Becoming “Modern”
Children born in the United States 1982–2002, the period bracketing the turn of the millennium, are known as Millennials, as those born in the decade after World War II, 1945–55, were dubbed Baby Boomers. Seeking labels for the generations of Andhra pandits discussed here we might call the old
est set Traditionalists, a group that included Baballa, Lanka, Duvvuri Yajulu, Bulusu Cayanalu, and Gullapalli Sita Ram Sastri, as well as Renducintala Venkatacalu Yajulu, Kapilavayi Yajnesvara Agnihotra Sastri, and others. They had all grown up with what Chinese culture esteems as filial piety, particularly with regard to the father-son relationship, which in Vedic Brahmanical terms usually means guru-student. For them there was strict adherence to the rules for sandhya-vandana, adhyaya, marriage and other rites of passage, yajna, and subsequent sacrifices when they chose to perform them. With few exceptions, parental will and authority were obeyed without question. Baballa, one of six ahitagni brothers, is an example of generational fidelity to the path of his ahi tagni father and his father’s ancestors.
In turn, the sons and daughters of Traditionalists came of age in a period of shifting cultural norms, a time when choices that seemed inconceivable to their parents gradually became available. All seven of Lanka and Anasuya’s sons, all six of Bulusu Kamesvara and Satyavati’s sons, and both sons of Bulusu Cayanulu chose careers outside the Vaidika path of their parents. Of the five sons of Yajulu and Surya, the eldest, Sarvesvara, prepared for, but eventu
ally declined, the ritual path of his father, and three other sons chose worldly careers, leaving only Surya Prakasa Avadhani as a potential sacrificer. That role he and Kanaka Durga eventually abandoned for health reasons in 2014. On the other hand, all five of Sita Ram Sastri’s sons, unburdened by pursuit of a sacri
ficing legacy, became highly successful Veda pandits to continue the teaching heritage of their distinguished parent. Two of the four sons of Samavedam achieved similar aims. This second generation had a checkered pattern and could be called the Selecters, those who chose between options, Vaidika and laukika, a preference that many of their parents did not deem possible.
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The next generation in this delta narrative brings us into the age of comput ers and information technology, yet a further distancing from the traditions of the early and mid-twentieth century. In fact, the “IT” generation, like “TV” a recognizably pan-Indian English acronym, is not an inappropriate label since a few of the Traditionalists’ grandsons left India to accept computer services employment abroad. Perhaps Opportunists is a better tag for those leaping into careers totally apart from both parental and grandparental generations. There are several aspects of modern changes with which to explore the distinc tions between these generations.
E.1 A New Cash Economy
The standard of living has changed. Money is necessary to live now, not the exchange of services between Brahmans and others. Dhupala Ramacandra Sastri, Head of Veda-Agama
Pathasala, November 17, 1980
Baballa, Lanka, Mitrnarayana, and other older pandits spoke frequently of their disillusionment with the dabbu (money) culture of modern India. On the other hand, Samavedam was not at all displeased to receive paper rupees instead of paddy or vegetables for his services reciting asir-vacanam blessings and welcomed the opportunity to buy personal items or turn the cash into dowry payments. Dowry debt, in fact, has always been one of the crippling features of economic life, an obstacle to financial solvency. Lanka paid Rs. 400 katnam (dowry fee) when giving his daughter Anasuya to Mitranarayana. “No land,” he said, “just cash. And I have been in debt my whole life.” An arrangement such as the Gullapalli-Duvvuri exchanges of sons and daugh ters discussed in Chapter 5 is one method of alleviating indebtedness. For another, it may be recalled that Cayanulu taught Veda to a son of his friend Renducintala in exchange for a dowry-less marriage with his daughter. The boy, Renducintala Satyanarayana Avadhani, lived in the house with Cayanulu, Subbalaksmi, and his future bride for the years of adhyaya until marriage in Vijayawada when he was fifteen and the girl was ten.
Attitudes toward money do in fact reveal a separation between gen erations. It was their loathing of veda-vikraya, the selling of Veda, that kept Traditionalists such as Baballa and Lanka from accepting any parayana posi tion with the TTD. Selecters and Opportunists, who had no such qualms, wel comed the steady income from a monthly check and a future pension plan. Financial independence for the family became more important than the strict distancing from rupee transactions so cherished by some elders, those who
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regarded salaries for Veda pandits as filthy lucre. The Traditionalists were fiercely guarded in many ways. Lanka, for example, remarked that any milk from the agni-hotra buffalo left over from daily offerings and family consump tion was always given away. “Selling milk just once,” he said with a bizarre analogy, “is the karmic equivalent of torturing fish for a year.” Such dogmatic circumspection, like Lanka’s refusal to use chemical fertilizers or hybrid seeds on his croplands, has all but disappeared today.
