The disgusting adulteration of the Telugu language was started as a trend by Telugu poets themselves, like Sri Sri. They had no idea how deep into wretched depths the language would sink in just 3-4 decades.
The reason behind is the destruction of university courses in Telugu.
Now it is fair to say that none of the Telugu politicians can actually speak in Telugu, without switching half the sentence into English, or even switching into a full English sentence. Telugu poets, singers, film celebrities .. nobody can speak unadulterated Telugu anymore !
The decay of the Telugu language is extraordinary even within the last one decade. The current chief minister (Jagan Reddy) is educated in an English medium school, and his grip on the language is barely a shadow of his father’s (who also served as chief minister).
A decade ago, it would have been unthinkable that most of the Telugu population would be writing in English while chatting with their own family and friends on “smartphones”. Telugu script is used very rarely now. Even when Telugu words are used, they are typed in Roman script.
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I highly recommend this discussion by @suryakane and @ruchirsharma_1 on the @bharatvaarta podcast. The topic up front is the regime change in Bangladesh, but ultimately the discussion was about the structural weaknesses of India.
The most serious problem facing India is that it has no utility for any of the greater superpowers, as @suryakane put it, and would serve these powers better when broken up into 5 or 6 manageable states. As @ruchirsharma_1 mentioned, the parallels with Yugoslavia are very strong.
@suryakane @ruchirsharma_1 I’m not sure India can increase its level of utility to USA/China in any manner. India is far too big and potentially far too dangerous for any such utility to override other concerns. So Balkanization of India will remain the most desired objective for the greater superpowers.
Some thoughts on India’s Independence Day in this thread. Please feel free to comment. 😀
1) India’s territorial integrity is very hard to defend in its current borders. The partition of India denied us our natural borders and shot up the costs of our defense multiple folds.
2) The connections of Indian civilization to the Persian civilization on the west and to the extra-Gangetic Indic civilizations on the east (what we call “South East Asia” now) are cut off. This is a major loss of our self image. These must be rebuilt via land and sea routes.
3) Indian languages are in serious decay. Each language should identify a few cities where it should be prominently present in the economic and cultural spheres. Treating this as a local problem might give a better focus than just as a global policy problem.
You might be unaware, but Bangladesh had a law explicitly preventing Bangladeshi Hindus from seeking Indian residency or citizenship. In fact, they would be branded as enemies of the state and their property in Bangladesh seized if they did that.
If India is giving citizenship to a large proportion of Bangladeshi citizens, it also has the right to lay claim on land and property which is rightfully theirs. This would be a destruction of the state of Bangladesh as it stands. Both Indira and Mujib ur Rehman were aware of it.
In 1971, it was in India's interests to promote Bangladesh as an independent state. All the decisions of Indira Gandhi (including the withdrawal of Indian troops after the war for Bangladeshi independence) can be justified on this basis.
Interesting formulation here: “built a nation from scratch”. So the “nation” didn’t exist before. Please note, the historian didn’t say “state”, he said “nation”.
This is the kind of historians we have for Indians as a nation.
This is quite ridiculous for any nation, but particularly so for Indians - who are easily the most ancient nation attested, not only from native texts but also from other civilizations. Every external visitor to India - Greek, Chinese, Arab - saw Indians as a nation.
In fact, even Nehru stated many times and very clearly that Indians were an ancient nation. That is the whole point of his “India wakes up to freedom” speech on the eve of independence.
A hilarious article that whines about colonialism and western gaze, but fails to list one single scientific discovery made under the Mughal or Turkic rule!
The largest economic surplus in the world of that period failed to produce even one single unique scientific discovery!
In this thread, I will discuss the nature of creative talent of AI models (such as LLMs like GPT-4 etc), from the perspective of अलङ्कारशास्त्र the Sanskrit aesthetic tradition. I will quote from the काव्यप्रकाश of the Kashmiri scholar मम्मट, from the first chapter (प्रथमोल्लास).
An in-depth understanding of generative AI models from the perspective of Alankāra Śāstra is highly needed. But the subject is vast and requires study of many celebrated scholars like Ānandavardhana, Abhinavagupta, Rājaśēkhara etc. Hope AI researchers will do this at some point.
I just relate the viewpoint from the well-accepted summary of Sanskrit aesthetics (from Kashmir) by Mammata. I am reading it with the Telugu translation by well known scholar Pullela Śrīrāmachandrudu, who summarized other viewpoints in his Prastāvana (introductory essay).