Warrier's COLLAGE May 24, 2021

Welcome to Warrier's COLLAGE On Monday MAY 24, 2021 1) Light and Sound Show: Andamans Jail https://youtu.be/tZo6PJn5NZc 2) Light and Sound Show: Sarnath https://youtu.be/ojUofSxguCQ 3) Andamans & Nicobar Islands https://www.thrillophilia.com/states/andaman-and-nicobar-islands 4) Legacy of Sarnath https://www.livehistoryindia.com/story/amazing-india/sarnath/?amp=1 (Links Selected by: M G Warrier Mumbai) Good Morning 🙏 Nice Day M G Warrier https://notionpress.com/read/restoring-trust-in-governance "Restoring Trust in Governance : India’s 2020’s Challenge is a companion volume to M G Warrier’s 2018 book “India’s Decade of Reforms” which looked at the initiatives taken by Government of India and RBI to restore the country’s economic health by an appropriate diagnosis of factors that stalled the 1990’s initiatives to introduce economic and financial sector reforms." Satsangam with Panchapagesan Aratih Janasamsadih : 18th Quality Distaste for crowds of people (Gita XIII, Slokas 7 to 11 ....20 qualities of a GNANI) The above quality should not be understood literally. We need not develop a distaste for crowds. It only means that a GNANI is self sufficient, self poised and self pleased. When we are self sufficient we do not desire crowds of people around us. It is the lack of this quality among people which causes them to meet, get together, socialize. On the slightest pretext people meet in large numbers. A GNANI’S desirelessness for crowds of people is only one aspect of his self sufficiency. A perfect GNANI is totally fulfilled in life. He is absolutely satiated. He revels by himself, in himself, with himself. There is nothing in this or other worlds that he requires or aspires for.. No physical pleasure, no emotional joy. No intellectual delight adds up to his supreme state of fulfillment. V T Panchapagesan A Select responses 1) E Madhavan Thrissur I felt Nallasivan's account of his experiences with Malayalees touching. And also Smt Vathsala Jayaraman's appreciation.... I am not very sure about the points she made, though. Still feel happy that the poem was taken note of. 2) V N Kelkar Mumbai E Nostalgia : Distance from Bombay to Mumbai Bombay officially became Mumbai in 1995. Here is a brief story of Mumbai. The seven islands that constitute Mumbai were originally home to communities of Marathi speaking Koli (fishermen) people. For centuries, the islands were under the control of successive indigenous empires before being ceded to the Portuguese Empire and subsequently to the East India Company when in 1661 Charles II of England married Catherine of Braganza and as part of her dowry Charles received the ports of Tangier and Seven Island of Bombay. During the mid-18th century, Bombay was reshaped by the Hornby Vellard project, which undertook reclamation of the area between the seven islands from the sea. Along with construction of major roads and railways, the reclamation project, completed in 1845, transformed Bombay into a major seaport on the Arabian Sea. Bombay in the 19th century was characterised by economic and educational development. During the early 20th century it became a strong base for the Indian independence movement. Upon India's independence in 1947 the city was incorporated into Bombay State In 1960, following the Samyukta Maharashtra Movement, a new state of Maharashtra was created with Bombay as the capital. VNKelkar 3) V Rangarajan Bangalore The Affection we get from others is a Gift of our own Character. B Book Review The Carpet People https://www.fantasybookreview.co.uk/Terry-Pratchett/The-Carpet-People.html For me, far too many Pratchett books featured characters who seemed to exist only to be mocked, such as the Cowardly Rincewind, worlds and places which existed just to provide weird jokes and puns on a given theme, and resolutions which more often than not took the form of "and here's the cosmic badger to make everything write again, ---- what didn't spot it?" A friend of mine once stated that Pratchett stuck in resolutions that nobody could ever spot then laughed at the reader for not guessing them. That being said, when Terry Pratchett refrains from these sorts of things, he has indeed written books which I'd class as truly astounding. Small Gods, the first Johnny novel, not to mention the more recent Unseen Academicals to name but a few. The Carpet People is for me one of these, an example of Pratchett at his absolute best writing a unique, simple but powerful work with none of the flaws that seemed to mark many of his more famous later offerings. Like the Gnomes Trilogy, The Carpet People takes the theme of seeing a civilization of small hidden creatures in an everyday setting, but where the gnomes world was a recognizable place, with foxes, department stores and most famously trucks the world of the Carpet People is mysterious and strange, a world where giant hairs of all colours make a forest of trees higher than the tallest redwoods, a world populated with a host of strange peoples with their own distinct history and cultures, yet at the same time a world which is quite literally under the readers' feet. References to the Caverns of Underlay or gathering varnish from achairleg mine exist to remind the reader just how close this world is, and yet they exist side by side with a rich history and many diverse cultures, creatures and places as colourful as anything you might find in a completely different fantasy world. 