E.2 Mobility
In the past we did not stir out of our villages. Now we receive
constant invitations to go to other places, Hyderabad, Delhi,
Ujjaini, elsewhere. And in the past there was contentment,
satisfaction with life. Now there is no contentment.
Mitranarayana, April 22, 1989
Another striking feature of the new era is mobility, a freedom to move farther and more frequently from the agrahara. Routine boat traffic on the canals, bullock carts, horse tongas, and man-pulled rickshaws are quaint memories or tall tales for most people today. Buses rumble by on more or less regular schedules, the occa
sional taxi is available for an emergency or special event, and for longer distances a relatively short bus ride provides access to the gargantuan Indian railway system. Cars that changed American society with the arrival of Henry Ford’s Model T are now on the market for India’s middle class. The Tata Nano, unveiled in New Delhi in January 2008 at the rupee equivalent of $2,000, appeared exactly a century after Ford’s “Tin Lizzie” and may have much the same effect on Indian society. For those four rubber tires, not wooden bullock cart wheels, the National Highways Development Project provided the beginnings of the Golden Quadrilateral, 3,625 miles of four-and-six-lane highways crossing thirteen states. A portion of the Kolkata-Chennai segment runs through the delta near Ravulapalem. Still today, however, most residents of the delta, with the exception of the lucky few in a hired taxi for a wedding party, have never been in a car. In 1992 one of Lanka’s success ful laukika sons was the first in any ahitagni family to own a car, a Maruti.
Public transportation by train, bus, or shared taxi means of course rub bing shoulders with outsiders, an immense hurdle for ahitagni and awkwardly distasteful for teaching Veda pandits managing madi, ritual purity. This is a leading reason for limited movement. And yet both groups, for whom long-distance journeys were rare before the 1960s, have indulged in travel to an increasing degree over the decades. As discussed in Chapters 2 and 6, agni-hotrin found ways to cope with hearth maintenance and requisite isti
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performance while absent. Recruitment of someone to serve as adhvaryu, brah man, or other rtvij role could mean travel to another state, usually Tamil Nadu, or attendance at a major sabha, perhaps in Kanci, or all-expense paid trips for special occasions such as the sixtieth and seventieth birthdays of Satya Sai Baba, in which cases wives were included in the festivities. Mentioned earlier is the case of Samavedam and his two sons, traveling anywhere by whatever conveyance, as long as an honorarium and travel expenses were forthcoming for their recitations. In the Tirupati temple in 1980, the Foreigner and his wife were delighted to encounter four Gullapalli brothers, Samavedam, and other Konasima friends among the sixteen Veda pandits belting out antipho
nal ghana in a Varuna puja, an attempt to bring rain to the Seven Hills. The pandits’ train journey south from Rajahmundry was successful and temple dignitaries were all pleased that mantras defeated the drought.
The most recent development is air travel. Lanka was flown to Delhi in May 1994 to receive a citation from the president of India. He was the only one of the ahitagni to travel in an airplane, an experience he never dreamed would happen. On the other hand, Duvvuri Sita Ram Sastry, one of Yajulu’s com
puter science grandsons, did relate his nocturnal dream of flying to Kennedy Airport in New York where he was met by President Clinton and his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright. The flight was a dream soon realized, although it lacked such a grand welcoming party.
E.3 Huna-vidya: A Rival Form of Education
Reading and writing I acquired in the course of time. I never
went to school. There was no activity other than Veda.
Duvvuri Yajulu, March 28, 1992
The spirit of Vedic life has disappeared. Now huna-vidya,
vocational proficiency, livelihood, are all that matters to the
younger generation, not rituals.
Mitranarayana, March 26, 1992
Yajulu spoke in the old coinage: 12 pice to an anna, 16 annas to a rupee. He loved to tell a story from his youth when a boatman shortchanged him with pice in a broken coconut shell after he paid to cross the Godavari River. The boatman showed up later with the balance, saying it was a test to verify what he suspected: the boy could not count. Like others of the old school Yajulu took pride in a record of learning Veda before reading, writing, and arithme
tic. Late in his life he tried to help negotiate marriage arrangements for a
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granddaughter in a time when a typical newspaper ad sought a “Fair beautiful MSc. Software handling bride.” “She has no B.A.,” he lamented, “and cannot go out and earn the money that parents want for their sons now.”
