Parva, the practical Mahabharata by Mr. S L Bhyrappa

After reading the 10 volume Mahabharata and the 2 volume Ramayana by Mr. Bibek Debroy (May his sould rest in peace), I assumed that my cravings for these great works have been satisfied. However, this was short lived. It was re-kindled by talks of Mr. R. Ganesh. R. Ganesh is a popular reviewer/presenter/reader of Sanskrit texts and an expert in decoding these texts for the average listener and a great orator. During one of his talks he mentioned about a work by Mr. S L Bhyrappa, the last scion of Kannada literature, the pure poet. I had known about his works and majority of his works have been made into fantastic films by very talented directors for the Kannada film industry. I had not followed much of his recent works and was shocked to see how active he is. I knew the names of the novels he had written. 

However, one novel, in particular had a name which was not telling the objective of its creation. I am talking about Parva. Parva is the "novelization" of the Mahabharata. The last line which I wrote took 1 second. Now, you put that line in your head and imagine the gargantuan effort which must have gone into this project. When I read the complete work of Mahabharata, there was a feeling of completeness. As I started reading Parva, it was as if I am reading the ultimate thriller/cliffhanger. The layout of the novel, the way it starts, the dialogues, the progression.... OMG. Pure ecstasy. Mr. S L Bhyrappa traversed the entire physical path/locations of the Mahabharata to get the feel of the places, the climate, the culture etc. Starting with calculating the age of the most senior character, Bhisma, he arrived at the relative age of all the myriad number of characters in the epic. He also read multiple versions of the Mahabharata in sanskrit to understand the undercurrent in the story. He visited as many places as possible, which are their own characters in the epic. Once all this got settled in his head, he started writing the novel. 

Having started reading the book, it is difficult to tell I am reading the Mahabharata. Now, I understand why many directors are now interested in making a film(s) out of it. Mr. S L Bhyrappa has perfected the art of converting this epic to the style of a novel. Suddenly, all the directors who did not have time to read the Mahabharata, can now read it like a thriller. The book has "fleshed" out the various characters in great detail. The art department of whoever is going to make a film about it, will just have to follow the description, which I have found very practical. Writings in Sanskrit have one thing in common. They try to cramp in maximum information in very few words. This is an art form which was required in old times since, books were non-existent and writings on palm leaves, in Sanskrit was extremely strenuous activity. 

The works in Sanskrit were made for distribution through singing. The performer was to know it by-heart, the text and all the information regarding the volume, the raga etc. This would enable him to perform/share any time. This was then passed on to the next generation. Mr. S L Bhyrappa has used the same methodology here. If you skip one line, it is like you are skipping an entire chapter. Fantastic. Practicality has been taken to the very extreme by the author. So, you are a person who is skeptical about miracles, unbelievable stories and you want only a practical explanation for all the occurrences. You have come to the right place. The description of heat, the monsoons, the struggle of people during the high temperatures, the limitations of technology available/known at the time all make very engaging reading. However, all the while maintaining the integrity of the epic. 

The book is not written, like, the author read a portion of the epic and translated the same. Here, the author took the entire epic into his head and retold the same with all his practical insights and keeping the structure of the epic intact. What effort. It is sad that the Mahabharata and the Ramayana do not get the same amount of exposure/love/critical observations compared to the Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer, which again, is a subset of what the Mahabharata is. 

The Mahabharata, translated verbatim, goes to nearly 10 volumes, each of a minimum of 500/600 pages. Compare this with the exact translation of the Iliad and Odyssey. You may feel that majority of the portion will be cruft, like majority of the modern novels. You will be surprised that you will be proved wrong and you will be happy about it. If you had the drive to read the Iliad and Odyssey do not miss the Mahabharata and the Ramayana for anything. Add these works to the books to be read before you end your Human existence. 

