a Golden morning at Triplicane

 

“A golden morning, framed by trees — at mystic Thiruvallikkeni.”

In the bustling city , the morning sun finds its way through the trees, even a busy city road turns magical.

 

mesmerising Gangtok !!

 

nice pictures make people happy; some make the photographers too happy !!

mesmerizing Gantok taken a few years ago !!!

Flowers - Lily, Lotus, Pundarika ~ Triplicane - Homer, Tennyson !!!

 

Heard of Nelumbo & Lilium  !  “Lotus & Lily”  - everyone of us know that our  divyadesam got its name from the sacred pond full of lily flowers “allikkeni” in association of Sri Parthasarathi Emperuman becoming Thiruvallikkeni.  [see the last line too!!]

The Sanskrit word “Puṇḍarīka (पुण्डरीक) -  is a well-known Sanskrit word for the lotus, particularly the white lotus.”  Puṇḍarīka occurs in the Ṛgveda, and later Vedic texts and Upaniṣads use lotus imagery. The Atharvaveda and Chāndogya Upaniṣad, for example, use the lotus in imagery associated with the human heart.  And this gives the lotus one of its most enduring Indian ideas:

It grows in mud, rises through water, yet emerges unstained.

That became a natural metaphor for purity amidst worldly existence. The lotus is therefore not merely a beautiful flower in Indian literature. It becomes a metaphor for Lakshmi, Saraswati, Brahma, Sriman Narayana/ Krishna, the human heart, the eyes of the divine, beauty, purity and spiritual detachment.  There is long-standing association of the sacred lotus with divinity, immortality and purity in Hindu and Buddhist traditions.

Puṇḍarīkākṣa (पुण्डरीकाक्ष) means:

“He whose eyes are like the white lotus.”

The Mahabharata repeatedly uses Puṇḍarīkākṣa for Krishna. When we hear “lotus” in Western literature, the first great reference is usually Homer's Odyssey.

Odysseus and his men arrive at the land of the Lotus-Eaters in Book IX. The men who eat the lotus lose their desire to return home. Homer describes the food as so delightful that they no longer care about their homeland. This produced the famous Western expression: “Lotus-eater” = someone lost in pleasure, idleness or dreamy forgetfulness. And the idea has survived for nearly 3,000 years. But  Homer's lotus probably wasn't the Indian white lotus pictured here.

The Greek word lotos was used for several different plants. Scholars have debated whether Homer's lotus was a fruit-bearing shrub, an Egyptian water lily, or something else. The botanical identity remains uncertain.  In fact, Denys Page's famous study Folktales in Homer's Odyssey discusses precisely this question and distinguishes Nelumbo, the Indian lotus, from Nymphaea, the Egyptian water lily.  So there is a delightful possibility that the same word “lotus” in Indian and Greek literature does not always mean the same botanical plant.

Many centuries later to Homer, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote The Lotos-Eaters (1833), directly based on the episode in the Odyssey. Library of Texas A&M University

His famous opening atmosphere is:

“In the afternoon they came unto a land

In which it seemed always afternoon.”

And everything becomes languid, dreamy and seductive.

Tennyson transforms Homer's lotus into a symbol of escape from responsibility, weariness, labour and the demands of ordinary life. That is quite different from the Indian conception.

Indian lotus: purity, divinity, spiritual awakening, beauty.

Homer/Tennyson's lotus: forgetfulness, languor, escape, dreamy pleasure. 

There actually exists a small twist here. Lotus is Nelumbo nucifera; Lily is Lilium; and what we commonly call a Water Lily is neither a Lotus nor a true Lily. It belongs to the genus Nymphaea — another aquatic flower, botanically distinct from both Lotus and Lily.  .. .. and pictured here are beautiful White Lotus flowers.

Regards – S Sampathkumar

6.10.2026

How good you were in Maths !! - Tables !!!

 

How good were in you Maths !!  ~ remember that when we were young, we were taught Tables !  - upto 16 – in the class, students in chorus 1 x 8 = 8, 2x 8 = 16, 24,32,40,48,56,64,72,80,88,96 ………. 

This morning SYMA conducted a Medical camp at Chennai Middle School, Ramnagar, Triplicane – the infrastructure, class rooms, cleanliness all impressed me beyond a point ! [that will be subject matter of another post] – this about a blackboard containing tables ..  do children glued to mobiles and calculators still learn Tables ?!?!?

