Tag History

Lost in translation!!

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The Chinese whisper with Google translate

Imagine playing Chinese whispers but where each player speaks a different language.

Language is a very local thing. You may learn a 100 foreign languages but you can think in only your mother tongue / native language. This is the reason why things get lost in translation. There is no perfect way to translate one language to another. Why is this? The movie John carter has a scene where a guy meets a Martian. They try to introduce themselves. See what happens. Only nouns, no other parts of grammar are involved but what they wanted to convey is lost.

Now lets add an Adjective and set the scene in South Africa. An English guy says Merry Christmas. How do you translate it to Afrikaans? See what happened when I used Google translator. 

Merry is translated as Geesende when used with Christmas and Blessed if used without it. Merry is translated to vrolik but vrolik instead means cheerful. You might get the context of the sentence, but not the true meaning. Simple words loose meaning when translated. What about ancient texts in ancient languages like Prakrit and Sanskrit? Sanskrit and Prakrit were the languages in which ancient knowledge of Indian-Subcontinent was documented. It included simple social practices to things so complex that Indians scholars have been trying to decipher them for years. 

 I started this post by saying ‘Language is a very local thing’. The structure of the sentence, the grammar, forms a word takes can all differ greatly. A lot of times there is no word to describe certain things in a particular language. Why? I’ll give a list of things a 4 year old would know and have no words for in Indian languages. Kangaroo, broccoli, strawberry & soda. These were non existent when the languages developed. Unlike English new words are not incorporated into most Indian Languages. So, how do they describe new things? Well there are other ways. Eg: There is no word for Train in my mother tongue Telugu. Its described by a word that translates to ‘Smoke carriage‘. When my people first saw a train, it was a carriage that emitted a lot of smoke. Now consider the job of translating scientific theories and theology documented by ancient Indians into European languages. 

I’ve given you on my take of the science of linguistics and yet haven’t arrived at the point. I’m getting to it. My point is very simple and you will understand the reason I gave you a linguistic lecture when I get to it. 

Heinrich Himmler was a prominent member of Nazi party of Germany. He was one of the architects of Holocaust. He was also obsessed with India and Hinduism. Himmler had a keen interest in the Rigveda and the Bhagavad Gita. Himmler carried a copy of the Bhagavad Gita in his pocket from 1941 until his death four years later. The book was a translation by the German theosophist, Dr. Franz Hartmann. In 1844, the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling highlighted in his lectures the same passage from the fourth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, which 100 years later would fascinate Himmler – so much so that he dictated this passage to his massage therapist. This passage emphasises that a person’s identity does not have to be defined by one’s actions — that is, even if they commit evil acts, they can still remain untainted and unaffected by ones’ own actions. Talk about taking things out of context. 

Texts written in Devanagari and Bramhi scripts, translated by a German, for a German and then used to justify their actions. Great. Then there is the Aryan Invasion theory. Nazi’s thought that Indians are descendants of Aryans, who were early Germans that migrated and invaded the Indian subcontinent. A theory that has been proved wrong using DNA tests. 
Let me quote an example of how Sanskrit can be interpreted in multiple ways…

keśavaṃ patitaṃ dṛṣṭvā
pāṇḍavāḥ harṣanirbharāḥ |
rudanti kauravāḥ sarve
hā hā keśava keśava ||

(Seeing the fall of Krishna,
The Pandavas jumped with joy.
All the Kauravas cried aloud,
“Oh! Oh! Krishna! Krishna!”)

Clearly, there is something amiss here. The Pandavas are such dear friends and admirers of Krishna that they would obviously not rejoice in his fall. The Kauravas so hate Krishna that they would surely not wail at his collapse. The real meaning of this kind of trick verse is often understood by splitting the words in a way that is not readily evident. 

The word keśavaṃ (Keshava is another name for Krishna; Keshava means “the lord of creation, sustenance, and dissolution”) can be split into ke śavaṃ (ke = in the water; śavaṃ = corpse). The word pāṇḍavāḥ (Pandavas are sons of King Pandu) can be split into pā aṇḍavāḥ (pā = water; aṇḍavāḥ = born from eggs). The word kauravāḥ (Kauravas are descendents of King Kuru) can be split into kau ravāḥ (kau = who; ravāḥ = noise, howl).

