Marmabandhatali Thev Hi

This song comes from Sanyasta Khadga, with lyrics by Shankar Balaji Shastri and music composed by Vazebuva. It belongs to the tradition of Marathi natyasangeet, where emotional expression is shaped through a close union of poetry and classical ragas. The composition is set in Patdeep, whose soft, inward mood suits the song’s mixture of tenderness, longing, and emotional vulnerability.

The song revolves around the idea of love as something inward, guarded, and quietly consuming. Rather than celebrating passion in an outward or dramatic way, it speaks of emotional attachment as a precious thing one preserves despite the pain that inevitably comes with it. The imagery of the lotus and the bee draws from older Sanskritic and bhakti poetic traditions, but the feeling remains intimate and personal rather than devotional.

A notable textual detail is that some later renderings altered the phrase “ठेविं जपोनि” (“preserve and guard it carefully”) to “नेईं हरोनी” (“carry it away, stealing it”). That small change shifts the emotional emphasis quite sharply: the original wording stresses care, preservation, and emotional responsibility, while the altered version introduces a more restless, possessive movement into the song.

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Verse 1

Original:
मर्मबंधातली ठेव ही प्रेममय ।
ठेविं जपोनि सुखाने दुखवीं जीव ॥

Translation:
Preserve this innermost bond, filled with love.
Guard it carefully — the heart must endure both joy and sorrow through it.

Notes:
“मर्मबंध” is difficult to render fully into English. “मर्म” suggests the innermost core, something intimate and vulnerable, while “बंध” is a bond, tie, or attachment. Together, the phrase carries the sense of a deeply private emotional connection, almost a knot tied within the heart itself. “ठेव” means both a treasure kept safe and an entrusted deposit. The verse treats love not as passing emotion but as something one must consciously preserve. The second line is especially gentle in its understanding of attachment: love inevitably brings both happiness and pain, yet the song speaks of guarding it anyway, almost tenderly accepting suffering as part of emotional fullness.

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Verse 2

Original:
हृदयांबुजी लीन लोभी अलि हा ।
मकरंद ठेवा लुटण्यासी आला ।
बांधी जिवाला सुखाशा मनीं ॥

Translation:
This greedy bee, absorbed in the lotus of the heart,
has come to steal its nectar.
Bind the soul to the hope of happiness within the mind.

Notes:
The verse draws on an old and familiar poetic image from Sanskrit and Marathi literature: the heart as a lotus, and the lover or longing self as a bee drawn helplessly toward its nectar. “अलि” means bee, but it also carries associations of restless desire and intimate attraction. Calling the bee “लोभी” — greedy — gives the image warmth and vulnerability rather than judgment; love here is hungry, absorbed, unable to stay away. “मकरंद,” the nectar hidden inside the flower, suggests emotional sweetness, intimacy, or the essence of love itself. The line “लुटण्यासी आला” introduces a faint tension into the tenderness: love arrives not politely, but with the power to overwhelm and take possession. The final line turns inward again, speaking of fastening the soul to hope and emotional fulfilment, as though love survives through an act of inward holding together.

Shura Mi Vandile

 

This song from Sangeet Manapman is written in praise of the warrior spirit, but its admiration is not merely for martial strength. The song honours those who willingly endure hardship, sacrifice themselves in battle, and place public welfare above personal gain. Like much of Marathi natyasangeet, the language is elevated and formal, drawing from older Sanskritic diction to give moral grandeur to courage and duty.

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Verse 1

Original:
शूरा मीं वंदिलें; धारातीर्थी तप ते आचरती; सेनापतियश याचि बलें ॥

Translation:
I bow before the brave;
upon the battlefield they perform their austerities.
The glory of commanders rests upon their strength.

Notes:
“धारातीर्थ” literally joins the ideas of the sword’s edge and a sacred pilgrimage-place. The battlefield is treated not simply as a place of violence, but as a site of sacrifice and discipline. “तप” evokes spiritual austerity or penance, suggesting that courage in battle demands the same endurance and self-denial associated with ascetics. The verse gives ordinary soldiers moral centrality: the fame of generals exists because of the strength and sacrifice of those who fight under them.