Mr. S L Bhyrappa has taken up the challenge of taking up this huge work and made it into a novel. This is possible since he has included all the stories/sub-stories/parallel stories as an aside during the conversation of characters within themselves or with others. He has used the smaller characters, talk about bigger characters, to bring a more earthy feel to the novel. He further completes the circle by making the larger characters talks a little about the lesser known ones. As a reader, you are in for a visual treat. For the puritans of the epics, there are shocks awaiting nearly every page. Only he could have pulled out this novel based on the epics. You can now understand why Suddenly people want to make it into movies. I still feel it is not going to be easy. However, they will try. There is a huge cache of gold to be minted. 

All the epics of the world make use of similes to explaining the grandness or the scale of things. Even Iliad and Odyssey are no exceptions. I heard somewhere on the public network that the Iliad has around 180 similes. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana is full of them. There will be no passage which does not include a simile and hence very difficult to count(As per me they appeared infinite, Or I have not come across any counts). But, Parva, does not believe in the similes. It presents the story as a practical explanation depending on the strength of the language and the imagination of the reader to gather the scenario. This is interesting  since epics are full of dialogues, with reader listening to the one sided lecture. In Parva, the reader takes the center place owing to the "practicalization" of the situation and the characters.

Mr. S L Bhyrappa is a prolific writer. If you look him up, all his works have been received on the grandest scale. All his works are different and tackle many different social issues. All his works are a standard for all the further writers writing in that specific subject. All his works have been translated into English. A foreign reader might find it difficult to read him since it is strongly rooted in the Indian society and culture. For me, the Mahabharata is his best work. The only work which gave him anxiety issues, the only work which made him meet a psychologist. But, I will take this result and wish him many more years of writing and me many more years of reading him. According to me he is the last of the Kannada authors with a writing of that high stature. Mr. S L Bhyrappa, thank you for all your writings. Further, I request you to KEEP WRITING. Lucky to be alive during your time.

Democracy upgrade: Selection of ministerial candidates for specific ministries

 It is high time we upgraded democracy. Not much has changed since the introduction of democratic principles by the Greeks. No, I am not talking about elections. Elections are what makes people to know that they are in a democracy. Free and fair elections are the hallmark of all great democracies. Elections done through physical ballot paper, electronic voting machines or in the future through websites, or through mobile phones with sims tied to the individual voter with privacy protecting and randomization tech etc. I am OK with any kind of the election process until it is free, privacy honored and protected and of-course, fair. 

 I am talking about the elected representatives. See, once we vote, like every five years, we forget the election process and are involved with the individual we have selected in the electoral process. This individual is what the public is going to interact for the next five years. So, we should put lot more effort into ensuring that the public will elect the person with the best capabilities for the job. There is a lot of feedback from the voters that they don’t have much options. Many of the times it will be the worst against junk, works against worst, worst against better worse, worst against lesser worse etc. As a voter, you are supposed to exercise your power and choose the best among the worst. This is something which the present generation is not able to digest. This fact makes many of the young voters to utilize the most important day of their life which is going to decide how they will lead out their next 05 years, on a vacation. This is a serious issue. The philosophy of democracy is totally defeated. 

The young do not want to participate in the electoral process as candidates or as voters for one and only reason. There is no clarity. There is no documented path. There is no real simple procedure laid out for any educated individual to utilize his education and knowledge more than think about all the modalities of how to win elections and how to sway voters minds. The same is with the voters. They do not know what is the differentiation factor between the candidates. These days, majority of the elections are fought on race, caste, religion and Jingoism or popularism. This is a wrong development. The young educated electorate is a global electorate. They are much above all these trivial things. They are all more about bettering human life, create a better and cleaner planet. Now, how do we make the voter to get involved, seriously in the selection process and on the way, impress the younger lot to participate in the election as candidates and enter leadership positions. 

Let us see how the present method of allocating ministries work. The most powerful/submissive candidates are given plum ministries. Either the minister selected will be so powerful, the media will never touch him or the minister is so submissive that the party leadership will take care of him and his ministry as per the party requirements. This is a serious concern. Ministries are allocated on whims and fancies, not on logical lines. My suggestion is to ask candidates to prepare like they are going to a job interview. However, this job is of the highest stature in the country. 

