StorageMojo.com will be relaxing until Monday, November 27. In the meantime I point serious storageheads at a wonderful article in the November 20 issue of the New Yorker.
As a warmup, memorize the Bible
Titled Homer in India, the oral epics of Rajasthan (not available online, AFAIK) the article discusses an ancient oral literary tradition of India. It was only some 75 years ago that scholars realized that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were handed down for hundreds of years orally before they were ever written.
In India, however, an even more elaborate tradition had managed to survive, relatively intact. An anthropologist friend had told me how he once met an traveliing storyteller in a village in southern India. The bard knew the Mahabarata – India’s equivalent of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Bible, all rolled into one. The epic is the story of the rivalry of two sets of princely cousins whose enmity culminates in an Armageddon-like war on the battlefield of Kurukshetra; at its heart lies tha Bhagavad Gita, for many Hinduism’s most profound and holy text, a dialogue, on the eve of battle, between the god Krishna and one of the princely heroes about duty, illusion, and reality.
With its hundred thousand slokas (stanzas), the Mahabharata was more than six times the length of the Bible. My friend had asked tha bard how he could possibly remember it. The minstrel replied that each stanza was written on a pebble in his mind. He simply had to recall the order of the pebbles and “read” from one after another. [emphasis mine]
While that is amazing enough, it turns out that the Mahabharata is only one of a large number of other India epics, some of which the article goes on to describe.
Can computers learn from people?
Do the tools of massive memorization have anything to teach computers about organizing digital information? I suspect they do, as the context creation of semantic web advocates seems not unlike the “pebble” paradigm described above or the location-based techniques of the medieval West. Memory “objects” ordered to preserve knowledge? What were they thinking?
Comments, as always, welcome. Enjoy the holiday, and count your blessings.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Thats true. Every kid in India knows detailed stories of Mahabharata and Ramayana. Interestingly, we were never taught anything about these epics in school, neither we read any book describing these stories. Most of the Indian overheard entire mahabharata from their parents and grandparents over the years.
That is so cool. Thank you for sharing the insight.
Bible study is a hobby of mine. America is flooded with dumbed-down, de-contextualized retellings of Bible stories and evangelical preachers using the stories to push a POV. I find that relatively few people have actually read the Bible, let alone heard their grandparents or parents recite stories from memory.
The New Yorker article made a similar point:
Of course, America is a young, highly mobile, diverse and ever forward-looking country, where, for many, the lives of grandparents seem archaic. I, for one, met but one of my grandparents, and that briefly. Perhaps that is why so many of us are avid consumers of new media and new stories. We are seeking to create a shared cultural framework in a country where relatively few come out of a long tradition of any kind. And even if we do, there isn’t much chance many of fellow citizens will share that tradition.
Robin
I found this very interesting. I am doing a bit of research just now, poking my nose into the business of sustaining culture via memorization. This is very helpful. If there are any other sources of information of this nature that you are readily aware of, pleas elet me know where else to poke my nose. Books and journals would be especially nice.
Thank you