Perhaps  there isn't a single person who invented them. They developed gradually in ancient civilizations.  Some references put that the  earliest known multiplication tables come from ancient Mesopotamia. Babylonians wrote mathematical tables on clay tablets, using their base-60 (sexagesimal) system.   Egyptians had sophisticated methods for multiplication, but generally used doubling rather than memorising a complete set of tables. For example, to multiply by 13, they could successively double and add the required quantities.

                Indian mathematicians developed and used multiplication tables extensively. The decimal place-value system and zero, which emerged in India, made arithmetic and multiplication much easier. By the early medieval period, Indian mathematical texts contained systematic multiplication methods and tables. Chinese mathematics: China also developed multiplication tables very early. The famous “Nine-Nine Table” (九九表) was traditionally memorised as a sequence of products from 1×1 through 9×9.  

Nobody can really be called the inventor. Multiplication itself is thousands of years old, and tables evolved as a practical shortcut for repeated multiplication. The  “2 to 20 tables” tradition familiar in Indian schools is much more extensive than the standard 1–10 tables commonly taught in many Western countries. Aryabhata, Brahmagupta and Bhaskaracharya did not invent the school multiplication tables as such. They developed and codified arithmetic methods that made systematic calculation possible..

Before Aryabhata — multiplication was repeated addition -  5 × 4 = 5 + 5 + 5 + 5 = 20.  Indian mathematicians explicitly regarded multiplication as a form of repeated addition. The terminology was quite sophisticated: the number being multiplied and the multiplier had specific Sanskrit names, and the result had its own terminology.  Calculations were sometimes performed on a board covered with dust, hence the term dhūlikarma (“dust work”).  

Aryabhata, in his Āryabhaṭīya, gave a systematic treatment of mathematics (gaṇita) alongside astronomy. His importance to the later tradition is not that he created “2 times table, 3 times table…” but that he codified mathematical procedures in a highly systematic form. His work became the foundation for generations of Indian commentators and mathematicians. An important point is that these texts were written in compact Sanskrit verse, partly because mathematical rules were intended to be memorised. So there was already a strong tradition of learning numerical rules by heart—something that eventually fits very naturally with the school practice of reciting multiplication tables.

About a century later came Brahmagupta. His Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta, written in 628 CE, contains an extensive treatment of arithmetic, including multiplication, division, fractions, negative numbers and zero.  Consider: 347 × 26. Today we instinctively understand that:

6 × 347 = 2082

20 × 347 = 6940

therefore 2082 + 6940 = 9022.

That depends on understanding place value — units, tens, hundreds — and the decimal numeral system. Indian mathematicians developed increasingly sophisticated arithmetic using this system. Historical descriptions of Indian multiplication methods show procedures remarkably close in principle to the long multiplication taught in schools today.   

Much later in the 12th century,  Bhaskaracharya’s famous Līlāvatī, part of the Siddhānta Śiromaṇi, contains extensive arithmetic and specifically discusses methods of multiplication and squaring. Bhaskara II gives methods of multiplication that involve arranging numbers in particular positions and multiplying their individual digits—methods that are recognisably related to the algorithms used later in traditional arithmetic teaching. And Līlāvatī is particularly interesting because it doesn't merely give rules. It presents problems for students to solve, including arithmetic progressions, interest, fractions, geometry and other numerical problems.

The modern Indian school tradition of Maths tables  is not something we can attribute to Aryabhata or Brahmagupta individually. Rather, it grew out of the broader Indian tradition of: number → place value → repeated addition → multiplication rules → memorised computational rules → school arithmetic. The fact that Indian mathematical texts were composed in concise, memorable verses also encouraged oral memorisation. Over centuries, this developed into the familiar practice of children reciting tables aloud.

The traditional Indian method of multiplication was so influential that medieval Europeans sometimes referred to Indian arithmetic as “modus Indorum” — the method of the Indians.  So when an Indian child today confidently rattles off “13 ones are 13, 13 twos are 26…”, there is a very long mathematical ancestry behind that apparently simple school exercise.

Interesting ! – back to Basics ! – back to schools !!

 

Regards – S Sampathkumar

4.10.2026