The Prabodhan of Balasaheb Thackeray

It is perhaps not always possible to imagine that the death of a person should cause so much stoppage. It probably happens in one’s surroundings once every generation. When I went outside to fetch milk in the morning of Nov 18 2012, the day after Balasaheb Thackeray had passed away, I met in the lift a young boy who was delivering newspapers. I asked him if the shops in Pune were still shut. “They are shut in the whole of Maharashtra” he said with considerable pride.

I nodded my head in agreement with this boy who seemed to represent all the good things that could come from the Thackerays’ Sena,  

Some of the non-marathi manoos could have said that the bandh was mainly due to fear. Two girls face-booked so and they were preventively --- if that is the word --- booked by the police. Bal Thackeray would have probably said “That is not my style. I have so much respect for the Marathi manoos”.

One cannot get such a disciplined collection of mourners solely out of fear. Moreover for pagan intellectuals like me, who do not belong to any faith, the fact is that revolutionaries and priests and monarchs of all kinds have shown throughout history that fear has the most power of persuasion in the short run.

I have walked as a child in a procession in Patna after Mahatma Gandhi’s death. At that age I could only see the legs of the crowd. These legs could have trampled over me. They didn’t. I was lifted, hand by hand, and deposited on the safe side. Mourning crowds are not violent in India. I have also walked the guneral procession of the  DMK icon, C. M. Ammadurai down the then. Mount Road (now Anna Salai) towards Rajaji Hall where his body was to be laid at rest. Being slightly taller than the rest I found before my eyes a thick carpet of black hair moving along slowly coherently in what could have only been a Bose-condensed state. There was not the gossipy present-day mass-television at that time and the spreading of news and views took so much more time and organization.

I can quite confidently say from this experience that the Gandhi-Thackeray-Annadurai-type out-pouring of mass adulation could only have come through a spontaneous sentiment expressed through every vein and nerve-ending as a swarm or social intelligence because of a very large personal loss in one’s society.

At the end of his life, Bal Thackeray could sing (against all odds) as Frank Sinatra did

I've lived a life that's full 
I traveled each and ev'ry highway 
And more, much more than this, I did it my way

----

For what is a man, what has he got? 
If not himself, then he has naught 
To say the things he truly feels and not the words of one who kneels 
The record shows I took the blows and did it my way! –

So I went to the Internet and started reading about this man. I think I may be slightly prejudiced in his favour if only because we are both Aquarians and could have the same birthday.

As far as I could make out, his life is, llike others’ are, an accident of history, but a very important one. It made contact with the emotions of his tribe at that time in a certain context. He was born as a Maharashtrian in a place that later became a part of the Bombay Presidency after India’s independence. There was this inborn thing in his genes … again common to many people … that protested some inequalities that were perceived. These perceptions reflected those of others. Bal Thackeray inherited these perceptions from his enlightened father ‘Prabodhankar’ Thackeray. Bal Thackeray went about expressing them in a way that forced changes that seemed to satisfy a large, deemingly suppressed, regional number, at the consternation of more financially accommodated upper cosmopolitan class.

A considerable amount has been written on Bal Thackeray on the internet. The trouble with internet is it gives an impression of being real while it is many-a-time only virtual-ity of little virtue. This blog will not pretend to add any new comment or perspective. It cannot hope to do justice to the political story of Bal Thackeray. I use this blog only to point out some threads that seem important or amusing to me.

There are two important points. The more important of these, from my personal viewpoint at least, is to emphasize the importance of Keshav Prabodhankar Thackeray, in a Father-son-Sena way. The other is to deal with the name Thackeray that transcends the Marathi gene and its relevance to the Marathi nuance.

I am sure that, Bal Thackeray would (if he could) express himself after his death the same way as Sinatra did (before Sinatra died, of course)

And now, as tears subside, I find it all so amusing 
To think I did all that 
And may I say, not in a shy way, 
"Oh, no, oh, no, not me, I did it my way

(I don’t particularly like being thrashed, but at the risk of being thrashed, I must add that I will refer to Mumbai in its earlier days as Bombay and will take care to refer to it as Mumbai for contemporary times, out of respect for all concerned, most of all for the Marathi manoos.)

It is a reflection of Bal Thackery’s private persona that a change from the Marathi Thakre to the British Thackeray could be a non-issue while the public persona took umbrage at every later-day reference to Mumbai as Bombay.

Balasaheb Thackeray

It is one of the ironies of Bal Thackeray’s life, that while his father adopted a British spelling for his family name, Bal Thackeray would himself grow up to fight for the change of the Portuguese/British name of Bombay to Mumbai. That probably was the theme of his life. Don’t mix his private persona with that of the public one. He required being a mild Ganapathi vahana (mouse) in one and a Tiger in the other (not that real tigers are more threatening than paper ones).

Behram Contractor, a Parsi, who columns under the pen-name Busybee was one of Bal Thackeray’s colleagues.at The Free Pass Journal. In his 1985 column A sort of Maharashtrian Woody Allen” Busybee describes Bal Thackeray as “soft-spoken ... sad-eyed”. Busybee would quote a reporter as saying that Thackeray was “... so timid that if the chair moved under him he would get scared” From those early days Balasaheb Thackeray would be one who said (according to his barber) a few days from his death “Those who say I am under ventilator should know I am still capable of putting hundreds like them under their own ventilators”.

Young Bal Thackeray sitting in his desk (Fig 1, top left) near a verandah frequented often by his colleagues going to the toilet, was amongst a crowd of Anglohiles (mainly south Indian) and Gujarati Businessmen. He smoked cigars and cheroots (“because of Churchill”) in those days hoping perhaps to smoke out what he heard. His fondness for western style made him switch to a pipe (Fig 1) which, like most of us who tried to do it, “he does not know how to pack and light and keep going” Busybee). Thackeray would also joke and laugh and was evaluated by Busybee as being better than Laxman “in those days ... though no longer”.

Bal Thackeray left the Free Press Journal when Ananthanaryan Hariharan along  with a few others mainly South Indians (including, some say, George Fernandez) to start a newspaper owned by readers.  In those days when Nehru’s socialism was the talk of the town, Hariharan would revolt against “... the treacherous curbs on thought and ideas imposed by the overlords of the press .... (that) has made a mockery of the freedom of press.” Thackeray was the cartoonist as well as the man who could had useful contacts. The team worked eighteen hours a day without salary. By this time Bal Thackeray was married (I have not yet found the wedding day of Bal Thackeray) and had his last son Udhhav Thackeray. By September 1960, Newsday was bankrupt and had to be suspended. Thackeray, and others to seek jobs elsewhere.

