Great Rappers of the Vedas Part One - The Old School Crew

OK, we’re going way, way back in time to when Vedic rap was first recorded. Of course there was no sound recording as we know it back then, 5000 years ago. It is a little known fact, but writing was actually invented as a way of recording rap. The earliest recordings in the genre were the masterpieces of the original Grandmaster of Vedic rap, Srila Vyasadeva.

He was the most prolific writer who has ever graced the microphone. Just one of his many works, the Mahabharata, is a magnum opus that outweighs the Iliad and Odyssey combined. That’s a pretty well-known fact for those in the know. What is less talked about is the fact that isn’t just like writing a novel or doing some kind of improvised spoken word show based on the fact that you have a famous name. It is all totally rhymed and on the one.
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Today I have decided to spiritualize my rap career more. Leafing through the Srimad Bhagavatam this morning I came across a section where Vyasadeva was suffering from a lack of enthusiasm. His mentor Narada Muni explained to him that it was due to not fully explaining the glories of the Lord, and of course His devotees.

So I have decided to do a series on “Great Rappers of the Vedas”. Coming soon….

Tomorrow I am going to the hip hop workshop with my demo. I have lost a little enthusiasm of late. Just because something can be done does not mean it should be done. Like mounting your gmail account as a filesystem. Anyway, I started off with a lot of enthusiasm for it, got half way through and now have lost a lot of desire to go on. That’s basically the way things go. The desire to perform activity is called kama in Sanskrit, and the activity itself is called karma. By performing a particular activity, new desires are acquired, and hence the repetitive cycle of desire and activity, known as samsara continues.

My MCing career started back in 2000 when I was part of the now legendary (or is that mythical?) rapping duo “AC/BC”, MC Anaconda and DJ Boa Constrictor, with my good buddy electronic music producer Vrajadhama das. We put the whole thing on hold while we went to live in South America for three years as “Los Gringos Andinos”, playing Huaynos and Valses from Ecuador to Bolivia.
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No, this isn’t a rant about the “Yellow Peril” threatening Australia - the continent in question is the Asian continent itself. Further to the earlier news about the eating habits of a hungry world, this latest information is that the farming industry in Asia is using up all the sub-surface water. This is the result of commercial farming. Subsistence farming does not cause such environmental damage. The disproportionate consumption of water in producing meat for the table is a problem that the Hare Krishnas have been signalling for many years now. As well, the overuse of and subsequent high demand for thirsty crops such as sugarcane indicate that our dietary habits have a direct impact on the environment, and we will suffer the consequences. And they say that there’s no such thing as karma….

Now y’all out there who have heard my demo know that MC K-OS is “taking it peer-to-peer-to-peer-to-peer-to-peer, I use the medium to make my message clear: Krishna and Open Source - Irresistible Object meets Unstoppable Force.”

At Red Hat our vision is to be “the defining technology company of the 21st century”, and I’m totally down with that. We are fully open source, all our software product is GPL, and we are pioneering a business model where our product is freely available and everything is open to the community. Now in another article I am going to deal a little more explicitly with what I see as the economics of the whole thing and how that relates to Vedic ideas of ages and socio-economic organization. Today I just wanted to mention in passing this point that I also think that Hare Krishna will be “the defining cultural and religious movement of the 21st century”, but unfortunately y’all gonna have to wait a little while longer for my take on that too.

What I am going to talk about today is what is happening in the wider society, and also in the Hare Krishna movement with regards to copyright and distribution.
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Let’s just calm down a little bit from that headline, oK? Conclusive truth can never be established by debate. However, dialogue and discussion are healthy and necessary in any organization as diverse as a society. I am very pleased to find that people within the Hare Krishna movement are beginning to engage on the subject of Gay Marriage, which is obviously a major civil and religious issue at the moment. At the end of this post I will give some pointers so you can check it out.

I have been following it for some time now, outside the Hare Krishna movement, and respect the coverage given by the Christian Science Monitor. Mainly it is a good gauge for seeing how much energy the ongoing dialogue is generating in the wider society.
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The WSN server was down last night as I did the hardware upgrade. Working with discarded pieces of hardware is kinda cool and ecological and all that, but it sho’ is a whole lotta pain as well. That’s austerity for you. It’s so much easier to just pay someone to chop down a few rainforests and blow an open cast mine into the side of a mountain…

I picked up a discarded PIII-450MHz mobo and processor that someone left under my house (when there are motherboards discarded beneath the house, what need is there for buying new ones?), so I thought I would install that along with the hard disk for the RAID array. It seemed to work during the day when I tested it, but as soon as I got it into the server it went weird. It doesn’t help when you are raiding a stock of mid-90s motherboards to try to find a lithium battery with some juice left in it. Why couldn’t they just put in a radioactive cell that lasts for a million years?

Anyway, the whole thing was complicated because the new disk is 40GB and neither the old mobo or the new one would support it. A couple of BIOS flashing missions later still no joy; the “new” one would support but just wouldn’t boot and stay up , so it’s now installed on the old PII mobo with the 32GB limiting jumper on it. It works. I dd’d the contents of the old drive over and then did a grub-install. Don’t try this kind of thing without a rescue disk handy. You can’t change your boot drive unless you boot off a rescue CD - you will toast everything. I know.

If you have a problem with user administration in FC2 or RHEL4 where you add a user but then cannot modify or use the account, restart the nscd service to reload the passwd and group files into the cache.

This kind of thing can drive you crazy. Here I am, trying to work on my Red Hat Knowledge Base Article on Backups (and set up the WSN server to be fully backed up at the same time), by setting up a remote machine to connect and do an rsync, and I get stuck on trying to create a user. Computers are supposed to save time, but in reality they just take time. That self-sufficient lifestyle block at New Govardhana is sounding more and more enticing with each passing day…

Here is an article which further exposes the bogus tactics of a certain proprietary software company’s comparisons of TCO of Windows and GNU/Linux. Wake and smell the java, welcome to the 21st century, your day is done - the revolution is inevitable.