2) Bill Gates: Why Media keep a watch? https://openthemagazine.com/feature/bill-gates-a-diminished-icon/ I can't become rich. I get some pleasure thinking that the rich are in trouble. Though I am aware that they are heavily insured 🙏-Warrier C Readèrs' Contribution 1) Praise/Flattery : Vathsala Jayaraman Chennai Human beings, as a race, are fond of being praised rightly or wrongly. Even Gods are no exceptions. Boons in Hindu mythology are the products of the satisfaction felt by Gods over the penance or praise showered on a particular god or goddess. 'Sthotra priya'-any God or goddess is normally addressed. Parents praise their children for the smallest achievements like reciting 'Baba Black Sheep' or 'Twinkle T winkle'...especially in front of a visitor . This process continues through school, college, office, kitchen through all the chores. This gets extended to added beauty on jewels, ornaments and clothes, including hair style and we well understand the marketing strategy behind. The social media have created a craze that it is great achievement if your small write up gets published in facebook or a forum, not to talk of publication in popular journals. It is just like hovering over the seventh sky. Desire for praise is primitive human nature. It is useful, exciting and positive. However if lack of it makes you unhappy and angry, it's time to take stock of yourself. A pat on the back....anybody would be happy. Praise, appreciation, admiration, encouragement, flattery......the line between them is very thin. When and how to do them judiciously is to be learnt. Gives different results with different people. Encouragement motivates people to do better. Admiration makes people lovable. Appreciation should be genuine. Flattery is to get something to be done by others.....best weapon. Reminds me a quote from Julius Ceaser. Brutus says...."If nothing works out to bring him to the market place (where he is killed) I would use flattery as the last weapon. One may feel that the forum mails or face book postings do come free and what the readers are going to lose if they just press 'like' button or write one or two lines in appreciation? In fact they are not free. It demands some time and energy with no guarantee of pay-off. There is also the opportunity cost, the activity the person could have done instead of reading what you write. We have to remember that attention is the currency of the internet. However advanced the technolgy becomes, there is a limit for the attention that the human mind can divert. The price of your writing ( the writings of all the writers clubbed together) may work out to two, five or ten minutes in attention-rupees. T hat is a lot to expect from a person who is more capable of assessing the worth of his investment of precious 15 minutes in reading the scraps. Praise is administered in lot of flavours. Often with good intentions, people want to praise but blow up such resolve with foam and froth, also known as flatter. I think the drawback with many good-natured people is that they tend to use hyperboles to show their appreciation which the other person though happy on lavish praise will reasonably grow tired of and may become uncomfortable. We should develop the skill to muster sincere praise. Praise as such is a cheap commodity these days but sincere-sounding praise is still of caret quality. Though praise is a great motivator, sincere praise works miracles. I think it is important that we instill sincerity in our praise and one must be mindful of this while appreciating the other person rather than ornamenting it with frilled phrases. Vathsala Jayaraman- (An unrelated article that came to mind: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/readersblog/warriersviews/what-to-do-with-negative-comments-10173/) Bonus Read: Soap is a chemical : Vathsala Jayaraman Chennai Today in big malls we see cupboards and cupboards of branded soap items, what people would have used before soap was invented and came to markets? Today everyone knows that soap is a mixture of some alkaline base with fatty acids. The saying goes that one person’s waste is another’s treasure. In those days human urine was a liquid gold in Romans who were well aware of the chemical properties of urine. They sold urine collected from public urinals and also paid tax on it. Before the world acquired knowledge to synthesise chemicals in the lab, they were