I have looked at some of Thackeray’s cartoons. A typical (not one I like best) is shown on the top of Fig 2. Some of the highlights of his cartoons from his Marathi-language magazine (based on Punch) is given at http://www.rediff.com/news/slide-show/slide-show-1-different-strokes-of-bal-thackeray/20121119.htm. The beauty of a cartoon lies in the eyes of the reader and I guess the ordinary India reader likes the cartoon to be like a kabuki theatre with lots of ingredients and plots and counter plots. I suppose Bal Thackeray catered to this option. My tastes are more of the New Yorker types (bottom of Fig 3) more because I am familiar with the idioms and situations of western life than I am of (nothing to be proud of) things in most Indian language.

language.

It has to be remembered that in those early days after independence filled with the idea being a nation of united people, narrow parochial/provincial considerations were not encouraged in public thinking. However, the late 1950s and early 1960s saw the beginning of movements across India that gave force to local worries and along with it to less lofty global ideals. In a highly spiritualised world (driven more by mortal war than by peace), the local family is merged with the global problem. In more peaceful times when advertisements for materials goods become important, then disparities between local communities and global ones become the driving force for building political will. So it was after the freedom was was over (if not won). Localisation of issues started. Materialistic local issues takes over from global (loftier?) ones.

There seems to be a set of people who insist on gaining prominence either by being (what they think) a shepherd to their flock of sheeps or by being generals of slaughter and ethnic cleansing. One usually thinks that Gandhi (the original one) is one of the former and Hitler is an (if only the more contemporary) example of the latter. In the Indian Political scene after Independence the Gandhian way seemed to be more effective in bringing about changes. In later times the politics of violence has seen results. We have reached the materialistic stage.

There are other movements that set an earlier background for the Shiv Sena movement. First of all, Potti Sriraulu’s demands separating the Andhra region from the Madras Presidency, Communists force him to keep his word on starvation to death. Periyar’s Dravida Kazhagam (DK) protests on the imposition of Hindi language (and culture) on the Tamilians. It spawns DMK (the M standing for Munnetra which in Tamil means progressive probably); and then AIDMK (the AI stands for All India probably because its founder was MGRamachandran was born of non-Tamil Keralite parents).

The Samyukta Maharashtra movement followed, I think, slightly later with Kesar Sitaram Thackeray (or Prabodhankar Thackeray) the father of Balram Thackeray being one of the leading activists. The leading lights of this movement were from Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhu (CKP) community, The Samyukta Mahrashtra movement serves its purpose of making a Maharashtrian state but then loses its purpose; Bal Thackeray’s Shiv Sena movement comes up next trying various ways of removing hurdles that seemed to hinder the progress of the local Marathi people, the sons of the soil. The famous Maratha king Chatrapati Shivaji becomes their icon so that Shiv Sena is like a Shivaji Brigade. The sons of the soil policy is later pushed more aggressively by the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) of Raj Thackeray, Bal Thackeray’s nephew.  

Keshav “Prabodhankar” Thackeray

Bal Thackeray must have inherited the strong social values from his father Kesari Sitaram Thackeray, the person in the Thackeray family I most identify with. He is more popularly known as Prabodhankar Thackeray because of the articles he wrote in the magazine Prabodhan and other magazines. From what little I have read about Prabodhankar Thackeray or heard about him from my literate Marathi friends, Prabodhankar Thackeray would have been one of my heroes if I had known about him in the days of one’s life when one had heroes.

Besides Bal Thackery, his son Srikant Thackeray, was a musician (he directed Mohammed Rafi in his first Marathi song), knew Urdu the National Language of Pakistan, and was mainly apolitical. Prabodhankar Thackeray must have encouraged liberal arts in his children. Like Bal Thackeray, Srikant Thackeray as well as his son were cartoonists. Uddhav Thackeray had the opportunity to do expensive aerial photography as his hobby, which he was fairly good at. From the lower middle class background of Prabodhankar the rise up the fiscal scale to Uddhav has been impressive. Prabodhankar

Prabodhankar’s typical middle class intellectrual social-reform attitudes saw him opposing the caste systems and in believing in the equality of women. Being born in the Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhu (CKP) community there was always a simmering discontent aganst the Brahmin community who dominated the Peshwa rule in the Pune heartland of Maharashtra and would later come to dominate the public life of the then Bombay. It was he who played an important role in uniting the diverse political parties in starting the Samyukta Maharashtra movement to protest the Brahmin and Gujarati domination of Maharashtrian economy.

Most of my accounts on Keshav “Prabodhankar” Thackeray (KT) below is taken from http://prabodhankar.com/node/11/page/ mainly because of my incomplete knowledge of reading Marathi.

The forefathers/foremothers were all valiant ( = brave, courageous, heroic, fearless, noble, gallant, bold; from Thesaurus). KT’s grandfather Dada Bhikhoba Dhodapkar fought against superstition and witchcraft in overcoming epidemics such as plague. When KT was rendered as an untouchable by his community because the shadow of the untouchable fell over him, his grandmother made KT stand under the shadow of a Brahmin to impress upon the community that by their rules KT should now make the low-caste KT a Brahmin. His grandmother’s funeral procession was attended by a large number of people cutting across various communities. KT’s father Sitaram “bala” Thackeray thrust himself as a social activist during plague and made the supreme sacrifice when he succumbed to the disease. At this stage KT had to drop-out from school and abandon his dreams of becoming a lawyer like his maternal grandfather.

This web-site said that KT married in 1910 “… Rama Gupte at Alibaug whom he had met during a stint with Drama company. The couple had  4 sons and 6 daughters.”

It was after his father’s death that KT started demonstrating his remarkable capabilities.

To make ends meet for his family he did odd jobs such as making signboard, painting, jobs, repairing machines, and selling gramophones and insurance policies.

Remarkably, he is said to have invented a printing machine to print 50 copies of a magazine even when in school.

He started free-lance writing for magazines, was good at it. He improved his income through journalism and publishing.

Later he joined the Mahatma Phule movement against the oppression of lower castes by Brahmins.

The Maharaja of Kolhapur engaged KT to write against Brahmin propaganda, because of KT’s excellent writing skills.

KT’s writings influence Lokmanya Tilak, the eminent Brahmin leader to start the Ganapathi festival in Pune with the participation of all communities.

KT refused in 1921 a sizeable amount of money (Rs 5000 ~ 5 crores in modern times) during his typhoid illness from the Raja of Kolhapur to write on Hindu scriptures. The king gave him a certificate as “ … the only person who an neither be bought nor bribed.”

He pointed out the inaccuracies of Brahmin propaganda against Maratha kings that were designed by the British to divide and rule.

He inspired and motivated Karamveer Bhaurao Patil in his peasant education work.

The first book in Indian language on science education was written by him.

He writes plays, biographies and booklets

His own biography “mazi jivangatha” is a massive work on Maharashtra and is an “important document for historians and researchers.”

He acted in all-time classic films Shyamchi aai, mahatma phule and majhi laxmi.

