Today at the South By South West festival in Austin, three finalists competed in the Microsoft BizSpark Accellerator finals in the "Innovative Web Technologies" category.

The companies, RecycleMatch, Siri and Skimble argued their positions on stage in front of three judges and tonight the winner will be announced at 6pm CST.

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The Accelerator competition is in its second year and started out with a list of 32 finalist companies in three categories. While all three categories have some strong entries, we wanted to check out the innovative technologies to see what was, well, innovative.

RecycleMatch First, Chad Farrell, co-founder of RecycleMatch, showed off the web solution that we hope takes off solely so it can help save the world. RecycleMatch, the only of the three that is not an iPhone app, is an online marketplace that helps match up waste materials with recyclers and manufacturers that need those materials.

"There's really no place to do this now," said Farrell. "Let's say I've got this piece of polyester fiber waste but I don't know anyone around who can use it. It's the perfect use of the internet - to connect people like that."

We can see this not only having a great impact on the world, but certainly stepping into the ever popular "green" genre and sticking around.

Siri Up next was Dag Kittlaus with the digital, voice-activated personal assistant software Siri. We think Kittlaus' introduction says it best:

"For decades, Hollywood has been paintinh this picture of machine assistants with Hal 9000 - what Siri is doing is taking some steps to make that a reality," Kittlaus said.

As our own Frederic Lardinois has written before about the iPhone app, Siri is "one of the most ambitious mobile services we have seen in the last few years."

You simply hold the phone up, hit a button, and tell it what you need and it translates your speech into text, uses natural language processing algorithms to determine what you need and then launches the appropriate services. Whether you want to schedule a taxi pick-up, make a dinner reservation or remind yourself of that Monday morning appointment, just ask Siri and it will do it.

"What if you could make it easy to ask your phone to do something?" asked Kittlaus. "It's all about simplification."

While the app looks to simplify your life, the technology behind it is anything but simple and it makes us feel a little bit like we've finally arrived in the future.

Skimble The final contestant to take the stage was Skimble and if there's one thing we can say, it's that co-founder Maria Ly did it with style, back-flipping and dancing to the 'Mission Impossible' theme song before putting both legs behind her head and doing push-ups.

Yes, you heard that right - she did push-ups with both legs behind her head. This woman is living what she's preaching, that we can attest to.

"We would like to inspire active lifestyles across the board," she started off in her explanation.

Skimble is a hybrid social network, physical fitness tracking app, that lets you track your physical activities, whether running, doing yoga, or playing kickball and compete with your friends. As you keep track of your activities, you can compare with your friends on a leaderboard and even compete to win real-world prizes. As with Siri, Skimble is primarily an iPhone app, although it has an accompanying website with additional features.

Our Pick We have to say, Siri takes the cake in this category and we're going to have to call it early. If the digital personal assistant doesn't take the prize, then it's only because it's too good and just doesn't need the start-up funding to continue. That almost seemed to be the line of questioning from the judges - why would something as impressive as Siri need to win this competition, with the funding and functionality it's already showing? All Siri needs to do, in reality, is start a bidding war between Google and Apple and it has it made, the judges half-jokingly but half-seriously said during the on-stage interview.

For the final word on what company will take the top prize, watch live tonight at 6 pm CST or check out the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator page.

Discuss

A reader wrote to me with an experience that he says vexed him. The relevant portion of his email is excerpted below (with his permission via email):

…during a talk with a liberal friend of mine, regarding the MF Hussain episode…friend talked on the lines of what liberals usually speak i.e kamasutra khajuraho…But…his explanation that Brahma marrying his creation (daughter) Saraswati amounted to incest which according to him means Hinduism sanctifies such relationships…made me quite uncomfortable and disturbed.

This kind of “analysis” typically stems from the Wendy Doniger school of thought, which confounds the symbolic with the literal and sees sex and perversion everywhere in Sanatana Dharma. There’s a Sanskrit proverb for this phenomenon: yad bhaavam tad bhavati (broadly, you perceive according to your mental makeup).

Different Puranas have different versions of how Brahma was born but the most popular one is that he was born out of the lotus that grew from Vishnu’s navel (hence his name, Nabhija). After he was born, he created a female form, Shatarupa, who then became Saraswathi. Essentially, he fell in love with his own creation and ended up marrying her. This is the story very briefly.

If you create something–a painting, a poem, a tune–it becomes yours and many people use colourful phrases to describe their creation: “labour of my love,” “my baby,” “manifestation of my creativity,” and so on. However, we don’t hear anybody expressing a desire to feed their creations with milk and food. Neither do they nurture any hallucinations that their painting will crawl after three months. However, if someone starts talking about taking the tune that they composed in Abheri to the doctor for giving it polio drops, you know what number to call. In other words, when you describe your artistic creation as your baby, it is implied that you are only talking figuratively, not literally.

This background is essential to understand Brahma’s supposedly-incestuous marriage to Saraswathi.