Here is a recent article from ABC News entitled “Kill Microsoft Word”. Of course no software package is perfect, but aside from its design problems, which are a natural consequence of the mentality behind it, Word is a particular virulent example of monopolistic thinking. It is designed to make its users a controlled and subservient market and limit their options by eliminating competition through closed standards. Rather than dominating through excellence and merit it wants to domiante through artificial monopoly and suppression and elimination of competition.

Here you can read an article by Richard M Stallman, the father of the Free Software Movement that arguably made the Linux phenomena possible, discussing some of the implications of using Microsoft’s Word document format.

The boys at Kaspersky Antivirus over in Russia are predicting a massive meltdown of the Internet today (the 26th) due to a techno-terrorist attack.

Get the scoop here, and check out their website where they even have their own Internet Terror Alert Level-style warning, which ironically is currently still set to “Green”.

Let’s hope that they have a recent backup of the Internet in case something does go wrong.

“You don’t eat like a sissy - so why colon cleanse like one?”

Hearmenow! You have got to love this one. 85% of all Americans have intestinal parasites you will know if you read my earlier articles about the worms and did your homework on the links. Now you should know that “IT IS ESTIMATED THAT THE AVERAGE PERSON HAS BETWEEN 3 AND 8 UNDIGESTED MEALS IN HIS OR HER COLON AT ANY GIVEN TIME”.

Here’s how to get rid of them. Of course, a general change of diet and lifestyle would be a good idea as well.

I might have to take this up while the very cool and stylee offer of a free t-shirt is still on. I need some new t-shirts…

At the moment I am working on another engine for Our Brisbane ISKCON.org. It was down for a few days because of problems with the database at the ISP. Last month it was hacked. The content management system I have been using is no longer freely available and supported, so I am moving on to something else.

The first few months (keeping it low key) have been useful as a trial to get an idea of what technology is needed and what human resources / marketing is needed. Basically I think that a standard blogging style engine like Wordpress could do it with the addition of a calendar / events type module. That’s all people basically use at the moment. I can see how the site could be extended beyond that, but only with a proper integration - that is to say many people doing a little bit each rather than one person doing everything.

Slowly slowly….

I got my machine on internet at home, and needed to allow it access to my server, which uses IP-based security through hosts.allow. Obviously I didn’t want to loosen things up, either by allowing all machines to connect regardless of IP, or by allowing my ISP’s entire dynamic IP range.

I read a thread on the ISP-Australia mailing list discussing VPN connection issues with dynamic DNS and heard about www.dyndns.org. I had an account set up and a static address to dynamic IP mapping in about 10 minutes. 20 minutes and I had a client installed on my machine to update dyndns.org wherever the IP changes.
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Here are a couple of hacks that I have been using. I’ll do them in two separate posts.

Firstly, I didn’t have internet access at home so I had to come with some kind of hack to allow me to use whatever computer I could get hold of to do my email, including my machine offline. (Please see here about the decapitalization of the term “internet”).

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The workshop was good. I didn’t bust out with any rhymes but just hung back and gave respect to the MCs. I picked up some good pointers and some confidence. This week I will work on my rhymes and next week I’ll represent. Everyone was rapping over much slower beats than I have been. I use the QY70 (see the earlier article about it) and spin things up at 120bpm. About 100 bpm I think is more the speed, so this week I will practice like that.

Duty is the best basis for a stable long term relationship, and marriage is, among other things, a public expression of a commitment to duty.

Stability is important for spiritual practice, as well as material happiness. No-one likes to be in a disturbed or uncertain situation. Alvin Toffler, futurologist and author of Future Shock, says: “Future shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.”
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Random thought for the day before leaving work:

Romance is out man. Now I know that Romance (with a capital R) is a woman’s thang - I read Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Somehow I was cast in the role of relationship counsellor a couple of years ago while in Peru, and I couldn’t relate with the things people were coming to talk with me about, so I read that book. Good practical male / female psychology.

Romeo and Juliet worked because they died, get it? Because you know what would have happened if Romeo had stuck around. If Shakespeare had been a woman they would have “lived happily ever after”, but unfortunately statistics don’t lend much support to the probability of that ending.
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My machine is now online at home. I have a sweet cable connex @ 1.5Mbps. No static IP, so I have it registered with dyndns.org who do a way cool free dynamic mapping. Of course I have to have this machine in the World Sankirtan.net domain so that I can work on my projects from home, without having to give all of Telstra’s broadband customers potential access to my server network, so I am working on a hack to dynamically update my nameserver configuration and hosts.allow file with the cable modem’s IP. If dyndns can do it, guess what: so can I. And I get paid to do this kind of stuff now…

I checked Umart this morning for a price for another hard drive for the World Sankirtan.Net server. I am going to configure it with RAID 1, which means all data gets written to two drives instead of just one, in case one of them goes belly up (the one I have in there at the moment is an old 10GB one that I found lying around).

Actually the whole machine is made of rejected parts that were unusable for other purposes. A 266MHz Intel Pentium II with 140MB RAM. No good for Windows XP, but it rocks as a server running Fedora Core 2, Red Hat’s free Linux operating system.
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Oh oh, here we go: BBC News reports on a conference on world-wide water consumption patterns held in Stockholm. It’s the same thing that was discussed in both “The Higher Taste” and “Divine Nature”, two books published by the Hare Krishna many years ago. Production of meat for consumption is incredibly wasteful of resources, including grains and water.

The Hares said it twenty years ago, now even meat-eating scientists have to agree - we are heading for major problems due to our lifestyle.