The election commission should call out for vacancies for the ministerial post and come out with minimum educational/emotional/personal traits which are required to run the particular ministry. The commission should also publish formats for the candidates to fill up and submit including what is wrong with the present ministerial situation, what is to be done to correct it and how it will be done, what is the vision of the candidate for the next 05 years. The parties are free to nominate their candidates. However, we now have a framework for independent candidates with a penchant for this kind of job profile. We will have many candidates who don’t like to work in the executive but be the public front end to experience the issues in the first person. These people will be in a position to guide the executive instead of the other way round. With this we will have a tight watch on the executive also. The executive normally slips into the background with the ministers being the front end. With ministers who have learnt the threads of the ministry with the aim of heading the ministry, we have a minister who understands the language of the ministry. 

The election commission, on receipt of the applications with all this info should provide wide publicity indicating the plan and vision of each candidate. TV and the internet news channels should chew into the info given and come out with feasible studies and the far-reaching results of the vision of the candidates. Newspapers should talk about each ministry and the candidates and more on their commitments and vision for the country. They should bring out the background of all candidates which in turn will help the voters to understand the intent of the candidate. This brings in the interest of the voter to understand the candidate. Now, the voter cannot escape by saying that they are not having any info. They should be bombarded with information. By information, it should be more of data and should be less of what the article writer thinks. Anyhow, now the voter need not depend on the news sources. He can download the documents submitted by the candidates and process them side by side since the applications are standardized. Comparison for the modern youth will be a piece of cake. 

There will be an excitement, buzz, discussions, arguments for and against the candidates. Suddenly your will see that the discussions of parties will vanish. The concentration is on the candidate. Now, you will vote for your best home minister, your best IT minister, your best finance minister and so on. You have chosen. You have taken the responsibility. At the end of five years, you can reward him, if he has met his commitment or you can just throw him out in the next election. When choosing a candidate for a specific ministry, you have to be careful. Because, as a whole this ministry has to work as a single machine with different types of gears, linkages, computer controls. A single gear which is out of sync can bring down the entire machinery down. There is added responsibility on the voter which was not existent until now. The voter was escaping his job in democracy quoting lack of clarity. Now, the voter has to optimize his options based on the excellent data available. We observe that the voter and the elected minister now have a bond. The voter knows what can be expected from the minister and the minister knows what is expected from him. The beauty of democracy. 

Yes, I can understand you are brimming with ideas. Go ahead, write it down. You may lose it. That is what writing is about. You inspire with your vague idea and it will give birth to many a leafs, which in turn will nurture the your idea tree. It will live long, much longer than your human life. So, again, Please write.

A method for backing up your dotfiles to your self hosted git server

 The procedure listed below is the method which worked for me to backup my dotfiles to my self hosted git server. It is not perfect. Meets my requirements.

On your Desktop

$ mkdir dotfiles.git (It is a norm to name the repository as reponame.git if a bare git repository is to be built up)

$ cd dotfiles.git

Now we will create a git bare repository. The git bare repo will not have a hidden .git folder.

$ git init --bare 

Since the repository is bare, you have to populate it. So whenever we run a git command, the command should have the following info.

git --git-dir=$HOME/all_gits/dotfiles.git --work-tree=$HOME (Do not run this command now)

with the above line we have now indicated that the work tree is the complete home directory. The above line will be used repeatedly. Create an alias for the command above in .bashrc 

alias gitdotfiles="git --git-dir=$HOME/all_gits/dotfiles.git --work-tree=$HOME" 

Now let us update configuration for this git repository to not bother us about the un-tracked files in the work tree since there are lots of files in the home directory 

$ gitdotfiles config --local status.UntrackedFiles no 

Let us now start adding files to the git repository form the work tree 

$ gitdotfiles add ~/.bashrc 

$ gitdotfiles commit -m "added bashrc" 

Let us now create a remote repository to push these files. These can then be pulled on to a new system where you want these files 

$ gitdotfiles remote add origin username@IP_of_self_hosted_git_server:/path/to/dotfiles.git 

On the self hosted git server

$ mkdir dotfiles.git 

$ cd dotfiles.git 

$ git init --bare 

For the first time when you are going to push 

$ gitdotfiles push --set-upstream origin master 

Check the transaction on any client machine or on your desktop

$ mkdir delete 

$ cd delete 

$ git clone username@IP_of_self_hosted_git_server:/path/to/dotfiles.git

You should see the dotfiles directory. 