It was KT who guided his son, Balasaheb Thackeray, when he was with the struggling Newsday magazine, to start the Marathi cartoon magazine Marmik (meaning precise). KT continued to find a path for Balasaheb. It seems (according to the website referred to) it was KT who “conceived everything that is known about Shiv Sena today”. It was natural that KT’s literary and political background should  lead him to conceive of the “son of the soil policy”, and give the slogan “Jai Maharshtra”  for the Shiv Sena. During the navarathri  festival which he started and helped popularise in Mumbai, he is said to have designed the ‘roaring tiger’ (the website says lion) symbol of the Shiv Sena.

Keshav ‘Prabodhankar’ Thackeray was truly a giant of a man, a giant of a Marathi Manoos.

Like his grandmother he deserved a great following. When he breathed his last at the ripe age of 90 his funeral procession was massive by the standards of those days matching the size of that of Ambedkar. It would have been nice to have known him.

The Thakre to Thackeray Change.

IIn giving pride (if any pride was needed to be given)  to the Marathi Manoos it is not necessary that the person doing so is required to be a Maharashtrian even if one knows exactly who is and who is not a Maharashtrian before one makes a Marathi manoos out of him (even if he was already a full manoos). A controversial statement by Digvijay Singh, is that in page 45 of volume 5 of the biography “Prabodhankar Thackeray Samagra Wangma” of Bal Thackeray's father, the Thakre family came from Magadh in Bihar. Digvijay Singh’s comment that the Thackeray family belonged to Bihar or Madhya Pradesh before they migrated to Mumbai  or to Raj Thackeray’s counter that Thackeray’s family roots are in the Pali village of Bhor District in Pune are immaterial in the context of the making of the Marathi manoos.  After all, it takes one generation of being an USAmerican before being president of USA! It is not sure, however, whether the Thackerays will admit that it would require one generation in Maharashtra to become a Marathi.

The Thackerays or Thakres should be from the Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhu (CKP) community, originally from Kashmir. They were labelled as brave helpers of Maharshtra by Shivaji in his version of “I Have a dream” (Mala Ek Swapna Ahe) speech. This community is said to be (by some) of Kashmiri origin and came to Maharshtra before the 13th century AD and were known to have controlled forts.  Keshav Thackeray, the father of Bal Thackeray, would write that although they were from the Pali village of Bhor, some of them were assigned the job (kiladhar, title given by Muslim ruler to the custodian of their forts) of protecting Dhodap fort near Nashik. These people had the name Dhodapkars while the immediate family stuck to the name of Thakre/Thackeray. Keshav Thackeray’s great-grandfather Krishnaji Madhav was from Pali, Rajgad where there is the Sarasgad fort. His son, Ramachand “Bhikoba” Dhodapkar, moved to Panvel and had a son Sitaram Panvelkar.

It was Sitaram’s a son, Keshav who changed his surname from Thakre to Thackeray because of his admiration for the English author, William Makepeace Thackeray. I suppose, because of the British influence at that time it was fashionable to anglicize names just as we would have changed, say, Hari Puttar to Harry Potter (?).

The William Makepeace Thackeray History

As a student of an Anglo-Indian school, I was familiar with the name Thackeray through William Thackeray’s work, Vanity Fair and later his delightful book  “A Book of Snobs”. Although I was vaguely aware of William Thackeray having some connection with India, I became aware, after a search of the internet, that he was actually born in Alipur, Calcutta in July 1811. But the interesting connection comes with his father Richmond Thackeray, who entered the service of the East India company at the age of sixteen in 1797 and later became the collector of the twenty-four paraganas, where he died in service in 1815. The Thackerays are an illustrious family of Yorkshire origin. A Thomas Thackeray the great grandfather of the author William Makepeace Thackeray was headmaster of Harrow and whose youngest son William Thackeray was also in the East India company. The second son of William Thackeray is Richmond Thackeray.  

Richmond Thackeray married Anne Becher on 13^th October 1810 and promptly had their only child, the author William Thackeray, just nine months later (Fig 2; is there a cricket bat below Richmond’s chair?). Richmond Thackeray’s appetite had earlier manifested itself by 1804 when he fathered a daughter, Sarah, by an Eurasian mistress, Charlotte Sophia Rudd, the mother and daughter being named in his will. When Sarah died, her annuity reverted to William. Although Charlotte was reportedly buried I could not find when she died or where. I suppose the mistress and the daughter would have got the Thackeray family name (Charlotte’s spouse is listed as Richmond Thackeray; Sarah married as Sarah Redfield Thackeray). The annuity would have had some influence in their becoming part of the British camp during their travels with the East India Company and later.

The Dhodap fort from which the Dhodapkar/Thackeray families came itself has an intriguing history. The Dhodap fort is supposed to have been occupied by moghuls in the early 17^th century. It is under the Peshwas between 1768 until 1818 when a surrender treaty was signed there in 1818, A description of the Dhodap village gives “The village consists of a few houses of Ladsakka Vanis and Shimpis, who do a little business in loans and grain or cloth. The remainder of the population is chiefly of Pardeshi or Bengal origin, with a Brahman or two and a goldsmith. …”

I find some resemblance between the Marathi Thackerays and the Yorkshire Thackerays. If you have not noticed it as yet, there seems to be some facial resemblance (Fig 1 bottom left) between William Makepeace Thackeray, the author and Raj Thackeray. Richmond Thackeray seems to be (Fig 2) a tall gangling man more resembling Balasaheb than Raj.

Should the Yorkshire Thackerays trace their origin as descendants of Kashmiri/Maharshtrian Thakres?

As a footnote, the story of Anne-Becher itself is fairly romantic. Before she married Richmond Thackeray she was in love with one Henry Carmichael-Smyth a military man. Smyth was not approved by the family and she was sent off to India to marry Richmond Thackeray.  However, she unexpectedly met the supposedly dead Smyth at a dinner hosted by Richmond. She became happily married to Smyth eighteen months after Richmond died, lived happily in England after 1820 and survived her son’s death. 

William Makepeace Thackeray Literature.

I have little idea what Keshav “Prabodhankar” Thackeray found in the English literature of William Thackeray that influenced KT in his writing, or his philosophy, or to even change his name. There could have been a Calcutta influence as he was in Calcutta for some time according to Wikipedia.

The book that immediately comes to mind, of course, is Vanity Fair. I remember (I was too young at that time to pick up subtleties that he intended) that he made remarkably long sentences. I was “told” to like the Ernest Hemingway style and so I found Thackeray not fashionable.

William Thackeray would write about the “guile-less and good-natured” Amelia which is peobably better read as some sort of liberated blank verse.