Now, with the word-splits, we get the revised meaning:
Seeing a corpse fall into the water,
The fish jumped with joy.
All the howlers cried aloud,
“Oh! Oh! A corpse in the water! A corpse in the water!”

(Here, “born from eggs” refers to fish while “one who howls” could refer to the wolves or other wild animals who can’t access the meat; or it could refer to the crows cawing loudly).

If one verse can be misinterpreted in such a different way, imagine what can be done to 700 verses. Then they took the ancient symbol used to denote well being. Turned it into and made it a house hold name of anti-Semitism, genocide, war and destruction.


This symbol has a great prominence in Indian culture. Its as important to Indians as a cross is to Christians. Even to this day, when Indian’s buy a new house or a vehicle, we put the symbol on it. Imagine an Indian buying a car in Europe and putting the swastika on it. At the very least, his neighbours will call the cops. The worst case scenario is that secret service will take him in for interrogation. All because… things were lost in translation. 

In Mein Kampf, and also Third reich literature the symbol was called HakenKreuz. A HakenKreuz literally means Hooked cross in English. But  when James Murphy, an English Christian Priest translated Mein Lampf, he conveniently used the word Swastika. By the standards of James Murphy, “Fledermaus” becomes “Fled he mouse” or “Fleder mouse”. By the way Fledermaus is a Bat. Not a sports bat, but the bat in Batman. Sure it does look like a mouse with wings but its no reason to call it a mouse. That’s ignorance. But Mr. James was anything but ignorant.Just because he wanted people to forget centuries persecution of Jews by Christians. Cross reminds everyone of Christians. Nazi’s were not the first ones to hate Jews. Jews are termed God Killers by the new testament. 
                                      

Above is the so called Swastika in Lambach Abbey Christian monastery. You can call it a swastika if and only if Austrian Christians adopted Hinduism in 11th Century. That didn’t happen, so its actually Christian symbol. Mr. James’s translation was an intentional mistake. But still its a mistake in translation. 


What if something similar happened to the western world. How would they take it? What if someone took a cross, put it on a flag, kill 100 times as many people as the Vietnam War? Oops. This already happened and there is a name to it as well. I just described the crusades. Still, you can buy a Jerusalem cross pendent and wear it around your neck and go out. No one will give you a second glance. 

Apparently some things are lost in translation and some things are some other things are polluted in the name of translation.

World history comes with a ‘Conditions apply!!’ disclaimer. 

The good, bad and ugly

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Blessing in disguise

What connects Mongolia with Europe? The only thing Mongolia has been famous for is Genghis khan. Apart from laying foundations to the longest continuous empire in the history of mankind, he also laid a lot of other foundations. Apparently 0.5% (35 million) of all people in the world are direct decedents of Genghis Khan. Apart from this freakishly fertile conqueror. There is nothing much of note about Mongolia. Wrong!!! 
Mongolia played a direct role in changing the face of Europe for ever. 

Imagine a place with huge unemployment, great divide between rich and poor. The streets were filled with hundreds of thousands of homeless and the poor. People starving, 10’s of people competing for every available job.  This is not Draravi . This was Europe in 14th century. With the living standards declining, the land going barren Europeans were struggling to make ends meet. Europe was about the enter a point of no return.

Lets go off topic for a minute, I want to mention the actual thing that inspired me to write this post. If you compare all Dan Brown works, Inferno will definitely be the worst. The book was all that bad, but unlike his other work, it doesn’t dazzle you. In the book, a very talented scientist creates a weapon capable of wiping out 1/3rd of the Earth’s population. Robert Langdon has to stop him. In the movie adaptation he does, but in the actual book he fails. Its revealed that its a airborne virus that makes 1/3 of the population infertile. So, there is no blood bath. Only substantial decrease in population(eventually). The scientist actually wanted to save mankind from destroying itself and this was his solution. Clever! was my first reaction. Then, I thought It would really help the Earth if something like that really happened. It was a lot of time later that I realised, Dan Brown actually took a incident from the history and tweaked it into a book. 

