This Web: The Development of Vedavid Indological Resources
Past and Present

When I first "lit this fire" in the image above, it was the launch of Vedavid just prior to the inclusion of my dissertation "The Developing Terminology for the Self in Vedic India" (defended Spring, 1998). That was the last of several versions of Vedavid until now, dating back to 1996. This picture is of old temple ruins I would walk through while I was in Melkote, India (above Madras), where lies the Academy of Sanskrit Research. Vedavid got me hooked up with them the same way it got me to the Xth World Sanskrit Conference in Bangalore (Jan, 1997, more slides here, and the stuff I presented is here).

Vedavid went through many iterations, and there is an excellent summary under Site History. The new homepage lightning photo was taken from my (then) balcony at Marblehead Harber on Tucker's warf during a storm. It became the background for my sutra menu design concept. I later commissioned the work for the homepage graphics (done by Deborah Norris) as part of my wish to rebuild this site, way back 2001. It's taken that long to get a window in which to complete it. First work was done early in 2009, and the rest from late 2009 till February of 2010. Have a look at the After links to see what I've been up to and waiting through while I worked on this major overhaul and upload.

I chose the lightning theme based on a pivotal insight I had regarding how concepts and views underwent merging and development in the Rig Veda while I was translating RV 1.165 regarding the harbingers of storm, the Maruts, during an Iowa storm (!) back before I even had my M.A. I was listening to Roger Water's "Amused to Death" (excellent album), and the three concepts of storm, Vedic Maruts, and that haunting album are forever fused.

The links at left under This Web provide a variety of resources covering the iterative history, early summary of the history of the site, VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) and some silly gizmos--animations and audio files--collected over the years. For instance, one audio file is for the Lone Ranger's trademark call - I linked it in the dissertation as whimsey where I introduced the term tman. The word tman was an early term for the self which then disappeared as of the later Rig Veda and subsequent. A late-night bleary-eyed dissertation writing session led me to quip - "who was that masked tman" ...

Comments are welcome - feel free to email me with comments technical or philosophical.