Monday, December 17, 2007

Shalimar the Clown

Started reading this book (Shalimar the Clown, dodo!) today in the loo (other books in my life haven't been so lucky), and found the first few pages quite interesting.

Couldn't go beyond page 6 as my bowel movement was rather impressive today and I found it foolish to just sit in the loo and read (especially because Bangalore has cooled down quite a lot in the past few days and my loo is much more suitable for a cold dead turkey than a warm cold blooded mammal)...

The first character introduced is called 'India'...odd for a name, but if we read a little deeper maybe not so. India is named so because of Indus which flowed through the ancient North Western India (now Pakistan) and kind of demarcated the Indian territory in the olden days from the 'Greater Persia' in the West.

Now, The name Indus is a Latinization of Hindu, in turn the Iranian variant of Sindhu, the name of the Indus in the Rigveda (Wikipedia)!

So much history behind a name...no wonder carrying forward with a name like 'India' would not be an easy task. But I still find it extremely interesting...

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