In 58 posts with close to 100k words, we shared a lot in 2024! Explore 2024’s biggest geopolitical shifts, cultural battles, and bold insights with Drishtikone’s year in review. See you in 2025! Happy New Year! Be safe!
When you see Russia get into existential war over Ukraine, or Israel bomb Syria or India battle with Pakistan or Bangladesh, it is not because of some whim. It has a historical and geographical context. That is critical to understand for analyzing geopolitics.
Numerical systems across most ancient civilizations developed using similar linear patterns of counting. For primitive hunter-gatherer societies, a linear scale that facilitated counting the number of animals killed or artefacts bartered seemed sufficient. In a more complex and flourishing agrarian society like India, the need to study natural phenomena like rains and floods led early Indians to observe the cycles of the sun and moon, which in turn led them to count along circular patterns. Ramprasad Soghal deconstructs the process by which ancient Indians arrived at the highly efficient Indian Numerical System, how it was adopted the world over, and how it was erroneously attributed as originating in Arabia. He further makes a case for the probable origin of the Indian Numerical System in ancient Kannada numbers by shedding light on ancient Kannada notations devised for recording the waxing-waning phases of the Moon, the concept of Zero developed for counting the No-Moon and Full-Moon days, and the unique Placeholder System derived from the effective Kumbha system.
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