Warrier's Collage on Saturday July 30, 2022

-- Welcome To Warrier's COLLAGE On Saturday July 30, 2022 1) Chinmayananda on Vasanas, Bhagavad Gita 15.2 https://youtu.be/DVv2uB-qGAo 2) Know More : https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/chapter/15/verse/2 3) Ranthambore Tiger Park https://youtu.be/BL5kGkcOUSc (Know More : https://weather.com/en-IN/india/biodiversity/news/2022-02-22-tiger-population-explosion-in-rajasthans-ranthambore-national) Good Morning 🙏 Nice Day M G Warrier M A Messages/Responses 1) R Jayakumar Shared the following message received from CFA by his daughter : "Congratulations, Divya Christine! You are now a CFA® charterholder and may use the highly regarded CFA designation. I applaud your diligence and hard work in achieving one of the highest distinctions in the investment profession." with this note : My daughter Christine Divya settled in in the United States has cleared CFA level 3 exam. She already cleared CPA. She also did MCom from N M College, Parle and MBA from North Carolina University. (Congratulations from Collage readers to Divya. Best Wishes -Warrier) 2) T N C Rangarajan Shared a link : https://www.speakingtree.in/blog/shocking-tale-of-a-baba-who-lived-for-900-years While trying to find more about him, I came across several documentaries and texts that mentioned him to be minimum 250 year old. 900 or 250, whatever the number of years he is claimed to have lives…the whole episode is still astonishing! -Priyanshi Lal, Seeker on Speaking Tree (When my mother used to tell bedtime stories, she used to overrule any questions with this one liner : "Kathayil chodyamilla" meaning "No questions allowed in a story". Or, in today's Social Media English : "It's just a forward!"- 🙏-Warrier) 3) V R Chittanandam Shri Babusenan's narrative skills are well known. All his pieces are very interesting to read. The one on Vasu Annan takes the cake. He has stopped the story at a very interesting stage. Yakshi! In real life? Looking forward to tomorrow's edition. Chittanandam B Collage Cover Story : T R Suresh Bangalore Suresh shared the following link : https://www.mentra.me/mentra-founding-stories with this note : "This is the story of daughter of one of my friends from Ponnani. Truly inspiring : I'd love for you guys to comment on Jillika's LinkedIn article on her journey and the pulse behind her startup Mentra : Read the full article here, https://lnkd.in/gAEkGtj3 (Suresh adds : This is a forward from my friend Rajan Warrier) Briefly : Jhillika's story to founding Mentra, inspired by her brother V Vikram Understanding the scale of people living with disabilities Later, Jhillika began to realize Vikram was not the only one marked for his differences. In one of her vacations to India, Jhillika’s father decided to take her family to an organization in Kerala (South India) named AMHA; an adult-living center for orphans with disabilities in India. The founder of the center whom they all called “Amma,” (means mother) devoted her life to rescuing these vulnerable and often intellectually disabled individuals who had been abandoned by their families. She gave them a loving home filled with support programs, classes and therapy with the resources she had. A story of hope and perseverance as Jhillika uncovers the hidden potential of her non- speaking autistic brother Vikram, and builds an organization focused on tapping into this neuro-exceptional potential worldwide. C World Tiger Day July 29, 2022 https://tigers.panda.org/news_and_stories/stories/the_world_celebrates_world_tiger_day/ Global Tiger Day is celebrated every year on July 29th as a way to raise awareness about this magnificent but endangered big cat. The day was founded in 2010, when the 13 tiger range countries came together to create Tx2 – the global goal to double the number of wild tigers by the year 2022. F M Misquith shared a Poem for the Day : ☘️🌿🍀🌳Verse for today : International Tiger Day Today is a day of abundant Joy, As it is 'Tiger International Day'. When we were all little children, We were as just one brethren, And in the forests deep, Tigers could safely creep. Since then their numbers have dwindled everywhere, One can only spot them here and there. Such majestic creatures are they, Now we are left with only whey. But the good news is that poachers are now all being kept at bay, And by careful watch, not a single tiger can they slay and get away. Yesterday there was good news, Which would have received rave reviews, That the tiger numbers in Nepal have more that doubled, They are left to roam about in peace and not in any way are they troubled. Let's all kneel down and pray day after day, everyday, That these majestic creatures are forever with us to stay.☘️🌳🌿🍀 Media Response : M G Warrier July 29, 2022 Wake up from dreams This refers to the story "After Fed, RBI may go for a rate hike : Economists " (The Hindu Business Line, July 29). The Economists who still continue to wait for Federal Reserve notes to start diagnosing what's good for India deserve sympathy. If RBI decides to alter base rate, where's the need to compare the change with Fed decision? When the base rates and the impact of their changes are not comparable in the two countries especially post-pandemic? Luckily RBI is vigilant and MPC is a full-time body ready to meet and deliberate to take decision at short notice. Unlike in the past it seems RBI also has learnt to take speculations in its stride. M G Warrier Mumbai Bonus : A blog link https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/readersblog/thoughtsmakewhatweare/is-it-too-deep-life-44033/ The ecosystem or nature teaches us about balance….. ENJOY LIFE … PEACEFUL LIFE . CONSERVE ECOSYSTEM …. SAVE