Modi’s Passion For High Speed Rail For India

By S. Sivathasan -June 29, 2014 

S. Sivathasan

Speaking on the Gujarat Budget of 2013, Modi expressed his annoyance at India’s failure to have her HSR. He also conveyed his passion. “Since 1980, the HSR has remained confined to the drawing boards only, now it should speed up”. The writer without 

access to the above observation wrote in Colombo Telegraph on March 24 2014, that in India “Intriguingly even a beginning is not made. Debate, more debate and intense debate till eternity before all the strands of wisdom can be assembled for the ideal decision”. Now   the occasion has arisen for the very critic to be vested with authority to ‘speed up’ the decision and to cast aside 34 years of inaction. It is seen that in Germany 99% of long distance travel is by train. Her citizenry displays the most rational choice of travel and the government responds in the most sensible manner.

HSR system operates significantly faster than traditional ones. An integrated rolling stock system is used on a dedicated line built to take on speeds of 200 to 350 kmp/h. Upgraded tracks can go only up to 200.

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Nagas Come And Pitch Their Tents In Naga-Dipa Of Lanka

By Darshanie Ratnawalli -June 29, 2014

Darshanie Ratnawalli

What if a part of Sri Lanka in the centuries before Christ had been named after a personage, a creature or a deity from the Celtic myth pool? We’d know that a people who were immersed in the Celtic myth pool were responsible for the naming. At the very least we’d deduce heavy, long-term and thoroughgoing involvement of Celts in Sri Lanka. That was an analogy. Here is the reality: In the last centuries before Christ, the part of Sri Lanka known today as the Jaffna peninsula was called Naga-dipa[i], after a species of creatures from the Indo-Aryan myth pool.

First, some background. As everyone knows, during the first thousand years before Christ, Indo-Aryan languages as well as ideologies and lore that were sired and mothered by the speakers of these languages, and so couched in them were spreading in south Asia, over land and later by sea. When the Christian era was just a few centuries in the future, this cultural package had arrived in Sri Lanka. The package was also delivered throughout south India down to its southernmost tip. It’s easier if you liken this to the spread of radiation from powerful radioactive nodes located in north India. If you took a metaphoric Geiger counter able to measure metaphoric radiation to the area corresponding to Tamil Nadu in the centuries immediately preceding Christ, it would beep. Loudly.

In order to beef up that beep with some percentages, let’s survey the corpus of pottery and cave inscriptions of Tamil Nadu during the period commencing two centuries before Christ and concluding one century after Him. Out of a total collection of 469 Tamil Brahmi inscribed pot-sherds, the writing on which typically and invariably spells out personal names, 270 legible inscriptions were surveyed by Y. Subbarayalu. Nearly fifty percent out of the total were Prakrit names. Of these, some appear raw in the pure Prakrit form, some in partly Tamilized form (visakaṉ) and/or hybridized with Sinhalese Prakrit (eg: buta-śa, camuta-ha) and North Indian Prakrit (yakhamitra-sa) genitive suffixes  while a smaller percentage appear “fully Tamilized avoiding non-Tamil letters, like Kuviraṉ (from Kubira or Kubera)”:-(Subbarayalu, “Early Historic Tamil Nadu”; 2009, pp.95-122[ii])     

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