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Tuesday, December 16

Fabric Called Purple—by Anand

by RY Deshpande on Tue 16 Dec 2008 05:13 PM IST

After fabrics named after places, methods, and materials used in the manufacture of cloth, it’s time to look at colour words that denote or refer to fabrics.

Purple is one of those colour words the root of which can be traced to a type of cloth. Beige, for example, originally was not the name for a pale shade of brown, but the French name for a type of woollen fabric usually left un-dyed. Nor was scarlet, a type of high-quality cloth that may have been made first in Persia, and could have been blue or green, though it was commonly dyed red. Purple has a fascinating lexical history. The semantic changes this colour word went through were neither amelioration (words losing their original sense for a milder sense) nor pejoration (words developing a sense of disapproval), yet it reached English by a circuitous route… more »

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Intellectual Fundamentalism—by Raman Reddy

by RY Deshpande on Tue 16 Dec 2008 02:16 AM IST

Of late, the view that Sri Aurobindo has to be presented either intellectually or with faith and devotion, historically or hagiographically, is fast catching up among the admirers and devotees of Sri Aurobindo. The idea behind is that faith is per se anti-intellectual and intellectuality necessarily anti-faith. The extrapolation of this stupid view into the realm of nationalities will one day land us into deep trouble, for one can politicise this view to drive a wedge into the nascent world unity that is taking shape here in the Ashram and Auroville and, hopefully, in other spiritual centres across the world. The conclusion that could be drawn is that, Indians are generally good for yoga, which can hardly be done without faith, devotion and surrender, and Westerners are only good for intellectuality and practical work, which does not make them fit for yoga. Though this might be true in certain respects—nobody would deny that Westerners have a certain advantage of coming from an organised and mentally developed society or that the age-old spiritual civilisation of India enables Indians to take up Yoga as naturally as fish takes to water—but if you overstress these cultural inclinations, I wonder how further progress would be possible. We all have to rise beyond personal and national barriers, learn from each other, and not insist on each other’s deficiencies, and definitely not make matters worse by aggressively pitting Western intellectuality against Indian devotion. The personalities of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are the best examples of a perfect blend of these two aspects and it is precisely because of this that they have touched the hearts as well as the minds of so many people all over the world… more »

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