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Verse 2

Original:
शिरकमला समरीं अर्पिती; जनहितपूजन वीरा सुखशांती;
राज्य सुखी या साधुमुळे; वंदिले ॥

Translation:
In battle they offer their lotus-like heads in sacrifice;
for the worship of public welfare, O brave ones, for peace and well-being.
Because of such noble souls, the kingdom prospers.
I bow before them.

Notes:
“शिरकमला” — literally “lotus-heads” — softens the brutality of sacrifice through devotional language. The image recalls the offering of flowers at a shrine, except here the warriors offer their own lives. “जनहितपूजन” is especially striking: service to the people is treated as a sacred act of worship. The word “साधु” in the final line does not mean saint in a narrowly religious sense, but morally elevated people whose selflessness sustains society itself. The verse moves beyond heroism into reverence, presenting sacrifice not as glory-seeking, but as an ethical duty carried out for collective peace.

Ravi Mi Ha Chandra Kasa

This song from Sangeet Manapman comes in a moment of playful admiration mixed with injured pride. The speaker compares himself to the sun and the beloved to the moon, but the comparison quickly turns into an admission that her charm and presence outshine his own confidence. Like much of Marathi natyasangeet, the language is elevated and theatrical, yet emotionally direct underneath.

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Verse 1

Original:
रवि मी, हा चंद्र कसा मग मिरवितसे लावित पिसें ॥

Translation:
I am the sun — then how is this moon
able to parade about so proudly, decked in splendour?

Notes:
“रवि” means the sun, suggesting brightness, authority, and masculine pride. The “moon” here is the beloved, moving gracefully and confidently despite the speaker’s claim to greater brilliance. “लावित पिसें” evokes ornamentation or display, almost like a peacock showing its feathers. The line has a teasing quality, but there is genuine amazement beneath it: the speaker finds himself overshadowed by the very person he expected to outshine.

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Verse 2

Original:
त्या जें न साधे गगनीं, गमे तें साधेचि तव या वदनीं ।
अबलाबल नव हें भासे ॥

Translation:
What even the heavens cannot achieve,
your face seems to accomplish with ease.
One can no longer think of womanhood as weak.

Notes:
The verse moves from admiration into surrender. The beloved’s face is described as having a power greater than anything seen in the sky above. “वदनी” means not just the physical face, but the expressive presence carried in it. The last line plays on the old expression “अबला” — woman as the weaker one. The speaker admits that such an idea no longer feels true in her presence. The compliment is affectionate, slightly dramatic, and deeply rooted in the language of admiration found in classical Marathi musical theatre.

 

Shatajanma Shodhitana

शत जन्म शोधितांना । शत आर्ति व्यर्थ झाल्या ।
शत सूर्य मालिकांच्या । दीपावली विझाल्या ॥

In searching across a hundred lifetimes, a hundred anguished longings proved futile;
Even festivals of a hundred garlands of suns have been extinguished.

तेव्हां पडे प्रियासी । क्षण एक आज गांठी ।
सुखसाधना युगांची । सिद्धीस अंति गाठी ॥

And then—today—I attain a fleeting moment of union with my beloved;
The joyous striving of ages finally reaches its fulfillment.

हा हाय जो न जाई । मिठि घालुं मी उठोनी ।
क्षण तो क्षणांत गेला । सखि हातचा सुटोनी ॥

Alas—before I could rise and embrace him,
That moment vanished within a moment, slipping from my hands, dear friend.

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Within Sanyasta Khadga, the song is placed at a very specific emotional juncture in Sulochana’s arc. She and Vallabh have only recently married, and the scene opens in a moment of intimate, almost playful domesticity as they mark their first year together. That private world is abruptly interrupted by a summons from the royal court, and Vallabh leaves mid-conversation. Before any real reunion can happen, news arrives that he has gone straight from court to the battlefield and has since been captured.