Mitranarayana’s comment broaches the vexing and complicated matter of an English curriculum in public schools mentioned in several previous chap ters. Labeled by the older Veda pandits huna-vidya, literally “the practice of the Huns,” that is, British invaders/colonizers, the English curriculum was abhorred for its interference in traditional Vedic adhyaya. According to the elders, learning in the agrahara should begin at dawn or earlier, even 4 am, and if the boy is expected to be in an outside school at eight o’clock the sched ule is untenable. More important than timing was the matter of content, of what constitutes learning. The boy’s mind, says the old generation, should be fresh and open to retain the flow of the Taittiriya syllables, not stuffed with ephemera like math and other subjects that can always be learned, as they learned them, later. The younger generation, having witnessed the advantages and wider perspectives of learning English and computer skills, among other subjects, has distanced itself, respectfully, from grandparental views. The middle generation is stuck somewhere between these viewpoints, having seen mediocrity or outright failure as the result of a boy’s divided mind.
The English-speaking world represents to the elders a laukika world that is intrusive and divisive. The Traditionalists and Selecters speak no English while Opportunists have become accustomed to hearing some English in school and even more via TV-TV (as it is called), particularly after the appearance of Star TV with programs available in English. Bookstore aisles contain English texts on biology, chemistry, math, physics (never anthropology, history, religious studies, sociology), all in preparation for the Indian Council for Secondary Education, SAT and GRE exams. The sons of Surya Prakasa Avadhani (grand sons of Duvvuri Yajulu) were the first to learn any English in their school in the large town of Rajahmundry, the eldest, Phani, being the only youngster in this entire survey to learn Veda and English simultaneously. The net effects of English education in India are increasing yearly, although still it is true that only a tiny fraction of the populace speaks or reads the language.
E.4 The Powers That Be
All people should not be equal!
Lanka, December 29, 1991
Although agrahara life is decidedly not the same as existence in a typi cal Andhra village or town there is no lack of awareness of what goes on
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in the outside world. Cayanulu, for example, cycled daily to recite in a tem ple in nearby Vyaghresvaram village and Duvvuri Surya Prakasa lives in Rajahmundry, recites in a temple, and teaches in his orchard compound. In Sriramapuram and Nedunuru, people from all social strata come to supply and service agrahara residents and inform them of current events, local, state wide, and national. Radio was there for the oldest generation after electricity arrived, and television was available for the two recent ones. Suddenly a single “TV-TV” appeared on Main Road in Rajahmundry, drawing crowds of shop pers to stare at what seemed like a lighted bird house atop a tall pole. Soon the crowds shifted to lanes where homes of the wealthy glowed with magical blue light and locked steel gates provided ladders for distant gawkers. When visiting pandit homes in the 1990s the TV, like that initial single dangling light bulb for an earlier generation, seemed always to be on for the ladies in an interior room. “But we don’t have color” became an apologetic refrain, at least until they did have color.
Although no pandit would admit to having gone there, a single cin ema, Jaya Prakasa Talkies, was visible for many years across the canal from Sriramapuram. With the advent of TV in nearly every house in the late 1990s it suddenly disappeared. In January 1987 agrahara residents joined their fel low citizens nationwide in the devotional event of watching the great epic Ramayana, a serial television broadcast on Sunday mornings, a drama that for many legitimized the suspect medium itself. The silver screen in cinema hall form had already claimed the devotion of millions of Andhrans with the appearances of N. T. Ramarao (NTR) as Krishna or Rama in epic films; he starred in more than 300 from 1949 on. When NTR turned to politics in 1982 and led the Telugu Desam Party in defiance of Indira Gandhi he successfully won office as chief minister, the first person outside the Congress Party to hold the state’s highest post. He died of a sudden heart attack in 1996 and the entire state shut down in mourning for the screen deity turned politician. Several agonized fans committed suicide. A samadhi was established in Hyderabad, as for a saint, and his ashes were ceremonially deposited with Vedic mantras throughout Andhra, including the Godavari at Muktesvaram in Konasima and Kotlinga revu in Rajahmundry.
