Indra – the dragon slayer

I recently coded up a python script (using Pythonista on my iPhone) in my spare time to speed up searches through the Vedic corpus and the Epics. It lets me search text patterns through the whole corpus, extract verses, cross reference it with translations and then create a text of Sanskrit verse with translations with clear citations. The inputs are text filters that can be combined to create excerpts on specific topics.

I did this partly to spend time on my morning commute to work but also because I wanted to research the old Sanskrit canon more. In the age of LLMs where the right kind of data is the real currency, I think textual analysis and research will be revolutionised with these tools. So, in that spirit, and armed with my script I curated a text with RV citations filtered on vṛtra​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ references and fed it to Claude 3.7, and after some prompting here is a great result. Be informed and enjoy!

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Indo-Turks and Anglo-Normans

Posting after a while, as this topic is very BP and I managed to write a rather long Twitter thread on it. So just compiling it all here in a neater format. May revisit and clean it up further later.

A short piece on why the Islamo-Turkic colonialism in India is not the same as the experience of the English who were colonized at roughly the same time by the Francophone Normans. Note Mahmud Ghaznavi died in 1030 / William Duc de Normandie was born in 1028.

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