The song emerges from that rupture. It registers not a long, settled separation, but the shock of an encounter that barely occurred—of a meeting that feels earned over lifetimes and yet slips away before it can take form. That’s why the language oscillates between vast temporal scale and the immediacy of a lost moment: dramatically, it belongs to that instant where expectation of reunion collapses into absence.

 

Baby development, Copying without understanding, meaning attribution

Been spending some time with toddlers and I've realized that babies are basically copy machines.

They may not necessarily understand what they are copying, but they would try their best to copy it. It's like what Dan Dennett says - Competence without comprehension.

I don't really know at what point they start to understand what they are doing, what they are saying, but at some point they do. My guess is that they start to associate an outcome with an action, which allows them to predict/expect something to happen when they act in a particular way or say something which is act of creation of meaning.

Also reminds me of something David Deutsch says. He quotes Karl Popper and the bucket theory of knowledge acquisition or something and says that you can't gain knowledge by reading. You gain knowledge by hypothesizing which are proven to be true or false upon experimentation (/interaction with the environment) This either reinforces the fact or weakens it, making space for alternative hypothesis. So the babies try to parrot whatever they hear and mimic whatever they see, expecting a certain outcome (usually, adults' vocal amazement at the babies' actions). This expectation is (almost immediately, and also over time) either reinforced or weakened. The attribution of meaning, at least at this stage, is exactly the (expected) outcome generated from this action.

Example: Making funny faces -> makes people laugh. 
                Therefore, meaning attribution:
                    funny faces = facial contortions that make people laugh
                    any other funny thing = something that makes you feel the same way that funny faces do

     

On the Vedas, their memorization, and the utility thereof

On the 30th of November 2025, a 19 year old boy Devavrat Rekhe completed a danda-krama parayanam of the Shukla Yajurveda. It took him 50 days (starting from October 2, 2025) chanting for about 12 hours a day. The text being recited is considered to be hard in itself, and the specific pattern of recitation, the danda-krama, supposedly makes it even harder. A great achievement for a young boy, and for that he earned praise for all over the country, including the Prime Minister.

Vedamurti Devavrat Mahesh Rekhe

It had already been two days since he completed is parayanam when the mainstream news picked it up which is when I got to know about it. It's been two days since, and I've been thinking about the utility of this. I don't want to sound contrarian just for the sake of it, or belittle the achievement of this young boy. If the articles I read are to be believed, and I do believe them, this is a great achievement, unparalleled in the last couple of centuries. However, I must express what I feel...

Starting from the initial assumption of the Vedic people that the Vedic corpus was indeed holy and had the answers to all of mankind's questions, it of course makes sense to soak oneself completely wet with the knowledge contained therein. The corpus itself being large, it's not possible for every man to know it so thoroughly in its entirety to an extent that for any question that life throws at a person, he may both find and quote the right passage(s) from the text with 100% accuracy. This is just too much work for every brain in a society, considering that some of them are also tasked with other activities necessary for being alive - hunting, farming, caring for the young, milking cows, making clay pots, etc. It's like asking for each and every house in your city to have a library room. Not all houses are large enough, and not all houses are/should be built for that purpose.

Society optimizes for this problem by selecting a few brains already inclined to and also capable of bearing such a burden. These brains, society demands, should spend a major part of their lives stressing themselves in the tasks concerning memorizing, analyzing, propagating these texts, all for the greater good of the society. Other members of the society can spend their lives pursuing other goals, and can query these texts through these people as and when required. 

The problem the Vedic societies had, 2000+ years ago, was that preserving and propagating these texts is particularly challenging. They had primitive paper, or other writing media, but they don't last in Indian weather. It breaks, rots, catches termites, burns, the ink fades away. In some cases, the paper might even get stolen! One may think, then just get a stronger paper, or...even indestructible paper - stone. But stone has its own problems. Though there's practically infinite amount of stone available (just like tree bark to make paper), not all of it is available in flat writable (rather engravable) surfaces. If flat, it may not be large enough. If flat and large enough, it may not be soft enough. Engraving even small sentences is hard, let alone volumes of text. Many many problems...

