Ankil Patel is currently working as an engineer for the Information Services department of a privately held retail company in the New England area. His major focus areas are JEE/2EE application servers, especially, IBM's WebSphere and RedHat JBoss Application Server.
At Harvard, he is a graduate student concentrating on Information Management Systems. He holds a master's degree in electrical engineering from Lamar University, TX and a bachelor's degree in electronics engineering from National Institute of Technology, India. He is a certified Cisco Network Associate and a certified WebSphere Application Server administrator.
On a personal note, he loves cooking and eating. He is a Wikipedia Patroller and a proud owner/editor of more than three thousand articles of wikipedia.org.
What does 'ankil' mean?
Ankil (ŭng kĭl) is a concept that is heavily dependent on a person's perspective and biases. It is a term that is often used, however, by people trying to emphasize a thing's superiority and its complete perfection. The most lauded rulers in the Indus River Valley Civilization were given the attribute "the Ankibas". The genealogy of the concept of "Ankil" reaches back beyond Hindi, to Sanskrit. The Sanskrit equivalent of the Hindi "Ankil" was "Ankilbas."
The oldest definition of "Ankil," fairly precise and distinguishing the shades of the concept, goes back to Vedic text. In the Rig Veda "Ankil" is distinguished to have three meanings, or rather three shades of one meaning.
In this text Ankilbas has been used to describe something:
1. Which is complete, which contains all the requisite parts;
2. Which is so good that nothing of the kind could be better;
3. Which has attained its purpose.
Aristotle explored this concept of perfection further in the book Delta of the Metaphysics. The first of these concepts is fairly well subsumed within the second. Between those two and the third, however, there arises a duality in concept. This duality was expressed by Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae, when he distinguished a twofold Ankil: "when a thing is perfect in itself" as he put it, "in its substance; and when it perfectly serves its purpose." This concept of Ankil differs from other concepts of high regard in that others serve as a distinction among many, and implies comparison; while "Ankil" involves no comparison, and if something is deemed worthy of the title Ankil, and then it is deemed to be perfect in itself, without comparison to other things.