As she is not a heroine,

there is no need to describe her person;

indeed I am afraid that her nose

was rather short than otherwise,

and her cheeks a great deal too round and red for a heroine;

but her face blushed with rosy health,

and her lips with the freshest of smiles,

and she had a pair of eyes which sparkled

with the brightest and honestest good-humour,

except indeed when they filled with tears,

and that was a great deal too often;

for the silly thing would cry

over a dead canary-bird;

or over a mouse,

that the cat haply had seized upon;

or over the end of a novel,

were it ever so stupid;

and as for saying an unkind word to her,

were any persons hard-hearted enough to do so

--why, so much the worse for them.

Prabodhankar Thackeray may have been influenced by Thackeray’s columns The Snobs of England in the Punch magazine when he asked Bal Thackeray to start Marmik magazine. In his “A book of snobs” compiled from this series of articles, I could not readily find great literature except a satire that could be termed as subtle and seemed to be repetitive. The sentences were not long.

Diddloff is a dandy

who would die of a rose

in aromatic pain:

he had tried to have me assassinated

three times

in the course of the negotiation;

but of course we were friends in public,

and saluted each other

in the most cordial and charming manner.

Prabodhankar’s views on caste systems may have been reinforced/influenced by Thackeray’s piece on Lordolatory after he heard two snobs conversing after a sermon:

 “This incident gave me more matter for reflection even than the sermon and wonderment at the extent and prevalence of Lordolatory in this country. What could it matter to Snob whether his Reverence were chaplain to his Lordship or not? What Peerage-worship there is all through this free country! How we are all implicated in it, ... The increase, encouragement, and maintenance of Snobs are among the 'priceless services,' as Lord John Russell says, which we owe to the nobility.

It can't be otherwise. A man becomes enormously rich, or he jobs successfully in the aid of a Minister, or he wins a great battle, or executes a treaty, or is a clever lawyer who makes a multitude of fees and ascends the bench; and the country rewards him for ever with a gold coronet (with more or less balls or leaves) and a title, and a rank as legislator.'Your merits are so great,' says the nation, 'that your children shall be allowed to reign over us, in a manner. It does not in the least matter that your eldest son ... have the reversion of your honours when death vacates your noble shoes. If you are poor, we will give you such a sum of money as shall enable you and the eldest-born of your race for ever to live in fat and splendour. It is our wish that there should be a race set apart in this happy country, who shall hold the first rank, have the first prizes and chances in all government jobs and patronages.”

Since I fondly remember the zillions of times I madly fell in one-sided love in my youth, I like this piece from the Virginians (set in quasi blank verse)

What?

You fancy that your sweet mistress,

your spotless spinster,

your blank maiden

just out of the schoolroom,

never cared for any but you?

And she tells you so?

Oh, you idiot!

When she was four years old

she had a tender feeling

towards the Buttons

who brought the coals up to the nursery,

or the little sweep at the crossing,

or the music-master,

or never mind whom.

She had a secret longing

towards her brother's schoolfellow,

or the third charity boy at church,

and if occasion had served,

the comedy enacted with you

had been performed along with another.

I do not mean to say

that she confessed this amatory sentiment,

but that she had it.

Lay down this page,

and think how many and many and many a time

you were in love

before you selected the present Mrs. Jones as the partner

of your name and affections!

The counterfoil to this is from Vanity Fair:

When men of a certain sort, ladies, 

are in love, 

though they see the hook and the string, 

and the whole apparatus 

with which they are to be taken, 

they gorge the bait nevertheless

--they must come to it

--they must swallow it—

and are presently struck 

and landed gasping.

William Makepeace Thackeray (WMT) had the fortune to be born into his family fortune just as Bal Thackeray had the fortune tob born into his father’s fame. There are other similarities. WMT was not interested in academics leaving university at the age of eighteen, met Goethe during his travels abroad, tried studying law and gave it up. He came into his inheritance at twenty one, gambled most of it away squandered some of it by financing two unsuccessful newspapers which he thought he would write for, lost his remaining fortune due to collapse of two Indian banks, tried professional art to support himself. He settled down at twenty-four after marriage and three daughters when he was forced to write for a living.

He produced art criticism, fictional sketches, wrote two long fictional workers befor he joined Punch through his connection to John Lech the famouch Punch magazine cartoonist and illustrator (see figure above). He wrote Vanity Fair in serialized instalments like most authors at that time, and almost immediately became a celebrity comparable to Dickens for the next decade.

It seems reasonable to conclude that William Makepeace Thackeray’s life set some example for the development of the Father-son-Sena Thackerays as columnists and cartoonist. It may takes immediate temper to become violent. It also takes considerable learning to desist from violence.

As WMT says at the end of the first chapter of his Book of Snobs

By the way, as some readers are dull of comprehension, I may as well say what the moral of this history is. The moral is this—Society having ordained certain customs, men are bound to obey the law of society, and conform to its harmless orders.

For generations hereafter

It has been said that whenever one sees a great ending be sure of a great beginning and not the other way around. A great beginning does not make a great end.

Gerson da Cunha has noted in his book “The Origin of Bombay” that “The history of Bombay tends to show that the prosperity of a family seldom outlives the limited space of three generations.”

If the Thackeray prosperity began with the hard work of Prabodhankar Thackeray then the third generation of Uddhav and Raj Thackeray have an worrying responsibility on their shoulders.

If the Prabodhan (enlightenment) is to last seven generations from Prabodhankar Thackeray’s grandfather’s time then the prabodhan has to last till Bal Thackeray’s great grandchildren’s times. It will be important that the prabodhan lasts that long. Not perhaps for the sake of the ordinary Marathi manoos --- they would have been globally plasticised by that time --- but for the Marathi prabodhan of the Thakres which is not expected to be different from that of enlightened persons anywhere.  

Four years ago nearing midnight hours, after a tiring meal-less day doing hospital work, I was looking for a cheap dining place a little outside Aarey milk colony near Prabodhankar Thakre flyover. I could not find a middle-class Maharshtrian restaurant open at that time of the day. I asked an auto-rickshaw (maharashtrian) driver whether he could take me to such a restaurant nearby. He said there is no such place that will be open at that time. So I asked him where would he go. To this he replied that people like him carry their own home-made food. They don’t like eating in restaurants.

I fully appreciated his viewpoint and I immediately understood the discipline and the need of the famous dabbawallahs of Mumbai.  I got a glimpse into the real Marathi manoos. It was not the language!

It is important that this quality of the Marathi manoos lasts for all generations

Creatio ex Nihilo god and god particle. Part III: Higgs', parrticle, Mexican Hats and Wine Bottles and Adristam

Ever since the excitement of the “god particle” came about, I wondered whether when the final time came to meet our creator in whatever elementary particle form, I would be subjected to a god field in which I could be expelled because I had no notion of the god particle. This field would not spare me even if I am a chemist with an “incorrigible” appreciation of the fundamentals of physics. At the risk of increasing my diabetes mellitus because of the excess stran on my mental faculties, I decided to take a long walk to pick up my daily milk and focus a little in interpreting in my way some of what has been written on the god particle so as to be accepted in a god-field. I guess what I have come up with is expressed in this blog, trying m best to avoid cutting and pasting, is a viewpoint with the statutory warning that all views expressed in this blog may have little to do with reality. In the context of god particle this does not seem to be a deterrent.

