Happy New Year

Wish you a Happy New Year.

May the New Year bring you
joy
prosperity

and a lot of colours

If you feel there are far too many colours already,
let the New Year bring a new kind of colours.

Foreground

Picture taken in the dead of night
on Christmas Eve 2010



Merry Christmas to you.

Merry Christmas

This is the crib
made at Premdaan,
a Mother Teresa home
at Bhatti, New Delhi


Wish you a Merry Christmas

Christmas6

Christmas5

Christmas4

Christmas3

Christmas2

Christmas1

Symbol

Do the symbols people choose
reflect the level of their civilisation?

Note the level at which the sword is held... the body language.

Does the body language reflect the mind, the attitude?

[Photo courtesy The Hindu, dated 23 Dec 2010]

Barred

Am I behind the bars?

Or is it Nature
that is under siege?

Busy

Beast of Burden

Heights to Conquer

There's a whole heaven to conquer
Whatever the obstacles be on the earth

The heaven beckons
Ceaselessly

Miles to Go

 "... I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep..."
Robert Frost

Neglected Art

Economic concerns are so overwhelming today that art is likely to be relegated to the wilderness.

Harmony 2

When man's creativity


blends with nature's beauty,

Harmony is born.
 
 
[For Harmony 1, please see below]

Satellite Generation

Hitch your wagon to a satellite



... the way out of the mess
         here on earth.

Pilgrimage

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights...

[T. S. Eliot, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock']

Snow-white Butterfly

Can you spot the butterfly on the flowers?


Hint: It's got snow-white wings.

Happy Diwali

Wish you a HAPPY DIWALI



LET YOUR LIGHT SHINE
all the way

Man beneath the costume

Beneath the motley of the clown,
we are just ordinary human beings
like you.

The costume is only an appearance,
a professional hazard.


Blogger's note: These two persons, whom I met on the arterial M. G. Marg in Gangtok, were promoting Sikkim Tourism.  When I turned my camera on them, they posed happily and voluntarily for me. 

Harmony

When man's creativity
blends with nature's beauty,
Harmony is born.

Symphony

Nature is the finest symphony
if we care to listen
with our eyes...

Relic

"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air."

Thomas Gray

Jekyll and Hyde

Did life steal the colour from one wing
Making you Jekyll-Hyde?

Patient Waiting

The morning broke to a drizzle
The clients are yet to arrive
So, you will wait
Patiently

Until Globalisation will come
and replace your cycle rickshaw
with a Maybach!

The Moon

I like you.

I love you.

The moon

The

moon

The Moon and Romance

Shine

There's so much darkness around us.

At least, you keep shining.

And bring some romance into our life.

Real Romance.

Empowerment

Can you empower yourself with the energy from those electric lines?

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,

or what's a heaven for?" Robert Browning

Cat on Car

Have a nice ride! But remember: being on top is always a risky job.

Innocence

Ready?

Go ahead, don't bother about me. I'm just an intruder with a gadget.

Yeah, that's it. You are a newborn calf. You believe my words. Soon you will learn not to.

Pen and Wine

Which is better: the bottle [tiny as it is] or the pen [mightier than the sword]?

Silver Line?

Does every cloud have a silver line?

Tunnel Vision

The other side is always greener.

Monkey Business

The monkey clambered up the wall and looked around.

Then he [let me assume that it was a 'he'] caught hold of the DTH dish. He shook it vigorously a number of times as if to ascertain its sturdiness.










Having ascertained the sturdiness, he sat down leaning against it, majestically.

We need salvation from certain kind of Religion

The phone rang just as I finished my breakfast. It was my sister calling from Kerala.

“Do you remember that professor who got into a controversy with a question he had set for an exam on Muslims?” asked my sister.

“Yes, has something happened to him?” I asked with a sense of foreboding.

“He was attacked by a group of people this morning and his palms have been chopped off,” said my sister who lives quite near to the college where the professor teaches.

I switched on the TV. A Malayalam news channel reported that about eight persons intercepted the professor’s car as he was returning home from church. They were carrying weapons like knives and axes. They also attacked the women in the car though not fatally.

My thoughts raced back to J. S. Bandukwala’s article in the latest edition of Outlook which I read last evening and the interview with Salman Rushdie in this morning’s Literary Review of the Hindu. Both Bandukwala and Rushdie are Muslims who think that there is something seriously wrong with their religion today.

Bandukwala traces the Islamic frustration primarily to the political clout that the West wields exploitatively over the rest of the world, particularly the oil-rich Islamic nations. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are results of that frustration, argues Bandukwala. He also identifies “the absence of education, in particular, science education” as another factor that worsened the problem. Related to this, he argues, is the absence of wise leaders in the religious community. Finally, he lists “obsession with the past” as a serious problem.

Rushdie also laments the pathetic narrow-mindedness of Muslims today. They wish to subsume human universals into the relative truths of their creed. Rushdie grieves over the death of the composite Sufi culture which was an example of how a religion can absorb elements from another religion and be more humane. The tragedy of the present Islam, as Rushdie understands, seems to be its blindness to the inevitable pluralism of human cultures and traditions. Laying strictures on the human imagination and potential for dreaming with the straitjackets of religion is to kill humanity itself.

History bears testimony to the fact that whenever any religion tried to assert truth as its sole prerogative, humanity with its infinite varieties was the tragic victim. Christianity subjected humanity to that sort of a diabolic terror in the Dark Ages. Is Islam going through its own dark ages?

Islam stands in need of an intellectual and imaginative awakening. It needs genuine leaders other than Osama bin Laden and the Taliban jihadists.

May Allah save us!

Darjeeling

The Tung railway station between Darjeeling and Kurseong. It is at a height of about 3500 feet. The railway station is just a small office on the roadside beside the residences of ordinary people.





Every signboard in the Darjeeling Hills carries the name Gorkhaland, though Gorkhaland is yet to become a political reality.








A view of the toy train.









One of the many charming life-like stuffed creatures in the Natural History Museum in Darjeeling.








The Kanchenjunga Peak - two views.

For the text related to these pictures, please log on to: www.matheikal.wordpress.com

The Gift of Kupup - 2 (Bunker Mandir)

The bed of God Harbhajan Singh in the Mandir dedicated to him at Kupup, 16000 feet high on the Himalayas.
Gangtok - Kupup: 60 km. But that road is closed right now. Take a 130 km stretch from Gangtok by a private tour operator and voila you're there at the Mandir which fulfils all your wishes!



This is supposed to be the room used by God Harbhajan Singh! Quite a few decades ago.

There are quite a few army trucks making their way up and down the 32 hairpin bends almost every day. Any day one of them could have transported a swivel chair.




A cell in the Bunker Mandir, also known as Baba Mandir.

The entrance to the Bunker Mandir.

The Gift of Kupup - 1

The road to Kupup - with its 32 hairpin bends which our co-driver was keen on counting at every bend.
Tourism is the chief, perhaps the only, industry in Sikkim.



A yak with its calf. Our driver was very keen that we shoot the calf. "Shaitan [satan - mischief incarnate]" he said, "that's what the calf is."






The hamlet of people living at an altitude of 16000 feet from sea level.
Is ordinary Indian life any worse than life in the Indian Army?
If you see the Indian Army's quarters in Kupup you'll think it's better to join the Army.
Indeed, that's whay the Indian Army has a huge human strength.





The bunkers on the frontier.
This frontier right now is accesible for tourism.
If China attacks India, it may be a different story.