So, Europe was in a bad state. What did Mongolia have to do with it? Did it give a financial aid? No. The concept in Inferno was problems of mankind being solved by a sudden decrease in population. The picture of a masked girl should have given you a clue of what I’m arriving at. The Black Plague of 1347. The thing that killed about 1/3rd of European population. From Russia to England. This originated in.. Yes Mongolia. It plague spread like a wild fire. It arrived in Sicily in 1347, in the next five years it killed millions of people. It did not go away easily. There were cases reported for next 3 centuries. There is no exact record of how many people died. Only speculation. Some studies say, it might be as high as 200 million. That’s a lot of deaths. In the above picture, the mask and the costume are of a ‘Plague doctor’. They are the ones who cured(tried to cure) the plague victims. The masks were designed to protect them from putrid air, which was seen as the cause of infection

How did this solve Europe’s problems? India has a lot of similar problems. Imagine if India’s population were to reduce from 1.3 billion to 870 million by year 2020. That’s same as the country’s population in 1990. What would happen to the Unemployment & poverty? Get it?

A lot of demand for work was created. Labour could demand good wages or the rich were left to work in their own fields. This reduced the economic divide. The availability of labour was scarce, so people started looking for options. They invented machines. Army had fewer men. So, muskets and cannons came into being. A lot of advances were made in the field of Medicine. Earlier hospitals only separated the sick from healthy. Now they started looking for ways to cure them. The power of church weakened, because people lost hope in the catholic church when it couldn’t help cure their ailments. Once the Plague was gone, there was renaissance. Not of just arts, but every aspect of life for Europeans. 

Some thing good happened from a very bad event. Now let us get to the Ugly part. Humanity did not learn from its mistakes. The earth is getting over crowded with humans. The only species that cannot exist in equilibrium with its surroundings. The polar ice caps are melting. There are more and more natural disasters. The campaigns of ‘Save the trees’, ‘Save the planet’ you see now a days are in-fact self preservation attempts. Will they work? Can we save our selves or will the Earth throw another epidemic in our face? Humans think they are an advanced race because they can have a video call on the move. Do you think Nature cares about stuff like Internet of things, Artificial Intelligence? All your gadgets will turn to paper weights you don’t have electricity for a couple of days. 
George Carlin did an amazing piece on this topic. (FYI, I love George and his point of view). Rather than quoting an excerpt from this gig, I’m including the video. 


History repeats itself. Ebola and HIV are attempts by Nature to restore balance. We have been able to survive(for now). But how long before the Nature figures out another way?

The curious case of Agent Smith

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ArtStation - Agent Smith, Kamil Trocinski

Was Matrix a profound joke by The Wachowskis’?

I hope every one has seen Matrix  and remember Agent Smith. The chief antagonist in the Matrix trilogy. If you haven’t watched the movie, then be warned. There are spoilers ahead.

The plot was very complicated. I had to watch all 3 movies quite a few times to understand what the Wachowski brothers (though they are sisters now, they were brothers when they made the movie) wanted to convey. Set in a distant future, the Machines achieve complete AI and take over the world, humans for some reason send some chemical explosives to block out the sun(because the machines run on solar energy), the machines are more smarter than the humans expect, they learn to harvest the energy from human body. Humans are no longer born, they are grown. They are in a state of sleep their entire duration plugged into machines. The human minds are shown a false reality called Matrix where everyone is in a belief that life is going on as usual. Some people escape and form a rebel army to fight the machines and free humanity. There is this concept of Karma brought in, mental prjections where humans can do any thing they believe when inside The Matrix, the half rock half opera like recitation of the sanskirt Mantra Asatoma Sadgamaya to justify this complex narrative etc etc.

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Long story short, Machines turn humans into batteries

It was 4th May 2017, when I was watching a rerun of The Matrix revolutions for the umpteenth time suddenly my head started revolving, the gods said ‘May the 4th be with you’ and I had my Eureka moment. No, I did not run naked on to the street screaming Eureka!. I was actually slumped on the living room couch in my pyjamas.