There are two views on the god particle as expressed in the cartoons above. The left expresses the trivial way the god particle influences the ordinary man. The one on the right expresses the actual experimental situation when the finding of a particle depends on a statistically relevant blip on a screen. It is the relevance of this blip that forms the basis of the god particle. What makes it significant is the amount of money spent on it. 

In philosophicsl/religious treatises/testaments on the origin of matter/life one inevitably ends up starting with a philosophy or with a bang. The Old Testament of some Hebrews would have the world being created in seven days nearly 6000 years ago, being off by a factor of a million or so. This kind of error is sometimes allowed in cosmology. That it started suddenly is the common philosophical point and therefore similar no matter what Michael Moore would say abut it. After all, there is this (theologically) much debated line

One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day (2 Peter 3:8)

which means that 6000 years translates to 6000 x 365,000 ~ 2,2 billion years (assuming, of course that the period of earth’s rotation and revolution remains relatively the same). This is a respectable value. The Hebrews interpret Hosea 5:14-6:2 

After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence 

as the 2^nd millennium after Christ when Israel was created and that the third millennium will be the time when the Israelites will be restored with their Messiah.

A different (as well as more accurate) chronology is in Hindu cosmology in which one day in the life of Brahma, the creator, is 4.3 billion years. This is the pralaya period when the universe is created/destroyed during Brahma’s day and takes rest during Brahma’s night for the same period. This process continues for 100 Brahma years which is 300 trillion years. The point here is that during the day it is adristam (causality) that rules when every effect/cause is caused/effected. The day starts, say, with the creation of a particle which could be a ray of light (stream of photons), if you want to be biblicaly correct. It is this disturbance that starts off the adristam cycle and when that ends it is night and nothing exists because there is no causality to perceive beginning and ends.

One way (my way?) of cartooning this aspect would be to imagine a body at rest. It doesn’t matter which body and what state of rest. For convenience, we assume that the body is a human body (say, that of Brahma, the maker of the universe?) in a state of rest (say, in the yogic savasana pose, Fig 1, left). In this pose the mind is ideally quiet and the eyes are closed so that no light there is perceived and it is night. The body is balanced on a point (fulcrum) and is parallel to a horizontal, defined for some (Euclidean or non-euclidean) geometry. A ray of light appears when the body opens its eyes and he asks why. He has a problem to solve. The mind becomes active. The blood goes to his brain. The head becomes heavier (this was demonstrated first, I think, by JBS Haldane) and the body is tilted from the horizontal (Fig 1, right, click to expand). 

If the medium above and below the horizontal were different then the consciousness of the man would wake him into the (lower) medium he is immersed in. When Brahma is not solving problems (no adristam) he will be balanced again to enter the dark phase which he won’t be aware of although Brahman (the supreme god) would know the difference.

The tilting of the body may be taken as a breaking of symmetry as far as the distribution of weight about the horizontal for the given geometry is concerned. The breaking of symmetry is essential to the theories for the formation of new particles. In essence the breaking of symmetry changes the way a force due to a field acts and this in turn may be interpreted in terms of a new particle (with a new mass) being formed  because the effect of a force is determined by the mass. We have shown a potential energy scheme along a coordinate which is some property (“expectation value”) of interest. 

The stability of a particle is usually discussed in terms of its energy along a particular coordinate.In order to simplify matters we may consider the expectation value to be the spatial position of the particle. If the particle is displaced along the z–axis (perpendicular to the valley of the Mexican Hat) there would be a change in energy. However, there is no change in energy when the particle is displaced parallel to the plane of the valley.

In the left of Fig 2 we have a featureless black ball resting at the middle of a single minimum potential (blue line). The potential has a double minimum which appears due, say, to a change in sign of the coordinate. The change in sign of the coordinate could result in a change in sign of some applied field; e.g., the arrows could indicate a change in magnetic field direction due to a reveral in direction of the current flow in a coil. As long as the feature-less ball is insensitive to the direction of the new applied field it will remain at the bottom of the single-minimum potential  However should the ball have a component that interacts with the applied field it will slide down to one of the minimum of the double-minima potential. For example, if the ball has an “up” oriented magnetic moment it will stabilize in the well created by the “up” field. In this process the symmetry of the double well potential is broken.

Such double-well potentials are sometimes visualized as a “Mexican hat” (Fig 2) potential which is cylindrically symmetric in the sense that there is a rotational symmetry about the zero of the “expectation value” coordinate.  A ball is precariously (unstable) balanced on top of the hat (Fig 2 left) and the ball slides down to a happier, more stable position. Once it slides down the symmetry is broken, no matter which side it slides down. 

The mexican hat first came into my consciousness when I heard in my very early days (late 1950s early 1960s) the music of the mexican hat dance. It was probably at this time (in my reckoning) that the Mexican Hat Potential was coined which could be important in understanding the way popular culture becomes important in popularizing scientific concepts. The dance that is the most classic is said to be the El Jarabe Tapatio (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE6qVVffM1Q 1.5 million views) the original form of which was banned by the Spanish banned because it was too sexy. Parts of the dance shown below are from another less popular youtube video (225 hits). I can’t help pointing out as an aside that the term Jarabe, according to the Wikipedia, comes from the Arab word ‘xarab” which they say means ‘herb mixture” but which we know as “sharab’ or intoxicating liquor (e.g., jhoom barabar jhoom sharabi, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W03OI-F7kdg).

 I struggled (remarkably unsuccessfully at that time) with the Mexican Hat potential when I was trying to understand the Jahn-Teller distortion in molecules when an outer electron occupies orbital (~spatial) states which are degenerate (energetically) equivalent. For such Jahn-Teller effects the distortion is usually studied in terms of molecular normal mode (pattern of motion in which all parts of the system move sinusoidally with the same frequency and with a fixed phase relation) vibrational coordinates, Q (see Fig 3 left bottom) for, say Cu²⁺ atoms with one d- electron in doubly degenerate (eg) orbital states, the arrows indicate direction of vibrating motion) The first order potential energy function for linear coupling between the normal modes for simple harmonic oscillators and the occupied electronic energy levels yields a double well potential. 