WATER AND FORESTS……. VALUE LIFE ….. CELEBRATE LIFE… …. D Collage Poem : F M Misquith Verse for today : 'Be An Angel Today' 💐🌻🌹💐To start with we're all sweeter than an angel, With one and all, we also easily gel, And we also cast a magical spell, And day after day, all goes very well. A little past this stage, With others we learn to engage, Some of us stand centre stage, Others are happy acting as a page. But just for today let's all like an angel be, And others from our company will not flee, Let's fill the hearts of one and all, With Joy, Peace, Happiness and from bondage free, In this respect, we should all essay to do, and I Hope and Pray, One and all 'll most willingly agree An Angel flies down from way above, And is the very epitome of Love, Let's decide from today to set all hearts aglow like an Angel, And very soon we shall graduate into an Archangel. 💐🌻🌹💐 E Readers write : 1) Babusenan's Column Continued from Collage of July 29, 2022 : What Vasu Annan narrated, most of us who knew him well took with a grain of salt. As I said at the beginning, he was a good story teller. Though quite interesting, either it was his own fabrication, or a resurrection of some short story picked up from a popular weekly like the 'Mathrubhoomi'. He might have been afflicted with malaria( he looked very tired when he came back) or, because of some action of his, Bhilai became too hot for him. We pretended as if we believed him. None wished to hurt him in any manner. Let us forget Vasu Annan for the time being and bestow our thoughts on the Yakshi clan. Continued at H 1 2) Ignorance (Maya) : Vathsala Jayaraman Ignorance (Maya) is like a Yakshi (Ghost), which once possessed a great pandit in a Himalayan hermitage. The unfortunate pandit sang and danced like any tribal damsel; he swore and cursed in the ghost dialect, and everyone in the hermitage became ashamed of his company. Continued at H2 F Leisure Reframe the question* Teacher addresses a student and asks : “How many kidneys do we have?" “Four!", The backbencher student responds. “Four? Haha,” The teacher was one of those who took pleasure in picking on his students' mistakes and demoralising them. “Bring a bundle of grass, because we have a donkey in the room," the teacher orders a front bencher. “And for me a coffee!”, the backbencher student added. The teacher was furious and expelled the student from the room. The student was, by the way, a famous Brazilian journalist and humorist namely Aparicio Torelly Aporelly (1895-1971), better known as the "Baron de Itararé". On his way out of the classroom, the student still had the audacity to correct the furious teacher: "You asked me how many kidneys‘ we have. "We have four: two of mine and two of yours. ‘We have’ is an expression used for the plural. Enjoy the grass". Life demands much more understanding than knowledge. *Forward received from R Jayakumar G Quotes from Chinmayananda https://www.azquotes.com/author/22987-Chinmayananda_Saraswati Silently hear everyone. Accept what is good. Reject and forget what is not. This is intelligent living. Chinmayananda Saraswati He's wise. Follow his words of wisdom🙏-Warrier H 1) Continued from E 1 They are certainly not human beings. In the Hindu heaven, the caste system seems to work as in India. Vidyaadharaapsaro yaksha Raksho gandharva kinnaraaha are akin to our OBCs. Yakshas' womenfolk are Yakshies while there wives are Yakshinies. Yakshas themselves are not rich, but they guard riches. Most of them are employed as security guards in Kubera 's Alakapuri. Yakshies are not beautiful like the Apsara women Rambha, Urvasi, Menaka and Thilotthama. In fact, some of them are ugly, but have the gift of changing into beautiful women, like Ravana's sibling Soorpanakha, in order to seduce men. Many of them, unfortunately, are votaries of cannibalism. Just like some African spiders, they eat the male partner after union. It is the belief in Kerala that these yakshies seduce able bodied travellers after nightfall and conduct them lovingly to their houses. Next morning what looked like a house would turn out to be the top of a black palmyra palm at the foot of which would be lying the hapless traveller's hair, nails and bones! Fortunately for us, Keralites, there is, living among us, a highly gifted sculptor, Kanayi Kunjuraman by name. The oversize statue of an Yakshi he carved out of a single stone in the garden attached to the Malampuzha Dam in Palakkad district in 1969 continues to remain as the consummate image of a voluptuous female beauty (nude, of course) an artist can form in his mind. Yakshies do no job. Kubera, who knew them well, did not employ anyone among them to guard his riches. He was very strict even to the Yakshas and used to banish from his capital those who did not do their duties properly. We all know that Kalidasa took pity on one such Yaksha and made him the central character in his eternal messenger-poem 'Meghadoot' One may not believe. What Kubera did not do, one institution in free India dared to do. That was RBI. It was at the suggestion of J R D Tata, who was on the Bank's Central Board when B Rama Rao was Governor, that a decision was taken to install the statues of a Yaksha and Yakshi at the entrance of the imposing RBI building under construction in New Delhi. Though the job assigned to them was guarding the riches of the Bank, they supposedly represented industry and agriculture-Yaksha the former and Yakshi the latter. The Bank entrusted the sculpting to the celebrated sculptor-cum-artist Ram Kinkar Baij who did the work at his leisure and took more than ten years to complete. The cost escalation involved was huge and finally, when the two statues were installed in1967, a