aware of the fact that urine soaked leather could make it soft and clean. It was due to the fact the urine which is rich in urea, a nitrogen based compound decays into Ammonia when stored for long periods. This Ammonia becomes a base when diluted with water. Any dirt in any cloth is mainly grease and acidic in nature. The mixture naturally formed into a soapy solution. In ancient Rome vessels were kept in various corners of the street for collecting urine. The passers by would relieve themselves into the vessels. The vats when full were taken to the laundry.Launderers preferred to use urine for its ammonia to get tough stains out of cloth. The dirty clothes were immersed in diluted urine and workers used to stamp the clothes standing inside the tub of urine and this was more lo less similar to the working of agitator in washing machines. Even after soap became more prevalent, urine–known as 'chamber lye' was used for removing tough stains. Because of its property as a mordant, urine made white clothes cleaner and coloured clothes brighter. Urine was so important to the textile industry of 16th century England that an estimated amount equivalent to the urine stream of 1000 people for an entire year–were shipped from across the country to Yorkshire, where it was mixed with alum to form an even stronger mordant than urine alone. The history of the most fragrant soaps today started in stinking toilets. Vathsala Jayaraman D Life Soliloquy of a dog It was a Friday, an auspicious day for humans. The owner of the huge bangalow was celebrating the Upanayanam ceremony of his pet dog. It has become a 'Dwija'-twice born. I am very jealous that a member of our community has been elevated to the level of a Brahmin. Sounds crazy? Yep, we are living in crazy times. The dog’s owners performed the upanayana ceremony on the dog as its owner whispered the Gayatri Mantra in its left ear and bestowed it with a “sacred thread”. I was wondering whether the owner would feed non-veg dog food to his pet? Will the pet pooch be polluted if it comes into contact with other dogs and will it have to be given a bath to purify it? Now the poor dog is probably doomed to spend its life as a celibate as it won’t know the caste of prospective mates and there is no service called Brahmindogmatrimony.com. I understand that a nawab of Gujarat organized a lavish no-expense-spared wedding ceremony for his dogs. The photographs of this ceremony can still be found in the Jamnagar museum in which you can see the bride bedecked with jewels from top to toe. Ugh! Yesterday I had a sumptuous food from the garbage bin placed in the front of Upanayanam hall. What is my fate today? It is not my fault that I was born a dog and that too as a bitch at that. It is not my fault that I can become a mother at a very young age as compared to humans but then my life span is also shorter than humans. It is not my fault that I give birth to half a dozen pups. It is not my fault that I am a street dog and that too in metros. It is not my fault that I am impregnated by another street dog and that too, by an ugly snob. Now see my destiny! Why these so-called humans are after me and my fellow sisters? They just pick us up along with our family, dump in a truck and put us to sleep. They say we are a menace to society. They say we react and even bite when we are harassed. Is it wrong to fight in self-defense? No such discrimination existed in the beginning. All lived in harmony. Our brothers and sisters in the wild do not face such treatment. I accuse you of cruelty. I accuse you of bias when you make some as pets, even perform upanayanam and marriages and annihilate some as a menace. I accuse you of gender bias as is prevalent in humans. Her eyes were brimming with tears. I could imagine her soliloquy. (She was still looking with expectations, when the MCD guys were dumping her in the truck, squeaking and asking for help.). We find soliloquies in many plays of Shakespeare. But this is different, emanating from a member of animal society, that too created by Almighty. The poor creature thinks that the guy is going to put her to sleep. She does not know that it is the gruesome expression for murder! *Received from Vathsala Jayaraman Chennai (Collage invites the reader for a virtual wedding. Attendance optional. Applicable protocols mandatory: https://youtu.be/X2E-i9ZhChk) E Story of Silk* by Sudha Murthy A long time ago, in a tiny village in China, there lived a poor girl from a weaver's family. One day, the emperor was passing through the village and saw her working in the fields. He noticed her cheeks and rosebud- like mouth, her proud bearing and her rough, well-worn hands, which meant she worked very hard through the year. He immediately fell in love with her and though he was much older, decided to marry her. The girl married the ruler of the land and went to live in his palace as his beloved queen. But she was unhappy. She had