Call it a nonsense notion but The Wachowski’s actually plagiarised the story from a couple of very well known books and added some Machines, cool graphics and a love story to them and presented it as their original work. The world believed them.It also relates the story of medieval and modern human civilisation. You don’t believe me?

I say that an Agent is a religion, Agent Smith is an Abrahamic religion. The Matrix is the world as we see it. The religious leaders with the backing of politicians and media show us a world we want to see. Zion is the actual world, a world only an Atheist can see. 

https://theconfusedprimate.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/1cfc8-c9b7b-agent-smith.jpg?w=636&h=291&zoom=2

Agent Smith’s sole purpose of existence is to convert all others to himself. This part is a blatant copy of ideas copied from the 2 most printed books in human History. Zion and the rebel army are the Atheists of the world. Now the original content. The only way to destroy Agent Smith was that Neo let Agent Smith change the last unique program in the Matrix (himself) also into Agent Smith. Now that Agent Smith’s purpose of existence is full filled, he gets destroyed. Cool. Right?

The ultimate and ingenious solution. The fire extinguishes when the fuel is exhausted. If you still can’t see the connection, then I’m out of my depth. Stop reading now.

I imagine this analogy would have left the likes of Richard Dawkins, Rick Grevais and Bill Maher spell bound and may be Christopher Hitchens & George Carlin would have turned over in their respective graves. 
Now lets try to see if its feasible in real world. Unfortunately the answer is NO. Here’s why. Unlike Matrix revolutions, during the in-numerous Earth’s revolutions around the Sun,  a lot of Agents were born. There are uncountable number of small and medium level agents who go about their job with out creating any scene and always make sure they are unnoticed. There are fake agents like Mormons and Scientologists. There are also some who are called agents by other agents but aren’t agents in reality. There are few high profile agents but only couple of them are like Agent Smith. Who act like a Virus. Definition of a virus is something that replicates by attaching to a host and then killing it. In the Matrix, agent Smith calls Humans a Virus that infected the Earth. Exhausting all resources of a region, multiplying and then moving on to a place with more resources, Humans are the disease and he is the cure. I agree with the first part, but he is definitely not the cure. But In real world the agents are virus that can infect another virus. Humans are not aware of this fact and are duped into thinking the that the agent is always correct.

death to humans | Tumblr

In early days these agents were unaware of each others existence. So everything was good. Then the connections were established and the path was laid for everything to go haywire. In Matrix the primary conflict was between Matrix and Zion. But in real world there is a civil war in Matrix and also between Matrix and Zion. The saying ‘Foe of the Foe is a friend’ is categorically applied by the Matrix, when they form a nexus to suppress any Zion uprisings. This makes the Wachowskis’ solution impractical. 

So what do we do?  Praying to your own agent is clearly not working, its been tried, tested and failed. Changing Agents isn’t going that good as well. Not having an Agent is not working as well. In India not having an agent will put you under default Agency. Debates did not work out well for Zion. They were burnt at stake in medieval period and are called disruptive and insulted in present age. 

You might be wondering which agency I belong to, or if I’m another Agent with a hidden agenda. I was born in India, so was signed up under the default Agent. I’m still in the Matrix trying to find answers and if there is a way out, waiting for my red pill.

the-matrix-red-pill-or-blue-pill | kylegrant76

USA – Unlimited Supply of Arrogance.

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No country for coloured men


United states of America, the self proclaimed leader of the world. In last couple of months 5 Indians were killed and a few more injured in race related violence. There is an uproar in liberal, Indian and foreign media. In 2016 there was a ‘Black lives matter’ movement on police brutality in African Americans. Some are attributing this to the rise of the right wing or in other words Donald Trump. But it has always been the home for racial crimes. The country was built on racial violence and genocide. What else did you expect? 