The Mexican hat potential is always cited when discussing the Higg’s particle or “god particle”. It is important nevertheless to understand some aspects of real-life chemistry and physics that has applied the Mexican hat potential to routinely observed processes before one moves towards discussions on the Higg’s boson. I struggled (remarkably unsuccessfully at that time) with the Mexican Hat potential when I was trying to understand the Jahn-Teller distortion in molecules which occupy orbital (~spatial) states which are degenerate (energetically) equivalent. For such Jahn-Teller effects the distortion is usually studied in terms of molecular normal mode (pattern of motion in which all parts of the system move sinusoidally with the same frequency and with a fixed phase relation) vibrational coordinates, Q_q,e (see Fig 3 left bottom for, say Cu²⁺ atoms with one d- electron in doubly degenerate orbital states, the arrows indicate direction of vibrating motion) Landau and Teller were among the first (late 1930s) to discuss the stability of molecules with orbitally degenerate state. The first order potential energy function for linear coupling between the normal modes for simple harmonic oscillators and the occupied electronic energy levels yields a double well potential.

The Mexican Hat potential has a continuum of minima in the plane of the valley (the xy plane). In this case, one may have other interactions that break the symmetry.

In the case of the Jahn-Teller effect when there is strong linear as well as higher order quadratic couplings between the electronic states and vibrational modes in the molecule the Mexican hat becomes warped (right of Fig 3). For example in metal-ligand, ML₆, octahedral symmetry the warping can give a Mexican hat with “hills” (higher energy) and “valleys” instead of one feature-less valley. For example, rotation about the z-axis by an angle f could give 3 “valleys”s at f = 0^o, 120^o and 240^o and three “hills” at f = 60^o, 180^o and 300 degrees for an electron in a doubly degenerate (e_g) orbital. The three “valley”s could correspond to three equivalent elongating distortions of octahedral symmetry as shown in Fig 3 (right, below; dashed lines indicating longer metal-ligand distance). The contour map of the potential energy surface shows the location of the “valley”s and “hill”s. It should be easy to see that for, say, axially asymmetric second order couplings the depths of the “valley”s could change and the stabilityof the various distortions could change.

The Mexican hat potential surface of Fig 3 left is thus a simplification. It may be appropriate to rename the “Mexican Hat” potential surface may instead be called a “lemon squeezer” surface (see Fig 2) when there are many “hill”s amd “valley”s. In Fig 2 a severly distorted “squozed” lemon rests at the bottom-most potential in a symmetry broken state

Complications come in when, for instance,  what seems to be straight in our coordinate system, is not straight when viewed from another perspective. For example, what is straight trajectory on a flat land, will be curved when we take the curvature of the land into account, and differently curved when one takes the axis of earth’s rotation or earth’s revolution. Similarly, if an object is hurled into space, its trajectory will depend, say, on its mass, shape, electrical charge, its magnetic moment etc., when there are gravitational, viscous, electric, magnetic fields, etc.