grown up in the wide open spaces of the countryside, and now she was confined to a place, magnificent though it was. She was used to working from dawn to night without a moment's rest, but now she had many servants to take care of her needs and did not know how to fill her time. In the village she had been surrounded by family and friends who exchanged news and gossip as they worked, but in the palace it was quiet and no one spoke out of turn. The emperor noticed his new wife was sad and tried his best to make her happy. He bought her grand clothes, jewels and artefacts, threw elaborate parties, hired the best musicians of the land to amuse her. Yet she was sad. One afternoon, the empress sat under a mulberry bush in her garden, lostin her thoughts about her village. She slowly sipped hot water from a cup . Starting up at the blue sky, the girl remembered the birds that flew over her village. Then , sighing softly to herself, she picked up her cup to take another sip. But what was this ! A cocoon from the mulberry bush had dropped into the hot water ! Her first thought was to throw away the water and the cocoon. But then she took a closer look, and she saw some threads peeping out from the cocoon. Where had they come from ? She pulled the threads. They were thin , strong and shiny. She kept pulling and a long line of thread came out. Now the empress had a great idea. She would take the thread from many cocoon and weave soft , strong cloth from it. She called her servants and everyone got to work. They took cocoon out of the mulberry tree, dropped them in hot water, and removed the thread. They gathered a fair amount of yarn. Then the queen ordered a special weaving machine and wove the first piece of cloth using this new thread. Thus silk, the best and brightest form of cloth, was weaved. The manufacture of silk spread throughout China. It was the cloth that only royalty could wear, and was much in demand in lands as far away as Rome. The route through which silk was traded between China and Europe through Asia was called the Silk Route. Now that the Chinese had learnt how to make silk cloth, they did not want to share this knowledge with anyone in the world. Generations of Chinese royalty were sworn never to reveal the secret to anyone. When princess got married and went away to far off lands , they were not allowed to tell anyone in their new home how silk was made. Many, many years later, when a clever princess was leaving her house on getting married, as was the custom, her bags were searched carefully to check that she didn't carry anything that would help her make silk. This princess had been weaving silk from a young age and wanted to continue to do so wherever she went. She had hidden the cocoon in her long elaborate hairdo.No one thought of looking there ! When she went to her husband's house, she took out these cocoons from her hair and started gathering silk thread ! In this way, legend goes, the knowledge of how to make silk left China. *Forward received from VN Kelkar 2) Poetry https://madrascourier.com/art-and-poetry/room210/ F Leisure 1) In and Out* Lock Down Joke Tale : IN AND OUT Once there was a family of skunks who lived in a hollow tree. There were two baby skunks. Their names were In and Out. Now whenever In went out, Out came in, and whenever Out went out, In came in. If In happened to be in and wanted to go out, he would not go out until Out came in. And if Out happened to be in, and wanted to go out, he would not go out until In came in. One day a big storm blew up, and the mother and father skunks were worried about their children. So they quickly l ooked around to see whether In was in and Out was out or if Out was in and In was out. Out happened to be in right then. The mother skunk said to Out, "Out, go out and bring In in, please. I'm worried about him." Out said, "Sure thing, Mama." So Out went out, and for the very first time Out and In were out at the same time. Just a minute or two later Out came back in, and In came in behind him. For the first time in a long time In and Out were in at the same time. The mother skunk was amazed. "Out, how did you find your brother so quickly?" she asked. "Oh, Mama, it was easy," Out said : "In stinked!" If you need a hint, that's instinct. *Forward received from S Venugopal Chennai via Group mail 2) Astrological Predictions for Leo subjects for May 23, 2021: "Support of family members is yours for the asking as love is showered on you. You may plan a vacation with someone close. Some of you are likely to seal a property deal. A positive change in your life may appear. Good health is assured. You will be in a position to repay a loan in full without touching your savings. Not taking initiative at work may get you hauled up by seniors." G Quotes about Darkness and Light https://www.wisesayings.com/light-and-dark-quotes/ Like: "Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." Terry Pratchett