USA is in some ways the Iran of the west. In other ways Americans and Nazi’s did some pretty similar things in their past. In-fact, they did far more bad things than what Arabs did to Iran and what Nazi’s did to Jews. Arabs had a clarity of thought, convert to Islam or die. So did Nazi’s. They hated Jews and they wanted them dead. They made no fact of hiding this. Germans do not celebrate the day Jews were killed by exchanging presents. Ayatollah doesn’t say his ideology is based on Iran first, Iranians first.

Got my point? No? Pilgrims and Natives. Does that ring any bell? 
Thanksgiving day, an american holiday that Sitcoms show as a day when all its characters have dinner together and exchange gifts. Normal Americans celebrate (if you can call it celebration) it by creating stampedes in shopping malls in the name of Black Friday. Indians are very familiar with this holiday. This is when their cousins buy Iphones and other electronics for them. But what are its origins?

“In 1621 the myth of thanksgiving was born. The colonists invited Massasoit, chief of the Wampanoags, to their first feast as a follow up to their recent land deal. Massasoit in turn invited 90 of his men, much to the chagrin of the colonists. Two years later the English invited a number of tribes to a feast “symbolizing eternal friendship.” The English offered food and drink, and two hundred Indians dropped dead from unknown poison.” 

Americans wiped out more than 90% of native Americans, but the history calls it just acts of genocide. Not genocide. Oh yeah. Apparently they are different.”How many ‘acts of genocide’ make up a ‘genocide’?”

On this count Present day Germany is leagues apart. Be it Stolpersteine project or the memorial day. The new German’s are constantly reminded of their ‘Actual’ history.
Brass plaques laid in the street to remember Holocaust victims
So where were we? A European was sent to find India(Thank all gods he did not find India), Found America, named them Red Indians (which was not at all racist), Other followed, killed the indigenous population which is now celebrated every year with friends and family. Is that it? No I was just warming up.

I didn’t even mention gold rush, slavery, bible belt, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, red necks, white supremacists, Klu klux klan, gun culture, Cuba, Mexico, Cold war, Nuclear race, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Capitalism. If you can’t relate these terms to America. Then I cannot help you, seriously!

When I said Iran is better than America. I meant it too. Iran’s transformation from Persia to present-day Iran also had its share of bloodshed. The local culture, language, religion were systematically erased. But not its people. 

As an Indian I’ve seen my fair share of Racism(Even before I ever set my foot outside the country). Indians are devoted to Caucasian tourists. Crowds flock to take selfies with them. Even authorities give them respect. But if there is a African tourist, they look at him the same way Ivanka Trump would look at an African American in back alley of a shady pub in downtown Brooklyn. I’ve had well educated, so called forward thinking friends look down upon Africans. Lets not go that far. I’m a south Indian, but have a couple of tones fairer skin that an average south Indian. I’ve had many experiences where people mistook me for a north Indian and when corrected told me that you ‘don’t look like’ a south Indian. 
Let me make it tad more personal. For years my maternal grand mother didn’t  allow the maid into kitchen and used to sprinkle some water on all the things that maid touched to ‘Purify’ it. Racism is a part and parcel of life in India too. Persecution is still there but violence is rare. 

Lets fast forward to American election 2016. It felt like Democrats and Republicans had a wager on who an field the worst possible presidential candidate. Republicans not only won the election but also the Wager. The notion that Americans are being unfairly treated in their own country is befuddling. If White Americans are not getting a good deal in America then who is?

It is a country of immigrants who are paranoid about the new immigrants. They did all the bad stuff enough for their beloved Santa to put them on ‘Beyond Naughty’ list with a permanent marker, now they want to maintain the status quo. Present day America was given birth by a an orgy between racist, greedy, arrogant, capitalist and hypocrite Europeans. 

Make America great again – the caption of Trump’s campaign had a hidden message (an open secret if you have some common sense) on his agenda. Now America is becoming great again. Great at racism, great at capitalism, great at war spending, great at meddling with other country affairs, Great at arrogance.

America hasn’t changed. Americans did not change. Americans are just getting back to doing what they are best at. They should simply hang a sign called ‘Enter at your own risk’ on Statue of liberty.