$ cd dotfiles 

$ ls -a (.bashrc is a hidden file) 

Let us now further add files, back on your desktop

$ gitdotfiles add .config/i3/ 

$ gitdotfiles commit -m "added i3 config file" 

$ gitdotfiles push origin master 

To get a list of added/tracked files 

$ gitdotfiles ls-files 

That completes the initial setup. Further, as you make changes, you will have to check the changes made to the files you have added. 

$ git status 

The above command will return a huge list of files, scroll up to the beginning and there your will find the changes you have made to your added files/directory. Follow the procedure of adding, committing and pushing with the aliased gitdotfiles command.

Distrohopping on Librem5

 In continuation to my previous blog-post expressing my excitement/happiness at receiving the librem5, being a distro-hopper (maniacal) in the beginning times of my GNU/Linux journey, I couldnt hold myself. So went ahead prepared an SD card and installed my first distro of choice, Debian GNU/Linux on the librem5. However, the experience was anticlimactic. The stable version did not boot and the weeklies just gave me a "glimpse" of the mobian logo. Yes, there are other methods like "jumpstart", but, I do not want to go that route. I want my librem5 as pristine as possible. It is already running GNU/Linux and lots and lots of users and devs are putting continuous efforts to have the latest and greatest on the device. For now, I will stay with installing alternate GNU/Linux on the SD card. 

Since Mobian GNU/Linux did not boot successfully, I went towards the next effort, Postmarket OS. I am just amazed by the amount of effort put by this team and the long distance which they have already traveled. The tools developed by the team are beautifully documented. It was a joy to go through the documentation. It is like they want every individual to be able to boot Postmarket OS and they want it to do the heavy lifting themselves absolving the user from the initial resistance to free their phones. Kudos to the team and all the users. I just went to the Postmarket page for librem5 and blindly followed the procedure to get PMos on the SD card. It was so straight forward, I just remembered the first book I had bought to learn Redhat Linux 6, my first GNU/Linux installation. GNU/Linux has come a long way and the tools developed by the devs, just for the passion, is unbelievable. In the initial install, I chose the --fde(Full disc encryption) option. However, the device repeatedly asked for the passphrase. I changed the passphrase on the installation (Again thanks to the use-case already available and documented). Now,  PMos went past the passphrase window and stayed at the boot screen. Waited for half an hour, then powered the phone off. By this time, I would have removed and re-inserted by SD card not less than 10 - 20 times. The sim/sd card tray is very flimsy. Be very careful while handling it. Dont worry, I have very nimble hands.

I am a seasoned distro-hopper. I dont give in that easy. On the next day, I flashed PMos, without fde. Now, it booted and landed me onto a text login screen. No keyboard. Luckily, I decided to give the device some time. The device logged me into an empty screen with a wallpaper. Empty screen. Yes, that is what I like to see on any desktop. That is the reason I love window managers. That is the reason I have been on i3 since ... (I have forgot the count). Again, why empty screen? Well, I had chosen the choice of sxmo environment heavily inspired by DWM and i3(sway of course). I had seen few videos of sxmo running on the pinephone. However, the video I had watched was very hardware intensive. That is the actions were performed by a combination of hardware buttons on the device. I hate using hardware buttons on any device. I prefer double tapping the screen to unlock the screen and double tapping the screen again to lock the device. I want the hardware buttons for that rainy day. I want the hardware buttons to get into fastboot. Went to the sxmo website. Mind blown. My God!!. What an idea!? The gesture system is one of the best I have come across. It is the most intuitive gesture system I have come across. Oh, did i just indicate that to boot from the SD card, you just have to power the librem5 with the vol down button held down for at-least 05 seconds. You have to immediately hold down the volume down key after powering up the device. 

