Avaktavyam

I’ve gotten word from Karen Lang that she and Paul Groner rated my Buddhism comprehensive exam with an “enthusiastic pass”. (Those exams are not graded with letters: either you pass or you fail.) Yay!
I’m working on my Hinduism comprehensive now.
And then the methodology comprehensive.
And then the dissertation proposal.
And then 9 months of research [...]

Memorization has been devalued too much in Western pedagogy. This is especially problematic in the context of learning Sanskrit.

Yesterday my wife and I had dinner at Madras Palace, a local Indian restaurant. I had a paper dosa and decided to eat it the way I was taught to eat food during my stay in Pune last summer: I used my right hand exclusively. No utensils. That earned me a few [...]

I’ve written before about my pitiful dosas and how I learned that I really need to spread the batter. I’ve since bought an actual tava… which does help but not that much. I’ve also experimented with rava dosa and found the batter to be thinner. It requires a different kind of handling… [...]

I found a book in a bookstore labeled with a Devanagari word I could not initially recognize. Was it the name of an ancient author? The name of an obscure philosophical school? No, it was something much more familiar.

I’ve been making dosas at home for a while but my dosas have always looked rather fat compared to those you can get from people who know what the heck they are doing. By “fat”, I mean that my dosas were thicker than normal. I thought maybe the problem was my batter or [...]

On the topic of Enya’s new made-up language,
Terry Dolan, professor of English at University College Dublin, said: “It’s a very eclectic language. It seems to choose elements at random. It brings in a whole wealth of different language forms such as Anglo-Saxon, Hindu, Welsh and, I think, Siberian Yupik as well.”

Repeat after me: Hindu is [...]

मेरे ख़याल में भारतीय खाना सब से स्वादिष्ट है। इसलिए अक्सर भारतीय खाना बनाता हूं। लेकिन भारतीय खाना बनाने का कार्य मुश्किल ही है और सच पूछो तो सुस्त हूं। अच्छा, अभी मैंने झूठ कहा है। वास्तव में बहुत मेहनती हूं लेकिन मेरी कार्यसूची में खाना बनाना महत्वपूर्ण नहीं। पकाने से कई दूसरे काम करने [...]

A word of caution about using the word “scene” to refer to normal action in a foreign context.

Sunil Laxman talks about his quest for the perfect dosa. For my part, I’m still trying to adapt my cooking style to the new mix I started using. My dosas are not perfect. That’s for sure!