With so many available forms of communication, any distancing from the external world is therefore self-chosen. Lanka once interrupted a discus sion of dharma to pose his own query: “Who is in power now?” He meant the central government in Delhi. At the time he most certainly knew it was Congress Party but his expression of disdain for any form of worldly politics was as important to him as his estrangement from a constantly changing democratic system in Delhi. More than once he praised the days of British
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rule. “They did nothing bad to us and they encouraged merit. Now it is our government that is bad.” At the same time his comment “All people should not be equal!” displays his adherence to varanasrama dharma, the classical system of hierarchy and stage of life, everyone in place according to birth, age, profession, and gender.
One common thread in agrahara conversations was a new sense of the growing powerlessness of Brahmans in society in general. Brahmans, by a “natural” hierarchy in accordance with scripture from the Rg Veda’s Purusa Sukta to Dharma Sastra, should be on top, prestige-wise if not always in terms of economics or polity. The Indian constitution and decades of Indian’s version of affirmative action, however, tweaked the old rules. In 1980 at the start of research for this book, the Delhi government’s Mandal Commission submitted its report recommending a 27 percent quota sys tem for large portions of the population, “Backward Classes,” “Scheduled Castes,” “Scheduled Tribes”—all those disadvantaged by “the Hindu social scheme.” Gradually, over time, the masses had real weight and competi
tive opportunities. Brahmans could no longer count on posts in village, state, and central governments, seats in college and university departments, shares of governmental largesse. This leveling of the playing field was unset tling to Veda pandits. Some pointed to distressing news of self-immolations of upper caste protestors against the report. Later, however, they displayed a measure of pride in 1993 when India’s prime minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao, a much-respected fellow Andhran, announced implementation of the report some thirteen years after its composition.1 The school at the end of Sriramapuram’s single lane was opened to all castes and this was accepted without agitation.
It is perhaps the newest generation, the Opportunists, that has the most favorable opinions of the ruling powers of state and nation. Already discussed in Chapters 3 and 5 is one example, the significant change regarding fam ily planning. From the Traditionalists’ point of view contraception is unnatu ral and contrary to Dharma Sastra. A strong battery of Vedic texts is quickly recited touting the purpose of marriage as the production of children to con tinue the lineage, governmental attempts at planned parenting being a med dling with family values. As in other ways the Selecters were divided while the Opportunists wholeheartedly embraced the national slogan “We are two, we have two.” Duvvuri Phani and Laksmi (Nagalaksmi) added two sons to their union in 1996 and 1998, declaring the second to be “the final” child. It could be said that Dharma Sastra rules were outweighed by the economic advantage of being a small family. The days of ten- or twelve-child families were num bered well before the turn of the millennium.
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E.5 “America”: Polarities and Dreams
What is it all about, this ‘going to America’? Anasuya,
February 24 2000
From a distance the mountains look soft. Lanka, March 22, 1995
Anasuya, a lifelong Traditionalist whose father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and husband Lanka were all ahitagni, was perplexed when ahitagni descen dants, including one of her sons, began leaving agrahara for that strangely menacing other-worldly place called “America.” Lanka, who failed to teach Veda to a single one of their seven sons, assessed that departing son’s chances of succeeding abroad with a grim proverb: a closer look at his foreign home will reveal rugged, forbidding peaks. Anasuya, capitulating to the loss, lamented: “When they go, they don’t come back.”
The pandit community’s opinions of “America” comprise a fascinating and complicated subject that morphed in various ways over the research period. A small part concerns the researcher himself, this white Foreigner (tela-dora) who knows much about Vedas, sacrifices, samskara, and recites mantras learned, mirabile dictu, in Kasi, one who repeatedly appears to pose questions about their lives. Samavedam expressed the sentiments of many: “It is wonderful that some
one from America is so dedicated to our traditions.” Baballa went further and expressed a belief shared with Yajulu and others: “He belongs to our country, our region, our place. Only to propagate Veda was he born in that other place.”
