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SANSKRIT ECHOES AROUND THE WORLD
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PHOTOS BY JOANNE CICCARELLO STAFF
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By VIJAYSREE VENKATRAMAN
CONTRIBUTOR
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The rise of India’s economy has brought an
eagerness to learn the ancient ‘language of
the gods’ – and a great-aunt to English
!"#$"%&'(!)*&*+!!Pallamraju
Duggirala (above) has been
teaching a weekly course in
Sanskrit to a small group at
the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in Cambridge, Mass.
His class is part of a Sanskrit revival
taking place in India and in Indian
communities worldwide.
Plenty of tails
are wagging
at dog parks
More than 700 parks now dot the
American landscape. Debates over
leash laws and proper use of open
spaces just come with the territory.
!"
By AMY BRITTAIN
!"
CONTRIBUTOR
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!,-#""!(./(+!!Samskrita Bharati, based in
India, is a source of instructional materials.
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N0=!I/73B9)0*/!0/901!4,.!%.!%0!$&)NICOLE HILL
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O85#)&!"#$!P/(*!%)!C&(*&5&91!H/5%+=1! &*$$'$)!0&..+ Adam Day watches ‘Louie’ (far left)
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mingle with other canines at a dedicated dog park.
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11
Sanskrit: A ‘dead’ language comes back
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You speak a little Sanskrit
LINGUISTICALLY, SANSKRIT BELONGS
to the ancient Indo-European family – a
“sister” of Old Greek, German (Gothic), and
Latin – and is thus one of the ancestors of
English. More like a great-great-aunt, perhaps. This helps to explain the coincidence
of words that sound and mean the same
in Sanskrit and English, such as bratha and
brother, says Michael Witzel, Wales professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University.
Hundreds of pure Sanskrit words
– from avatar to Zen – became permanent
fixtures in English through cultural interactions between the East and West since the
Middle Ages, he adds.
Some of the pure Sanskrit words in
English you know include: karma, guru,
Juggernaut, pundit, mantra, and nirvana.
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!"#$%&'()!Mythili
Vutukuru participates in
a spoken Sanskrit course
at MIT. Since 1981, some
7 million people have
attended such classes
worldwide.
the Pacific.
! #$%&'$"'"!'(%)*$+%!,-%.$&%!%/%0
"
Twenty years ago, scientists found that all
humankind descended from one woman
who lived in Africa about 150,000 years ago
– the “African Eve.” Now scientists say they’ve
found the house cat equivalent.
Like pigeons or rats, wildcats moved in to
exploit the new environment. “Cats never
really had a purpose. Cats were tolerated,”
says Driscoll. Cats that best endured a
human presence – the tamest and friendliest
– proliferated.
Carlos Driscoll, a PhD candidate at
Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation
Research Unit, and colleagues compared
house cat DNA with that of wildcats
from Europe, the Near East, Central Asia,
Africa, and the Chinese desert. Genetically
speaking, domesticated cats were nearly
indistinguishable from Near Eastern wildcats,
although they came from five lineages, or
families. Domestication probably coincided
with the advent of agriculture 12,000 years
ago. The surmised “Feline Eve” – matriarch of
both house cats and wildcats – lived more
than 100,000 years ago in the Near East.
!1&%/%&!(%2'!3$/%"!*%3$)&"!2!.$-'
Not only is North America floating on a
sea of magma, it’s riding high, scientists
from the University of Utah say. And it’s all
because of unusual heat.
Unlike dogs, which could easily accompany
migratory bands of human hunter-gatherers,
cats had to wait for a more sedentary
lifestyle before joining humans, says Mr.
Driscoll. “In order for cats to be around, you
have to have a town,” he says. It’s likely that
domestication was not entirely intentional.
Rather, as humans began practicing
agriculture, they moved into permanent
settlements. Cities presented a new niche.
!4))5!6)1*!72*"!/2#2'$)&!$&!89:;
Will shirt-sleeve vacations on Mars be a
reality by the turn of the century? Noted
physicist Lowell Wood, now a visiting fellow
at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, Calif.
thinks that humanity could be well on its
way to making the red planet livable by
2050. The job could be completed in 100
years, he said recently at the Aspen Institute.
Currents of molten rock deep in the Earth
heat some areas of the surface more than
others. These areas expand and thus
become more buoyant. They rise and “float”
higher. Much of North America would lie
far below sea level were it not buoyed by a
greater-than-average share of warmth.
Traditional plate tectonics says that
colliding plates pushed up the Rockies, the
Himalayas, and the Alps. The new study
argues that collisions alone aren’t keeping
Denver a mile high.
“If you subtracted the heat that keeps
North American elevations high, most of
the continent would be below sea level,”
says study coauthor Derrick Hasterok, a
University of Utah doctoral student in
geology and geophysics, in a press release.
INGRID VAN DEN BERG/AP
!?@&A!B$@CD)!Felis silvestris lybica (above),
found in Africa and the Mideast, is said to
be the common ancestor of all house cats.
“Differences within the Earth’s crust and
upper mantle explain about half of the
elevation of any given place in North
America.” Take that extra heat away, and
Denver sinks 727 feet below sea level. New
York City would be 1,427 feet down, and
Los Angeles a whopping 3,756 feet under
Mars is stuck in what Dr. Wood calls a
“thermal depression.” In a Martian day,
temperatures near the equator can swing
from 70 degrees F. during daylight to minus
110 degrees F. at night – too extreme for
Earth’s terraforming vegetation. The first
step is to narrow the gap between these
highs and lows. A potential solution:
Create an artificial greenhouse-gas effect.
After decades of warming, when Martian
temperatures reach the “biospheric
optimum” – temperatures resembling Earth’s
– Mars will experience a “Great Spring.”
“I believe it’s roughly a 50/50 chance that
young children now alive will walk on
Martian meadows … will swim in Martian
lakes,” said Wood. It’s not a matter of
technology or money – it’s a matter of will,
he said.
!*!78,020!+29.0:;2<=7.38>>
!"!Some material, particularly quotes, came
from the Associated Press and Space.com.