No media is perfect. Preservation of the texts is still challenging. They can't not store the texts somewhere. The best storage media they could get their hands on? The human brain. Vedic Brahmins spent hours on end memorizing these texts with utmost fidelity and then passing them on to future generations of Vedic Brahmins. They used various memorization techniques like chanting it out loud, group recitations, memorizing the text in different recitations patterns (kramas, like 1-121-12321-..., or 12-23-34-..., etc.), being able to recite from any gives starting point, reciting in both forward and backward direction, etc. All of these aided with lots and lots of practice every day resulted in the texts being so in-grained in the minds of young Brahmins that they would be able to recall them at will. Every now and then, a wiser and even more studious Brahmin would move past mere memorization and move on to (or even parallelly pursue) actually studying the texts, interpreting them if necessary, offering commentary, holding lectures, etc. Such supremely learned Brahmins would eventually attain important positions in society for being the treasures of this holy knowledge, while a vast majority of the common Brahmins would, as far as these texts are concerned, act as mere storage and recall media, making ends meet by offering Vedic services to the commoners.

I may not have elaborated a lot on the specifics of the memorization techniques in the previous paragraphs, but I hope it was enough to establish the point of how important the Vedic recitation and memorization techniques were in making sure that we, today, get a near perfect "tape recording from the Bronze age." But, at this junction, I would like to remind everyone, that the memorization was(/is) just a tool. A tool whose utility lies in understanding the specific problems that the Vedic people faced with respect to the preservation of these texts. Had they not had problems with recording the text in some other (more permanent) media, they would've never resorted to memorization or the complex techniques built for the same. Therein lies the crux of this article.

Memorization is a tool. The different kramas developed for the same are also tools. One may become expert at wielding a tool, just like one may become expert at performing tricks with a table tennis racket and a ball. But that does not make one an excellent Vedic scholar, or an excellent table tennis player. My contention with the current state of Vedic studies is that they haven't kept up with the times and have rather spent something more valuable than gold, their attention, on something secondary. While not taking anything away from the feats of the young boy, I still think that 100% memorization and parayanam (recitation) of the Vedas is still secondary to activities like offering commentary on Vedic texts, tracing their origins, finding parallels in other dharmashastras, maybe other religious texts, etc. which are much much more important. I would even go so far as to say (without giving in to my professional biases) that digitizing (including but not limited to scanning a manuscript into PDF) is a much more worthwhile effort than spending years on rote memorization. We have cracked media storage, we should move on to other much more important things...

A case for shower curtains in Indian bathrooms

I've been travelling for the last handful of weeks and have been facing a small issue - wet ankles. 

Many Indian bathrooms aren't designed well enough to have a bath. There aren't dedicated bathing zones, clearly demarcated and separated from the rest of the areas so as to not leave the entire floor wet after taking a bath.

A usual Indian bathroom where the bathing area bleeds into the toilet and the wash-basin areas leaving the entire floor wet after someone takes a bath. 

The problem with a wet bathroom floor is a very practical one. It makes the entire floor slippery increasing the risk of accident and injury, but that's not why I'm complaining. I'm still young and have a relatively good sense of balance. My problem is post-bath, when I'm dressing myself, the act of wearing pants without them rubbing off the bathroom floor and getting wet becomes difficult. The hem of the pant almost always inevitably gets wet and you are left with cold ankles for at least a couple of hours till it dries off on its own.

This can easily be solved by introducing some sort of partition between the dry and wet zones of the bathroom. This can come in various forms, two easiest ones that come to my mind are either a glass partition or a simple shower curtain, any of them additionally paired with a sunk dedicated bathing area. Glass partitions and sunk bathing areas may not be always possible due to many practical constraints - space, money, etc, but a simple shower curtain rod and a plastic shower curtain can be easily added to any existing bathroom.

 

A simple space separator dividing the bathroom into dry and wet areas. An additional separator can be added between the toilet bowl and the bathing area to get more dry zones.