Skip to main content

Blogchatter AtoZ Challenge



Hi Friend,

“April is the cruellest month,” T. S. Eliot declared, “breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land…”  April is my summer break.  I’m going to celebrate it with a lot of writing, “stirring (certain) dull roots with spring rain.”  Daily blogging is one of those challenges.  ‘One of’ implies that I have taken up another challenge too.  That will be revealed towards the end of April.  This is to comply with Blogchatter: reveal the theme of my AtoZ posts. 



I wrote a few days back that “My A2Z may begin with Abracadabra and end on a magical Zenith.”  Yes, the theme of my AtoZ posts is: Life’s Magic. It can be read as:
1.     Life is Magic
2.     Life has Magic
3.     The Magic of Life

The first post will indeed be titled Abracadabra and the last Zenith.  Abracadabra starts off the magic.  I hope to take you to the Zenith of a magic mountain by the time we reach the end of April.  I’m not the wizard, however.  You will be the wizard with your own magic wand, your own magic spells.  Here is my invitation to you to Life’s Magic.


Comments

  1. Wow! Waiting for the magical posts! Great theme :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Looking forward to your posts in April. Wonderful theme :-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Can't wait for April, as magic begins then. Good luck Tomichan, even we are participating this year.

    Cheers
    MeenalSonal from AuraOfThoughts

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Tomichan! Am sure you will ace this one..looking forward to your posts :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. This sounds interesting! I would like to see the magic come alive this April. All the best

    ReplyDelete
  6. This sounds great.
    Looking forward. All the best 🙂

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Delighted, Purba. It'll be great to have you here.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af