Jaipur bomb blasts

Several days have passed since May 13, 2008, when a series of bomb blasts hit Jaipur. It would have been remiss of me not to recognize this event on the Mera Bharat Mahan blog, as I have frequently written about Islamic terrorism in India on this blog (I leave documentation of Naxal terrorism to Naxal Terror Watch).

I have read various accounts, which differ in the number of victims and even the number of blasts. However, there were at least six blasts, which left at least 60 dead and 200 injured. The fact that these blasts took place within a short time indicates coordination, thus bearing the hallmarks of an Al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist attack.

I will leave editorializing for another day. In the meantime, I pray for the departed, the injured, and their survivors.

The Hindu : From Indus Valley to coastal Tamil Nadu

This article From Indus Valley to coastal Tamil Nadu from the May 3, 2008 edition of The Hindu notes that there are commonalities between arrow-like symbols on megalithic pottery from Nagapattinam district, Tamil Nadu and Indus Valley symbols.


Megalithic pottery from Tamil Nadu

The pottery from Tamil Nadu is said to be dated between 300 BCE and 300 CE, while the Indus script dates is said to be dated between 2600 BCE and 1900 BCE.

I have been meaning to write a review on the book The Aryan Debate, edited by Thomas R. Trautman. Trautman adheres to the traditionalist view of the origins of the Indian people, which posits that the Aryans migrated from outside India and that the Aryans post-date the Indus Valley Civilization; however, he gives respectful attention to scholars with alternative viewpoints. He bases his judgments on what the vaunted "community of scholars" says about what linguistics and archeology (with emphasis on archeological evidence about the presence of the horse in India) indicate about the origins of the Indian people.

Trautman believes that the Indus Valley script might be some version of Dravidian, but doesn't provide any evidence. Indeed, the articles on the Indus Valley script in The Aryan Debate iterate that there has been no successful decipherment of the Indus Valley Script. Trautman would likely take the similarities of symbols on the Tamil Nadu pottery and Indus Valley script as evidence that the Indus Valley script was some sort of Dravidian.