The Mexican Hat potential is also sometimes known as the “wine bottle” potential when there is punting at the bottom of the bottle. The lowest-energy state of the system is not at the symmetry point at the top of the punt but is down in the trough of the wine bottle. The occupation of the trough at any point will break the symmetry. Another way which we think is useful (not only because it could be new) is to  the bottle is held parallel to the earths gravitational field --- say, parallel to the vertical bars of the window grill of a cheap-ish apartment builing in Pune (Fig 4, left). If one manages to tilt the apartment complex without changing the direction of the gravitational field (Fig 4, right; this usually happens when the wine in the bottle reaches the dregs stage) and the bottle is still thought to be held straight, there is more liquid on one side and the symmetry of the “wine bottle” potential is broken. The tilting of a bottle could be taken as the beginning of a swirling motion where liquid flows in the trough because of an introduction of a swirling motion introduce by the combined action of a tilt and rotational motion.  If the liquid had no resistance to flow, say, because of a continuum of minima in the Mexican Hat potential--- it was a superfluid --- the flow will be perpetual once the initial flow of liquid was started. In this case it is not straightforward to imagine a tilt if the fluid had no charge. But once the fluid is imagined to be a flow of perpetual current then the fluid may be thought to be a superconducting current and the direction of tilt would be related to the direction of the magnetic field that is expelled by a superconducting current (Meissner effect). The physics of the swirling or rolling of a ball in the “wine bottle” or “Mexican Hat” potential is looked upon sometimes as a transformation under continuous symmetry of the way the total energy of the system is expressed (its Hamiltonian operator). There is one mode which is thought to be gapless or no energy change on traversing the degenerate levels of the minimum potential. This is called the Goldstone Theorem and the massless mode is the Goldstone mode. The Goldstone mode is described usually by referring to a ferromagnet in which all the magnetic moments (taking up a direction in a magnetic field) are aligned in one direction (Fig 5, top, magnetic moments indicated by arrow). This arrow may refer to any direction. In Fig 5, middle, the finger of god reaching out to Adam in Michael Angel’s painting in the Sistine chapel would reach out in the same spiritual direction for all aadmi (hindi for man = adam).  There are some critical points that arise from the system being infinitely large because, I suppose, one cannot roll up infinity into a three-dimensional ball or even flatten it into a two-dimensional disc. In this way an infinitesimally small point and an infinity become equivalent as they cannot be divided. Peter Higgs gave an illuminating talk at Kings College, London, on 24th November 2010 (my wife completed sixty that day) which he titled “My Life as a boson”.  t is perhaps best to get Higgs’ viewpoint from this talk:- The feature of spontaneous symmetry breaking is that you have some continuous symmetry that is broken by the ground state of the condensed-matter system. If it is of infinite volume, which of course a ferromagnet never is, then the ground state is degenerate. But if you were in an infinite ferromagnet then there would be a spontaneous magnetization, which could point in any direction, and you would think that the system was no longer rotationally invariant. The Mass of particles One of the more discussed topics in modern particle physics seems to be the origin of mass. This should be strange to us since we have been brought up in the belief that the central feature of Newton’s view is the conservation of mass so that mass is the crucial defining property of matter. There should be no origin because all of us, including elementary particles are born with a mass. Mass can be redistributed, but neither created nor destroyed. In modern physics there is no equivalent fundamental concept for mass.It turns out that in special relativity it is energy that is conserved, and in general relativity gravity responds to energy through space-time curvature and not mass. There seems to be a new way to look at properties of physics, which is the property of emergence. It emerges from the interaction of smaller entities which themselves do not show it. For instance, the P,V,T of a gas of atoms or molecules are not anticipated from the property of a single atom or molecule though they may depend on the properties of those individuals. When the physicists consider emergence, mas appears as an approximate, emergent property of matter so that the understanding of the origins of mass of standard matter (colour gluons, up- and down- quarks, electrons and photons) depends on  understanding the properties of the relevant elementary quanta. “I would like to emphasize that this theory of the origin of the mass of standard matter makes no reference to symmetry breaking in the electroweak sector, nor to the Higgs condensate, nor of course to the Higgs particle.” (Frank Wilczek, in Origins of Mass, 2012 It is useful to familiarize one-self with mass being expressed in terms of energy as electron-volts. From the well known expression E = mc2, mass is expressed in units of eV/c2, where eV is an electron volt, c is the speed of light in a vacuum. Most times mass is simply expressed terms of 1/c2 units as electron volts, eV. 0.51 MeV is the rest mass of an electron or positron and an electron-positron annihilation yield nearly 1 MeV of energy; 0.94 GeV is the mass of a proton, 200 MeV energy released in fission of 239Pu or 235U atoms. The next term one need to be (as usual vaguely) familiar with is  The Standard Model (SM).  comprises a set of fermionic fields whose quanta of excitation are fermions with spin ½ such as electrons, protons, quarks, etc. The Fermions obey Pauli exclusion principle by which two fermionic particles cannot occupy the same state at the same time and which leads to the Fermi-Dirac statistics. There is also a bosonic field whose quanta of excitations are bosons following the Bose-Einstein statistics in which two bosons can occupy the same state at the same time. I am not clear why Fermi, an Italian, is associated with statistics of fermions that gives others their space and Bose, a  Bengali developed a statistics where one is used to one’s space being overcrowded. Actually a Bengali is unaware of the existence of others as long his wisdom can flow uninterrupted, non-contradicted (resistance less) preferably at the same time and space in perfectly coherent incoherence. That is why the Bengalis are so loved    A little about gauge and gauge theory In simplest terms, I think, a change in gauge may be looked upon as the way we convert our measurement systems on going from America to Europe (e.g., feet to metres, gallons to litres, pounds to kilograms, dollars to euros). This is one example of a gauge transformation in which we have changed our measurement coordinates (gauge) with changes in our location. We do not change the absolute (a more difficult concept to define, perhaps, especially when we are talking of god-like terms) value (gauge invariance, --- “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet;/ So Romeo would, were he not romeo call’d”) of the property being measured. Put this way, gauge theory is straightforward. Gauge invariance must be maintained to ensure that the results are not dependent on the choice of gauge. IThere is also Wigner’s statement that the invariance of observables under certain transformations implies the existence of an unitary operator on the various states. If the unitary operator commutes (Abelian group operation does not depend on the order they are applied as in the addition of integers, with the unity operation being addition with 0 as an integer) with the operator (Hamiltonian) that describes the dynamics of the system, it gives to characteristics (spectrum or observables) that describe the system. However, there are systems (such as those with long-range coherence including superconductors, superfluids, iferromagnets) in which the physical observable (local symmetry) does not reflect the invariant global symmetry of the system. This is the spontaneous symmetry breaking, as noticed by Higgs’ observer inside a ferromagnet (see above). n the more complicated world of particle physicists, gauge theory is applied to areas (I don’t venture to understand) such as string theory and loop quantum gravity where, essentially, point particles are replaced by one-dimensional string-like (sutra?) objects and their path in space trace surfaces instead of lines and are described by appropriate languages from topology and geometry. A gauge boson is a particle that carries an interaction between elementary particles by the exchange of these gauge bosons between them. Thus photons (mass ~ 0 GeV) carry electromagnetic interactions, the two W± (mass 80.4 GeV) and Z0 bosons (91.2 GeV) carry weak interactions and the gluons (mass 0 GeV) carry the strong interaction. All of these have spin = 1; except for the W± boson which have charge ± 1, the others are charge neutral. The Lagrangian equations (that describes the state of a dynamic system in terms of position coordinates and their time derivatives that summarises the dynamics of the system) express a gauge invariance that cannot have a mass term so that it implies that gauge fields are massless and a mass cannot change as Newton said they won’t. Gauge symmetry offers a way to describe interactions due to invariance properties of Lagrangians. The gauge principle provides a method to transform a Lagrangian that is invariant with respect to global Abelian symmetry  from the U(1) group (unitary transforming) into a Lagrangian that is invariant with respect to local symmetry, or gauge-invariant. By having a spontaneous symmetry breaking such that new background forces can be introduced, one may overcome the concepts of gauge invariance and introduce/add a mass because of a change in the background. Such a change cannot be a consequence of the initial starting equations. It is put in by hand due to the spontaneous changes in symmetry (as we did, we think, by the “drunken” building in Fig 4). This is a key step in the Salam-Weinberg electroweak theory. Curvature and Mass The mass of a particle (say, the earth) placed in the wine-less end of the bottle (see inset of Fig 4, left) would be different from that when immersed in the wine-full end (see inset of Fig 4, right) of the bottle, for example. If we take the tilt (director) angle as a measure or gauge then the extent of tilt may be taken as a measure  of the change in the gauge. The director characterizing the local direction of tilt is a two-dimensional vector sicne it depends on the position in the trough. The continuous rotation symmetry along the bottle axis is broken in the director. The symmetry breaking occurs spontaneously in the tilted bottle. All directions are equivalent long the central symmetry axis (there is no change in energy) as long as the tilt angle is the same.  