question was asked in the Rajya Sabha as to the need and propriety of erecting a nude female statue in front of the RBI. That created a flutter and then the very popular weekly 'Blitz' pointed out that the Yaksha looked almost like Sadoba Patil, an industrialist. The entire episode caused a lot of embarrassment to the Bank and, on a proposal to issue a press note clarifying the whole issue, the then Governor wrote : 'Let sleeping dogs lie.' Then followed an official dead silence regarding this episode. While in the official records the female statue is treated as Yakshini (wife of the Yaksha), the sculptor told an interviewer that he conceived it only as a Yakshi, the woman Yaksha. This would have posed a serious hurdle if the statues were installed in front of RBI's vaults in Mumbai where gold bars are kept. In the early 1990s, to tide over the financial crisis, when the Governor urgently wanted some gold bars to be sent secretly to London, the Yaksha would have agreed, but not the Yakshi as she was not his wife! I stretched my imagination to its breaking point. I confess I could not see a Yakshi as a symbol of our agriculture. 2) Continued from E 2 At last, when the ghost was exorcised and the pandit was freed, he became his original self. He remembered nothing of his pranks and blabberings. Humanity is similarly possessed by the ghost of ignorance (maya). The ghost has to be driven out. What is maya? Maya comes from the Sanskrit meaning “that which is not” and there is‘illusion.' Sages described it in different ways but common idea is that our body, mind, and intellect (“BMI”) can mislead our soul and entangle and entrap it into bondage. Frankly, the soul aspires to control and enjoy matter. However, the BMI complex builds the qualities such as desire, anger, greed, ego, attachment, and jealousy to create illusion. In Mahabharata, when Duryodhana enters the hall of illusion (Maya Sabha) at Indraprasth, built by the great master of illusion, he loses his way, becomes confused and envious. When Draupadi at him, he becomes uncontrollably angry, feeling insulted, and vows to take revenge against the Pandava clan for their audacity to display their power and wealth to belittle him in the presence of women. The world is also not very different from the hall of illusions. We also live here enveloped by illusion, in a state of ignorance about ourselves, whereby we fail to discriminate between truth and falsehood, become confused, engaging ourselves in egoistic struggles and binding actions, and lose our connection with the supreme Divine Being which should be our destiny. Maya has three effects such as obscuring, projecting, and revealing. The obscuring or veiling effect cuts off our vision of perfect unity. This is how creation is made. Its projecting effect casts forth all these broken reflections that we see around us. This sustains the world. Maya's revealing effect occurs only when we contemplate all these different forms with the idea that are in essence one with everything. This destroys our ego and makes the illusion disappear to break the cycle of birth and death. It is the desires and attachments that put us in contact with the objects of our world. Once we experience it, we enter a trap of journeying for ever and stop thinking about going back. We become imprisoned into our thoughts and resultant desires, undergoing a series of births and deaths delaying our liberation. Mahayana Buddhism explains maya with eight examples of illusion such as magic, a dream, a bubble, a rainbow, lightning, the moon reflected in water, a mirage, and a city of celestial musicians none of which is real. We get unshakable faith in our own mental phenomena, believing it is real. The above is a beautiful sketch of maya picturising it as a man caught by a spirit. Rishis have been telling that it is only an illusion projected by our senses.. They called It “maya" or the magical creative power of the“Brahman”. With the dawn of the 20th century, we find that physics started to support this view. The theory of relativity showed us that we can only know the relations between objects, and quantum theory declared that we can only see probabilities. What we think of as solid matter is an illusion created by our eyes. In fact, it is the “maya" which the rishis talked about. Scientists finally realized that our senses do not give us a true picture of Reality. This is exactly what the rishis of ancient India had been telling us more than five thousand years ago. The quantum world of science, which is a strange, unbelievable dance of particles, solidifies into a semblance of concrete reality when an observation is made by someone. In the absence of an observer, the atomic world is only a possibility. The particles materialize only when we look for them. The modern physicist corroborates the claim of the rishis that the world exists only because we who are the observers are actively participating in it. The world is a creation of the human mind. The sage of Arunachala known as Ramana Maharishi said, "Just as the spider emits the thread (of the web)out of itself and again withdraws it into itself,likewise the mind projects the world out of itself and again resolves it into itself.when mind comes out of the Self, the world appears.. Therefore,when the world appears to be real, the Self does not appear;and when the Self shines, the world does not appear. ' Meditation and yoga can only give us occasional glimpses of that Supreme Self, but the abiding knowledge and realization that our existence is not separate from that universal existence, can at one stroke remove all our mental agonies. Vathsala Jayaraman

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