The "Retrofitting" Fallacy A common critique from Western academia is that modern Indians suffer from "post-diction"—waiting for quantum physicists to make a discovery and then conveniently shoehorning it into a vague verse from the Upanishads . This critique relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of both language and methodology. The ancient seers ( Rishis ) were not writing religious poetry or mystical metaphors; they were writing cognitive science, cosmology, and metaphysics in a highly technical, high-context language (Sanskrit). When 19th-century colonial translators—who operated strictly on a Newtonian, binary, mechanical worldview—encountered these texts, they did not have the scientific vocabulary to comprehend them. They translated precise technical terms into crude religious dogma (e.g., Maya into "illusion"). Today, we are not "retrofitting" the old books to match new physics. We are finally acquiring the scientific vocabulary requi...
This is a Greater Coucal — chembothu , in Tamil — in my compound in Chennai. Black hood, deep chestnut wings, a long clumsy tail; a bird that would rather clamber than fly. I photographed it this week with something dark clamped in its bill. I have watched these birds for years, and for most of those years they walked past one particular thing on the ground as if it were furniture. This week, one was eating it. The thing it was eating — or one very like it — is the Giant African Snail. If you garden in this city you know the snail, even if you never knew its name: Lissachatina fulica (the older books call it Achatina fulica ). It is not a Chennai problem, or even an Indian one. It is one of the planet's most successful invaders, established in more than fifty countries — and almost none of that travel was its own doing. It is native to a thin strip of coastal East Africa. Everything after that was us. Naturalists carried it to India around 1847. It moved on through cargo hol...