A wider perspective with which to begin, however, is the Dharma Sastra dictum that a Brahman should not live in inauspicious lands, places where mlelccha (barbarians) might contaminate him. Manu 3.158 condemns those who travel by sea and Bhaskara Misra admonishes those who incur the sin or fault (dosa) of being in an inauspicious country.2 In 1980 the Foreigner enjoyed long discussions on the Atharva Veda with Tangiral Balagangadhara Sastri, one of Lanka’s gurus, in his Sarvaraya Veda Patha-sala in the bucolic village of Kapilesvarapuram. He was one of the six Veda pandits teaching twenty-five students. In 1993 Sastri-garu was encountered again at an Atharva Veda Conference in Manhattan where he recited from his seldom heard Veda. There in New York City, adjacent to the United Nations headquarters among gigantic skyscrapers, so unimaginable to one secluded on the north bank of the Gautami-Godavari in Konasima, he confessed his trepidation about cross ing the ocean. To the surprise of all the Veda pandits, Sastri-garu returned as the same person, apparently undamaged by American soil, food, customs, and evil eyes. It was the beginning of a slow transformation of opinion regarding that dangerous and remote land of iniquity.
Epilogue: Becoming “Modern” 255
Transcripts from sessions with pandits in the 1980s glitter with negative views of America, a place of magic, mystery, and money, full of people who drink alcohol excessively, communicate by sorcery over wrist watches like Dick Tracy or James Bond, carry cameras that cause photographed objects to burst into flames, and frolic as spendthrifts with fabulous wealth. Lanka once asked: “How is it that Americans are so wealthy? Is there a lot of gold just lying about?”—a remark that called to mind Herodotus’ gold-mining ants that made the people of India so rich.
As mentioned earlier, in the late 1980s the Foreigner and the Andhra University professor began to read to the younger pandits letters the youth had received from Hindu temples in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Houston, and other cities, invitations via the TTD to recite daily as Yajur Veda pandits. The letters were all in English and of course had gone unread. After hearing the invitations no one responded, all citing fear of excommunication by older pun
dits, including fathers and grandfathers, their gurus. Yajulu was among the fathers who simply forbade such thoughts of foreign employment. “Selling the Veda,” said Lanka, terminating discussion. Samavedam’s son Bhaskara might have been a likely candidate. But he was fond of narrating two accounts, one of a Brahman from Gangalakurru who returned from America and found that no one would eat in the same line with him, while another Brahman was in America when his father’s funeral took place without him, a horrendous thing to do to a guru and parent.
Opposition to such travel did shrink, however, when long-term effects of a 1965 change in US immigration laws became apparent. Young men sought employment in the United States, came home to marry, and soon added par ents to their new American homes. It seemed that someone from every village in Andhra dropped anchor in the United States and reported back a quite different perspective from received knowledge. Over-the-counter medicines became popular gifts; plain aspirin, available in India at one-tenth the price, was proudly shown to the Foreigner as if it cured cancer. In America, it was said in hushed tones, everyone receives free life-saving injections and lives to be ninety years old. News soon came that not only were there Hindu tem
ples in America but that some were staffed with Telugu priests who served Venkatesvara while other Brahmans recited Vedas! It was of course the “I.T.” phase that led the march, the outsourcing of computer technologists who at first manned telephones in Hyderabad or Bangalore and then began to emi
grate. Dollars were no longer the tainted wealth of filmi stories but now a valu able asset. By 2008 it was reported that Indian citizens working in the United States had the highest annual amount of dollar remittances to the home coun try of all foreign nationals: $27 billion.3256 vedic voices
Several descendants of ahitagni were reported in earlier chapters to be com puter specialists trained in Hyderabad before emigrating to the United States. One is Duvvuri Sita Ram Sastry, grandson of Yajulu and also of Gullapalli Sita Ram Sastri, now living with his wife and two children in Hartford, Connecticut. A failure at learning Veda, he devoted himself to providing financial support for his family in Andhra. A cousin who is also a grandson of Yajulu performs similar computer technology services in Milwaukee. As for Yajulu himself, after the Foreigner’s leave-taking one sunbaked afternoon in Sriramapuram, the blind and halting nonagenarian mischievously shouted: “Tell them in America I am looking for employment!”
All Veda pandit family histories have revealed multiple changes in transi tions from the older to the middle to the new generations and from the age of man-pulled rickshaws to flat-screen TVs and laptops. None has retained the features of life in the early twentieth century. Baballa’s descriptions of his Konasima childhood life at the outset of the twentieth century seem quite mythic to residents of the same hamlets today. They are seeing the results of one hundred years of ballooning populations; expansion of towns, roads, communications, and amenities; political and social tinkering with the caste system; intrusion of the British curriculum and some of its language into pub
lic education; presentations of the wider world on radio, television, and film; firsthand accounts from those who had defied Manu, traveled over the great oceans, and somehow returned alive, well, and worldly wise.
