No 13036, Wednesday 09 Sep 2020, Sunnet

Solution to 19A has been deliberately left unsolved and is to be answered only by a non-regular/novice commenter, with proper annotation. Those who have answered earlier in the week, please give others a chance.

ACROSS
1   Friends perhaps question word given to a business group (2,4) TV SHOW {TVS}{HOW}
4   Clearly see gross monsters (8) OGRESSES*
10 Alternative front by academy musicians (9) ORCHESTRA {OR}{CHEST}{RA}
11 Freighter’s crew (5) EIGHT [T]
12 Hold area with a quarter (5) SEIZE {S{E}IZE}
13 Add magnificience to a severe hairstyle (9) POMPADOUR {POMP}{A}{DOUR}

14 Endless garbage? Take 50% of that to power (7) NONSTOP {NONSense}{TO}{P}
16 Check speaker’s shower (4) REIN (~rain)
19 I initially verify that this is half of 11 (4) ?O?R (Addendum - FOUR - {I}{Ve...y} and 8/2 - See comments)
21 Blast road built by first woman (7) PANDORA {PAN}{ROAD*}
24 Speak of depressed land (5,4) TOUCH DOWN {TOUCH}{DOWN}
25 Finds lures undone (5) RULES*
26 Rigid past perhaps (5) TENSE [DD]
27 End assembly on Monday with another leader of young scouts (3,6) DEN MOTHER {END*}{M}{OTHER}
28 Pages man at rest? That is wrong (8) CHAPTERS {CHAP}{REST*}
29 Tie it to a thief (6) BANDIT {BAND}{IT}

DOWN
1   You file a number (8) THOUSAND {THOU}{SAND}
2   Engineer notices some small fragments (8) SECTIONS {NOTICES*}{Sm..l}
3   Bull’s view of a plant (5) OXEYE {OX}{EYE}

5   Measure damage to syntax (7) GRAMMAR {GRAM}{MAR}
6   Height of joy? Collecting fragments of Everest (9) ELEVATION {EL{EVe...t}ATION}
7   Mark’s about to enlist (4,2) SIGN UP {SIGN}{UP} (Correction - SIGN ON {SIGN}{ON} - See comments)
8   Wit posed with anger (6) SATIRE {SAT}{IRE}
9   Climb and come forward (4 2) STEP UP [DD]
15 Also some trimming is the solution for one with the most prominent dentures (9) TOOTHIEST {TOO}{Tr...g}{IS+THE}*
17 Work and shower in a garden store (8) TOOLSHED {TOOL}{SHED}
18 Without Karnataka’s IT & Communication scheme (8) SANSKRIT {SANS}{KR}{IT}
20 Arrange to procure again (7) REORDER [DD]
21 Linguist’s sandwich (6) PANINI [DD]
22 Stable in just a tick (6) STATIC [T]
23 Discrete amounts as Tan is varied (6) QUANTA {QUA}{TAN*}
25 Wine/Port in Germany? Yes (5) RIOJA {RIO}{JA}

Reference List
Academy = RA, Quarter = E, Power = P, Monday = M, As = QUA, Yes in German = JA

Dr RKE's TalePiece

Sri Vidyasankar was an expert in SANSKRIT GRAMMAR. He had become internationally famous after he started a YouTube channel, in which he explained the RULES of syntax, phonemes, TENSE and conjunctions in FOUR videos. These were based on the Ashtaadhyaayi, PANINI’s book of EIGHT CHAPTERS, written 2500 years ago. The greatness of Vidyasankar was that he was able to establish that Sanskrit had not been STATIC since Panini’s times. The language had evolved and flowered so much in the ensuing centuries. The lessons had garnered THOUSANDS of ‘likes’. The comments SECTIONS not only had the usual gushing remarks but also serious discussions by experts on computational meta-language, who had SIGNed ON, because they were enamored by the QUANTAl algorithmic structure of the ancient language that had several parallels to the recently described machine languages.

It is no surprise that when Vidyasankar’s flight TOUCHed DOWN at the Boston airport, Ada Franklin, the professor of Modern Linguistics at MIT, Cambridge, STEPped UP to welcome him.  She had requested him NON-STOP for a year to give the prestigious Naom Chomsky lecture at MIT. The following morning, Vidyasankar gave a clear exposition of the relevance of Panini’s syntactical rules to the present day, holding his audience spell-bound. Ada Franklin had a tough time REINing in the eager graduate students, who SEIZEd the opportunity at teatime after the lecture to interact with the man who so easily blended the ancient with the modern.  No doubt, there was a great ELEVATION of the status of India that day at that temple of learning.

On Good Morning, America, the breakfast TV SHOW on CNN, Vidyasankar said “I am only an interpreter of what the sages said eons ago, RE-ORDERing their cryptic pronunciations into a form that is easily understood by our generation”.  That is what we call the humbleness that comes with great scholarship of the Orient.