Colophon

When a scribe finished copying a Sanskrit manuscript, the closing note naming the text, the copyist, and the place was called the puṣpikā, the little flower at the end. This page is this site's puṣpikā.

The name

yechuri.sh reads a few ways, and I wanted all of them:

  1. A shell script: a small executable, a prompt waiting for input. This tickles my software geeky aesthetics.
  2. Y·S·H are my initials: the full name folded across the dot, Yechuri · Saahil Haranath. Surname as root, given names as extension, which is also how Telugu names are ordered. The small seal at the foot of every page carries the same three letters; in a manuscript it would be called a mudrā.
  3. Saha (సహ) is Sanskrit and Telugu for together. The apex of this domain is nearly empty on purpose: it is held for my family, with one door today and room for more. This subdomain is the first room to be furnished.

The shell

I am a citizen of the internet, and this site is my shell: the home I carry. Others call sites like this digital gardens. I like that analogy too, but I like the shell better: something that houses my thoughts, my presence on its calcium walls. Something I tend over time.

The light

The three swatches in the footer change the palette. Their names come from what Indian scribes of yore wrote on:

  1. tālapatra, palm leaf: cream ground, brown ink, and a red reserved for rubrication. The default.
  2. nīla, indigo night: gold ink on a blue-black ground, after the tradition of dark-dyed leaves lettered in gold.
  3. śilā, stone: a plain grey, after inscription.

The marks

The drawing at the foot of every page is a muggu, generated anew on every visit the way a real one is laid fresh each morning. It is drawn by muggula-prastaram, a library I wrote for enumerating and generating these patterns. Every one you see here is a single unbroken line. A muggu is drawn on the mungili, the ground just outside a front door. Click this one to step into the muggula mungili, the courtyard where you can walk through every pattern a grid holds and lay your own. The dotted underlines are small footnotes: hover or focus to read them.