Let us continue about sxmo. The sxmo project has a very nicely curated set of apps. The most important contribution from the team are the scripts. The project has exposed many of the phone related activities as hooks for the user to tap into and make scripts to accomplish tasks when triggered by clicking the name of the script or a combination of hardware buttons. The present scripts written by the project devs are readily available from the script menu(swipe diagonally from the top right towards the center of the phone). The menu, when accessed through the documented shortcuts are context sensitive. That is the menu is displayed based on what is available on the screen. If it is a Firefox window, the menu will give an option to open a new window or a new tab, you get the idea... Tiling is a first class citizen on sxmo. It was a joy to see multiple windows stack one below the other. Other Operating systems took years to reach this level of window management. Anyhow, I will write on only "sxmo". Thanks again to all the devs and users making the GNU/Linux stack a reality on phones.

Librem 5, The phone all the GNU fans wanted

After a wait of nearly a year I have received the librem5. It has brought me immense joy to hold the phone in my hand. I funded the venture only to fund the effort. I was never looking forward to the phone. Placed the order through a friend's friend's .... friend in the States. The camaraderie to help out a friend without even knowing what is it I am buying goes a long way to explain the concept of friendship. It is amazing. Though the phone was received a year ago, it had to wait for the friends to come to our country. This requirement was very clear. It will come only when the friend is free and wants to visit his country. 

 It was pure ecstasy when I held the phone in my hand. It was like some sort of magic. I was holding the phone which was a culmination of efforts of so many like minded people with the singular effort and aim to make a "Free as in Freedom" phone. Having started using GNU/Linux since 2002, since my first PIII PC, I have run GNU/Linux on all my desktops and Laptops including Macbook Airs and Macbook pros. Let me not forget the countless hours spent on learning to use the "Freedom" way on the computers. It was difficult. I have persevered. I love the freedom I gain for the effort put in to customize the OS. I love the fact that every single word, every single screen, every single action is tailor made for me. 

For a person who knows the value of Freedom, GNU/Linux is my wet dream. Let us not forget the hours spent on modding Android phones to run CyanongenMod and Lineage OS on many Android devices over the years. Again, I loved the freedom these mods presented me when using a phone. While all other phones bound the user and made them to learn it their way. I had my phone tailor made to work my way. Yes, GNU/Linux is a rabbit hole. Yes, GNU/Linux is free if you do not consider time as money. 

Coming back to the L5, holding a phone which has GNU/Linux out of the box, was sheer excitement. For the first time, after buying a computer, I need not spend hours to bring the device and its characters to my liking. For the first time, I just started using it in "as is" condition. A great win for all the developers/users/visionaries who believed in the project. For me, it is still unbelievable. Yes, I know, it took a lot of time. It angered many of the investors. As for me, I was confident on the team to produce a working phone. My main confidence lay in the software stack, ie, GNU/Linux. It was always available for the purism team. 

I have forgotten when I ordered by L5. It does not matter now, nor it mattered when I ordered. When I received the phone, I explained the intention of me ordering the phone and the philosophy behind it to my friends. It went above their heads. Paying "that" money and waiting for "that" many years was not entering their heads. They know my passion, but still could not put their head together to understand this amount of madness. However, they were happy for me receiving the phone for which I had "Paid" with plenty of difficulties. 

I opened the phone and connected it to the charger. The lights were running in disco pattern and nothing was happening except that the vibration motor was running crazy and matching the disco lights on the device. A quick search took me to the purism how-to's and in seconds had my phone charging. Booted into the device and was immediately at home with the UI. It was just a small sized GNOME shell. 

Everything was familiar. Everything looked in its place. Everything was inviting me to hack on the device. Immediately install i3 and the like and have a dark background with nothing on it with a launcher on demand. This has to wait. I want to experience the vanilla L5. I want to savor all the efforts put in by the entire team of purism and all the independent devs and users across the world by using it and providing valuable feedback. 

Please acknowledge my heartfelt gratitude for embarking on a journey with no support from any big corporation, in the present modern times wherein, no government is questioning the strategy of throwing out phone/laptops since the batteries of the phone are made non-removable. Criminal. 

Of course, I am just getting started!!

Movies..... Feeling.....

 

Read, The Brothers Karamazov