Bharatiya Bharatashastra

 Common Telugu Expressions Just like in English, Telugu also has expressions and idioms of its own. For example, in English we say "tying the knot" to mean marraige, but in Telugu we say  anṭu-kaṭ ṭu ṭa m  (అంటుకట్టుట), which means "grafting". Like that, Telugu has interesting phrases that we shall explore.  Pick up the Phone In Telugu, we have two expressiosn related to the use of a phone. 1)  phōn ettu (ఫోన్ ఎత్తు )  "lift up the phone" 2)  phōn peṭṭu (ఫోన్ పెట్టు ) "put down the phone" Now a days we have mobile phones like iPhone  or Android , but in the old timey days, we had those landline telephones. Refer to the image below [a]:   To answer the phone, you would lift up the handset (the "phone"). To end a phone call, you would have to put the handset back onto the body. I still have such a land line phone in my my ammamma 's house. Those expressions are called linguistic skeumorphs . Grafting Two Trees In very informal Telugu,...

 Pappu and Parathas in Medieval India Pappu or Dal  Pappu is just Telugu for Dal . What is Dal? It is simply pulses! Pigeon Peas, Chickpease, Green Gram Beans, they are all Pulses. When these pulses are cooked with water, they become soft, and that cooking is Dal or Pappu. The word Dal comes from the Sanskrit word dAlita meaning "split", as you would have to spli most of these pulses and unhusk them to be used in cooking.  One of the earliest mentions of such Dal or Pappu comes from the Manasollasa , a book by the 12th Century Chalukyan king Someshwara . Manasollasa  is a compendium of all delights a king takes part in, and one of that includes a chapter on food, approproately called Annabhoga .  The Annabhoga in the original Sanskrit can be found here: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.280843/page/n161/mode/2up?view=theater (pg 162 on the archive bar) I wrote this on May 7th, 2024, and as of now I haven't translated the Annabhiga fully. I have began...

  Burning Lenses in Ancient India Burning Lenses are crystals or glasses that are shaped in a way to concentrate light from a source to a fingle point such that what ever you are shining the light upon catches fire or burns. Think about those experiments where you use  a magnifying glass to concentrate sunlight on a paper to burn it. The source for a lot of the information I am about to present in this article comes from a scholar named Berthold Laufer, who wrote a paper on burning crystals in China and India, appropriately titled: " Optical Lenses: I. Burning-Lenses in China and India ".    Archemedes is said to have used a mirror to focus sunlight on enemy ships to set them on fire.  An old example of burning crystal (not glass) is mentioned by Airstophenes (450-385 B.C.), but according to Laufer, the burning crystal was a rare and miraculous comodoty during his time. It was during the late period of classical antiquity (just before 1st Century BC) that b...

Austroasiatic Origin of the Hindu Cosmic Egg In Hinduism, one of the beliefs is that the universe is in the shape of an egg which is why the universe is called  Brahmanda  (expansive egg). The Cosmic Egg motif is found in certain accounts of the creation stories throughout the Hindu literature. In this article, I will show that this motif originated from the Austroasiatic people of India, and not the Indo Europeans. Admitedly, I am not the first to make the conenction between the Cosmic Egg motif of Hinduism to the motifs found in Eastrn Asia. A scholar named Ülo Valk, made a breif mention in his paper on the Balto-Finnic cosmology.  I am, however, probably the first to explore this connection in depth and also involve the Central Indian tribes.    Puranic Tale Consider the Matsya Purana, on of the oldest Puranas .  In the Matsya Purana  2.25-30, we are given an account of the creation of the universe. Here Lord Swayambhu (Narayana) desiring to cr...