The narrow dirt track that Lanka walked in the dark to and from his daily lessons is long gone, replaced by an asphalt road for motor vehicles. The servant courier walking with spoken messages for another village has been swapped for a cell phone. The many coins that added up to a rupee have been replaced by large denominations on paper or a bank check. While not the “digital natives” of American Millennials, Indian students are entirely familiar with the meaning of the Internet and the new social media. Certain aspects of domestic ritual life have been abbreviated, a few samskara, for example. Girls and women of the household are not as artistic as they used to be in creat ing the predawn threshold designs (muggu) of rice or lime powder, if there is time to do them at all. And people are living longer. About the middle of the research period for this book came the report that life expectancy in India had risen from thirty-two years in 1947, when Duvvuri Yajulu was exactly thirty-two, to fifty-nine in 1991, an astonishing increase of twenty-seven years. Yajulu lived to be ninety.
In taking the measure of a Veda pandit life that is supported by convention, stamina (opika), sobriety, dharmic responsibility, and above all, adherence to ritual schedule and detail, it is important to discern the impact of “modernity.”
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The sense that the Vedic tradition is being consumed by modernity has been afloat for much of the past three decades. It is a misleading apprehension, however, and is shared mostly by those families whose sons failed to learn Veda, or never tried, and settled for worldly careers.
Families with successful sons actually believe that their numbers have increased. And when sons achieved certification and entered into temple employment the steady income meant a considerable improvement over for mer times.
The accelerated pace of modern changes received an enormous boost in the period 2010 to 2014, something like a jet-assisted cultural take-off. Kapilavayi Rama Sastri in Annavaram is a good illustration, driving a car, living in a new multi-floor private house glistening with electronics to match the most up-to-date American home: flat-screen TV, laptops, I-pads, I-pods, and possi
bly I-things that are yet to appear in Silicon Valley. And brother Venkatesvara over in Simhacalam, also bearded, also wealthy, first to own a motorcycle, is now driving his own car. One might think that Glinda had floated in from Oz to endow the delta with all the treasures of the New Age.
Many aspects of life, however, remain unchanged. When the sun rises or sets each day it is just about six o’clock. The distinctive colorations of rice fields that line the roads, asphalt or dirt, transform as always with every season, and the expert coconut picker still shinnies barefoot up the bristly trunks with ankles bound in rope. But above all, the lessons that Baballa and Lanka heard and repeated back so many years ago are exactly the same today, as are the basic procedures of an ahitagni ritual life.
In the early 1990s the delta was opened to drilling by the ONGC, India’s Oil and Natural Gas Company. Large-scale road construction enabled mas sive equipment to reach the littoral of the Bay of Bengal. Then a spectacular “blowout” occurred in well number 19 on January 8, 1995, at Pasarlipudi and dangerous horizontal flames shot hundreds of feet in all directions, lighting up Konasima and frightening everyone in the delta. No one had seen anything like it. Vedic Brahmans began to recite mantras. Astrologers were consulted about this eerie phenomenon and one with Veda pandit ancestry assured the Foreigner that sabda, sacred sound, either mantras or slokas, “both are the same,” would solve the problem. One day a group of hulking Texans, complete with spurs, Stetson hats, and bulging beer bellies, appeared on the road outside Amalapuram, as inconspicuous as a squadron of Martians landing in town. They set to work first turning the flames into a vertical inferno a thousand feet in the air, then capping the well with a robot. When the fire finally fizzled and went out after burning sixty-five days, the Vedic Brahmans announced that their mantras had been the correct ones. The Brahman astrologer demurred
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and proclaimed that certain planets whose paths he routinely stalks had fortu nately changed course on March 10, as he predicted. Others said the well fire had burned itself out, “as do most fires.” No one gave the Martians credit and they all flew back to Texas.
There is something to be said here regarding the persistence of world views in the face of altered cultural landscapes. The softly uttered morning and evening Gāyatrī prayer, Ṛg Veda 3.62.10, once heard only in India, is now comfortably at home in Hartford, Milwaukee, San Diego.
oṃ tat savitur vareṇyaṃ / bhargo devasya dhīmahi / dhiyo yo naḥ pracodayāt oṃ
May we achieve the divine splendor of Savitṛ; may he illumine our minds.