Meharbaani

nobody@ipernity.com (Designldg) — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 11:24:42 +0000

Designldg has posted a doc:

This is a portrait of Meera auntie in Allahabad (Uttar Pradesh).

Meharbaani is the Hindi word for Kindness.
Kindness and hospitality are key Hindu values.
I was reading this poem from the great Tagore and I thought of her hospitality while I was visiting Allahabad to give lectures.

The Home
"I paced alone on the road across the field while the sunset was
hiding its last gold like a miser.
The daylight sank deeper and deeper into the darkness, and the
widowed land, whose harvest had been reaped, lay silent.
Suddenly a boy's shrill voice rose into the sky. He traversed
the dark unseen, leaving the track of his song across the hush of
the evening.
His village home lay there at the end of the waste land,
beyond the sugar-cane field, hidden among the shadows of the banana
and the slender areca palm, the coconut and the dark green jack-
fruit trees.
I stopped for a moment in my lonely way under the starlight,
and saw spread before me the darkened earth surrounding with her
arms countless homes furnished with cradles and beds, mother's
hearts and evening lamps, and young lives glad with a gladness that
knows nothing of its value for the world".
Rabindranath Tagore

A Ramayan reader

nobody@ipernity.com (Designldg) — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 05:21:38 +0000

Designldg has posted a doc:

In the morning I was leaving the house of Romit in Allahabad and I saw this lady reading the Ramayana.
You can see the yellow fabric protecting the holy book in her hands.
It is not rare to see elder people reading that kind of things in India, this lady was so deeply into her thoughs that she didn't notice me at all.

The Rāmāyaṇa (Devanāgarī: रामायण) is an ancient Sanskrit epic attributed to the poet Valmiki and is an important part of the Hindu canon (smṛti).
The name Rāmāyaṇa is a tatpurusa compound of Rāma and ayana "going, advancing", translating to "the travels of Rāma".
The Rāmāyaṇa consists of 24,000 verses in seven cantos (kāṇḍas) and tells the story of a prince, Rama of Ayodhya, whose wife Sita is abducted by the demon (Rākshasa) king of Lanka, Rāvana. In its current form, the Valmiki Ramayana is dated variously from 500 BCE to 100 BCE, or about co-eval to early versions of the Mahābhārata.
As with most traditional epics, since it has gone through a long process of interpolations and redactions, it is impossible to date it accurately.
Indian tradition regards the Ramayana as part of Ithihasa, or history, with Valmiki's version as the oldest written form and the most authentic.

The Rāmāyana had an important influence on later Sanskrit poetry, primarily through its establishment of the Sloka meter.
But, like its epic cousin Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyana is not just an ordinary story.
It contains the teachings of ancient Hindu sages and presents them through allegory in narrative and the interspersion of the philosophical and the devotional.
The characters of Rama, Sita, Lakshmana, Bharata, Hanumān and Rāvana (the villain of the piece) are all fundamental to the cultural consciousness of India.

Docs from Designldg, tagged "allahabad"

Meharbaani

A Ramayan reader