So, we have established/accepted that Brahma is the God of Creation. But is that all there is to it? The answer is yes if you take the marriage literally, physically as in a marriage between a man and a woman. But if it’s nothing more than a marriage between a man and a woman, why was Brahma so attracted to his own daughter? Being Creator, how difficult was it to create a wife for himself? And this question is what prompts us to look at the symbolism behind the supposedly incestuous marriage.

As Creator, Brahma brought to life Existence itself. Which logically means he thought of creating the physical world that we perceive through our sense organs and our mind. If you talk about the physical world of shapes and forms you need to give it a definition, or a name or label. This is known as the world of Rupa (Form/Shape) and Nama (Name), both inseparable from each other. In plain language, you look at a tree and your mind can’t be satisfied unless it finds a word (nama) to define it clearly so that when you say “tree” you know exactly what it is without having to actually look at it with your eyes. And this process of defining the physical world lies in the realm of thought. Thought then is expressed through speech.

What follows from this is rather simple. The shapes and forms that Brahma gave to his thoughts became the physical world. When he expressed it in language, it became speech. Which is Saraswathi, his daughter. And which is perfectly in line with Saraswathi worshipped as the Goddess of Speech (or vaak), language, and learning. However, we’re yet to hear of a word which has no meaning at all. As someone said, every word is an idea–it represents something: a thought, an object, anything. In other words, a word cannot be divorced from its meaning. Even in case of names of people–if I say out the name of a person, it conjures up an image or some sort of memory or association related to that person. This meaning is again Saraswathi, now donning the role of Brahma’s wife. This is what Kalidasa says in the opening verse of his grand Raghuvamsha:

Vaagarthaviva Sampruktau Vaagartha pratipattaye|
Jagatah Pitarau Vande Parvati Parameshwaru||

Just as a word and its meaning are inseparable
I bow to the Shiva and Parvati, the parents of this world.

As the meaning of the word, Saraswathi is Brahma’s wife just like a wife who stays with her husband for life through good and bad times. This symbolism is pretty much true of all Gods and their wives. As the wife of Vishnu the Preserver of the world, Lakshmi is the Goddess of Wealth. You cannot hope to attain peace and order in the world without prosperity.

This then is the symbolism behind Saraswathi as both Brahma’s daughter and wife. Yet, for millions of Hindus over thousands of years, Brahma and Saraswathi have continued to remain worship-worthy. The last thought to a practising Hindu about Saraswathi is her so-called “incestuous marriage” to Brahma. There’s a reason symbols and myths in Hinduism have an enduring quality about them: they make highly abstract philosophies and concepts readily accessible to us by making them part of our daily life. It’s easier telling a child about the importance of learning by narrating the importance of worshipping Saraswathi than it is to threaten it to “study or else!” Equally, it is easier to explain abstract concepts of thought, words and meanings to a layman using this story than conduct an academic session/seminar. Even without this complexity, the story of Brahma and Saraswathi still makes for a fascinating and interesting narration.

However, in this age of an absurd insistence on Reality-Everything, we’re forced to look for literal meanings in places where finding literal meanings is both irrelevant and absurd. If you do that, you’ll be forced to read literal meanings even in Atlas’ tale of bearing the weight of the Heavens on his back. You can’t be selective in choosing literal meanings for some, and symoblic meanings for other mythological tales. Those who readily accept the symbolism, not literalism, of the Trinity as symbols of creation, preservation, and destruction suddenly look at the literal meaning in the marriage of Brahma and Saraswathi. This is typically why Hindus are upset with the likes of Wendy Doniger et al, who read literal meanings because it fits the conclusion they want to derive.

On a related note, there’s a deeper reason why Hindus are outraged by M.F Hussain’s pictures of Hindu Gods and Goddesses. Hindu art, according to Ananda Coomaraswamy, moves from the impersonal to the personal. For example, if I draw a painting of a mike and say this picture is an artistic representation of the triumph of technology to improve the quality of our lives, it draws absolutely no outrage. On the other hand, if I caption the same picture with something like, this is the penis of my friend Robert’s father, and shows the virile nature of the force behind all creation, what’s your guess how Robert will respond? Given the deeply personal nature of our mythology, Saraswathi and Sita are as much–if not more–our family members as our parents and siblings are: in other words, they are not merely paintings of just any nude female form. It is this that upsets Hindus not mention the way Hussain perverts these mythological tales to create his trashy “art.” And this is also why Hindus aren’t upset with Khajuraho sculptures or for that matter any random nude pictures.

I suppose this adequately puts my anguished reader at peace.

Tags: Commentary, Creativity, Hindu Mythology, Hinduism, India, Indian Art, Indian Mythology, Indian Philosophy, Indian Politics, Khajuraho, Literal and Symbolic, M F Hussain, Politics, Pseudosecularism, Pseudosecularism Hall of Shame, Society & Culture