The curvature up the side of the wine bottle is often called a “mass". In the big bang theory this curvature has a relationship with real physical mass, The relationship between curvature and mass is reminiscent of the mass of a charge carrier in an energy vs wave-vector (E vs k) plot in band theory of solids Fig 6, left). The energy of a free electron, Efree, has a parabolic dependence on Its wave vector, k, such that  Efree µ k2/m0, m0 being the mass of a free electron.   In the presence of an attractive potential such as in a periodic lattice of a crystal, the energy, Ecrystal µ k2/m*, where m* is an effective mass. In the periodic potential of the lattice, the E vs k diagram shows allowed and forbidden region. In an extended zone scheme shows an energy band which are separated by band gap. Going by the curvature, it is apparent that the opening of a gap would lead to changes in curvature and therefore to changes in mass. It is true that in the late 1950s and early 1960s the exclusive particle physics community was frustrated in their progress with particles and their origin. In particular the problem seemed to be to find a mechanism that gives a photon a mass. It was at this point that Nambu listened to Schrieffer (both graduate students at that time) and speculated on the way the broken symmetry gives mass to fermions. Again referring to Higgett’s 2010 talk at King’s college he writes *referring to Fig 6, right)  “the analogy that I think Nambu noticed was with the Dirac theory of a spin-half fermion. If you have a massless Dirac particle there are excited states of positive energy and there’s the sea, and there is no gap between them, but if you have a massive particle then those are split apart. There is an energy difference between the sea and the states of the fermions, so there is a BCS-like gap of 2mc2. This is basically the way in which Nambu’s BCS model involving spontaneous symmetry breaking generates fermion masses.” In the Nambu-Goldstone mode, the ground state is not invariant under the symmetry. Instead, there is a continuous family of exactly degenerate, not invariant, ground states that are related by the  generator of the broken symmetry. For every spontaneously broken symmetry there is a particle species with zero mass which are called Goldstone particle or Goldstone bosons when they are spin-less.  The currents of broken symmetries create these particels from the vacuum.  One may have the ball in the bottle of Fig 6 to be a ball infinite dimension  The “wine-in-the-tilted-bottle” model requires to be modified to make a proper connection with the  Higgs’ model. In the first place the tilt in the wine bottle need not be so exaggerated. The tilt may be treated as a perturbation around the ring wirh a wave number, k. We may may make the tilt infinitesimally small or  k  tending to zero..When the relaxation time of the perturbation becomes long compared to the relevant time scale there is perpetual flow... as in a superconductor. The wine at the bottom of the “wine bottle” potential will then be seen as that shown in Fig 7 with a phase mode and an amplitude mode. It is the amplotude mode from the curvature that gives mass to the boson. On the Mass of a Photon The massiveness of a photon goes against some of our most cherished lessons from what we think is fundamental physics. A consequence of Maxwell’s description of electromagnetism is the constant speed of all electromagnetic radiation in vacuum. However, many of the properties of light is obtained from universal constants such as the Planck’s constant, h, and the velocity of light, c, and a spin angular momentum h/2p, for a frequency, v. As it turns out, the idea of a finite photon mass does not contradict developments in classical electromagnetism or quantum electro dynamics (QED). Experiments to find limits to the rest mass of a photon shows it to be less than 10-50 9. With a nonzero photon mass, the usual Maxwell equations transform into the so-called Proca equations which are valid for the charge carriers in superconductors and for, the basis for understanding massive photons and the London penetration depth, lL ((the distance magnetic flux can penetrate into a superconductor). It turns out that the damping of a magnetic field inside a superconductor is totally caused by the photon having a finite mass. The propagator (the probability amplitude for a particle to travel from one place to another in a given time) for a massless photon with distance r fall off as 1/r. When a photon obtains a finite mass with a Compton wavelength 1/m­A, the propagator drops as exp(-m­A­­r) /r. The London penetration depth, lL ~ 1/mA. As early as 1992 in a paper titled “On the London equations” (PNAS, 1992, v. 89,no. 22, 10673–10675.] Sternberg had shown how the classical London equations for superconductors can be written in a form that yield the Proca equations. The abstract of this paper has the sentence: In particular, the field itself acts as its own charge carrier. The Higgs field has non-zero strength everywhere and the particles such as W±, Z0 and photons   aquire mass by interacting wit the Higgs field. Since the field carries its own charge carrier, the Higgs field should have a Higgs particle. The Higgs amplitude of the vibrational amplitude up- and down- the sides of the Mexican Hat potential (or wine-bottle potential, Fig 7) has a rest mass that the Large Hadron Collider experiments were looking for. The mass of the Higgs particle as determined by experiment (126 GeV ~ 133 mass of protons) would correspond to an atomic nucleus of atomic number 133. This value is close to the value of the fine structure constant of ~ 137. This value gives the relativistic limits of stability for the mass of an atom. Anderson found in 1963 in a paper entitled Plasmons, Gauge Invariance, and Mass that when a superconducting Fermi liquid is charged, the scalar zero-mass excitations become longitudinal plasmon modes of finite mass of a superconductor. It has been pointed out (including by Higgs) that Anderson’s proposal was a speculation since he did not discuss any relativistic model so that he could not demonstrate (through Lorentz invariance) how the Goldstone theorem could be avoided. A critical question would be whether such a Higgs boson mass value allows to extrapolate the standard model to very large energies witout leading to vacuum instabilities (which is an end-of-the-world scenario, in my understanding, at least for some particles). The most critical ingredient in evaluating this instability is the top quark with a mass of ~ 173.2 GeV. Whether the electroweak vacuum is stable or not up to the largest possible high-energy scale, would depend critically on a precise determination of the Higgs boson and top quark masses. An estimate by Alekhin and co workers show that the mass of the Higgs boson is at the brink of a stability (see Fig 8, click to expand for reading the legend)., This must be exciting from a Russian roulette point of view since the stability of our universe would depend on the theoretical models for the “god particle”. The Higgs field that permeates all space and gives mass to some bosons including photons now becomes conceptually similar to the luminferous ether , that is a material substance that causes light to have an unique velocity as it passes through it. The famous experiments of Michelson and Morley disproved this concept when they showed that the measured velocity of light did not depend on the direction of the Earth’s motion seemingly demolished this theory and established the special theory of relativity and Einstein’s story became a folklore. Higgs electro-weak field is a modern relativistic, quantum mechanical, non-Newtonian resurrection of the ether.   When Einstein applied his general theory of relativity to the structure of the cosmos, Newtonian laws still guided scientific efforts and to be consistent with Newton his model, Einstein had to have in his model an infinite Euclidean three-dimensional space with the mass (or density, r) being distributed uniformly.  It seems that Einstein realized that for such a model the universe would be unstable to collapse or expansion. For Newtonian gravity, in which the gravitational field is conservative, one uses the Poisson equation (Ñ2F  = 4pkF) for a scalar gravitational potential, F. Einstein found it necessary to add a cosmological constant, l, that modifies the Poisson equation (to Ñ2F  + lF)= 4pkF)  to his field equation. By doing so, it seems, Einstein had introduced a new repulsive force on every particle that balanced the catastrophic consequence of an attractive forces due to the distribution of mass, Einstein himself required a justification of the cosmological constant, l, by empirical observation. The cosmological constant was required by Einstein to get a quasi-static distribution so as to obtain “ ... the fact of the small velocities of the stars.”. Beginning of Time: Setting up a Supercurrent In superconducting coils a supercurrent can be set up by having the rate of change of an external magnetic field with time being not equal to zero. Taking this up in some way may mean that the fact that a supercurrent is important in setting up the Higgs field or generating the Higgs particle can only be done at the beginning of time itself ... or at the origin of the time coordinate itself when the Minkowski spacetime is three dimensional space alone. I don’t know if this makes some sense to the special relativity people as they always have the past and future light cones meeting at the origin. It is perhaps because of this that in real time time, when time exists, mass is given to gauge bosons and the realisation of existence begins. Causality or Adristam comes into being.  I hope it makes some sense in the context of the beginning of the day in the life of Brahma.  The cosmological constant was thought by Einstein to be the residual space-time curvature when matter was created/removed. It would therefore seem that at time t = 0, some supercurrent contributing to the relativistic gauge field still existed. So whether Brahma’s days and night may continue in cycles there is the eternal Brahman overseeing this cycle. There is no Creatio ex Nihilo? In the meanwhile Shiva continues with his dance of creation and destruction as Brahman said he should (I think). In the meanwhile, we may add our "aum" to te sparklers from the experiments on the Higgs particle in the spirit of Diwali --- our own Festival of Lights