Photo of the Day

Biswajit Dihidar shares his thoughts and stories through the lens of his camera.  Check out Viewfound for more intriguing pictures…

 

Kintaro The Golden Boy

Lee Jay Walker brings us the art and folklore of Japan’s Kintaro the Golden Boy:

Toshidama Gallery comments about the depiction of Kintaro by the artist Utagawa Yoshikazu (pitcure above)by stating that “Yoshikazu portrays Kintaro (the Golden Boy) wrestling one of Yorimitsu’s retainers. Kintaro, as with so many Japanese heroes, is the subject of legend and possibly some fact. Raised by his mother near Mount Kintoki it was said that he was a wild child of superhuman strength – wrestling bears, uprooting trees – and he befriended and spoke to animals especially his friends the monkeys.”

Happy Birthday Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Today is Ghandi’s birthday.  He would have been 144.  In honor of this auspicious occasion, some timeless Ghandi wisdom:

“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”

“A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes.”

“An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.”

“The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.”

 

 

 

Photo of the Day

The rice terraces of Yunnan, China, are carved into the hillside. Different types of vegetation lend the landscape its alternating hues.

See more surreal landscapes here.

Sunday’s Poem

Noshi Gillani

Is a poet from Pakistan who writes in Urdu.

Noshi Gillani was born in Pakistan in 1964. Her fifth collection of poems: Ay Meeray Shureek-E-Risal-E-Jaan, Hum Tera Intezaar Kurtay Rahey (O My Beloved, I Kept Waiting for You) was published in Pakistan in 2008.

Can Someone Bring Me My Entire Being?

My arms, my eyes, my face?

I am a river flowing into the wrong sea
If only someone could restore me to the desert

Life goes on but I want no more from it
Than my childhood, my firefly, my doll

My vision does not admit this new season
Take me back to my old dream

Of finding one face among the many in my city
Whose eyes can read deep into me

My life has been a boat in a whirlpool for so long
O god, please let it sink or drift back to the desert

 

Sustainability Does Not Travel Well

Pamela Mar explores the distinction between the meaning of sustainability in the East vs. the West and concludes that “sustainability does not travel well.”

…the definition of sustainability – i.e. progress which stems from balancing economic, environmental and social priorities – may resonate globally, but the strategies for implementing it have to be tailored to local circumstances.

Mar emphasises the difference between the West’s sustainability strategies vs. Eastern needs and concerns.  In Western terms sustainability applies largely to the environment and does not address the concerns of labor:

US-style capitalism is unique in the advanced industrial world for how the fruits of the industry are shared: while labor is being squeezed, capital collects on the gains. In other words, real wages for the American worker have been falling steadily since the 1970s even though productivity has grown. Elizabeth Warren recently noted that if wages had kept up with productivity growth since 1960, the minimum wage today would be US$22 an hour instead of just above US$7. This also helps to explain why the US CEO-worker wage gap is the highest in the developed world.

People of Color In the Middle Ages Not an Anachronism

I ran across the blog Medieval POC while reading an article at the Oxford University Press. The focus of the blog is to “showcase works of art from European history that feature People of Color” and to “address common misconceptions that People of Color did not exist in Europe before the Enlightenment”. Here’s a recent post:

The all-white reinvention of Medieval Europe commonly depicted in popular fiction, films, tv shows and art is entirely that: a fiction. An invention. An erasure. Obviously, people of color have been an essential and integral part of European life, European art, and European literary imagination since time immemorial. To cite “historical accuracy” as a means to project whitewashed images of the past into the future to maintain a fiction of white supremacy is an unconscionable farce.

Indian Indigenous Activist and Journalist Dayamani Barla In Her Own Words

Dayamani was born in the indigenous tribal (also known as Adivasi in India) dominant Jharkhand state of eastern India. Her family belonged to the Munda tribe. Dayamani’s father like other tribals in the region was cheated out of his property, because he could not read and lacked paperwork to show his rights to the land. Her father became a servant in one city, and her mother a maid in another. Barla remained in school in Jharkhand but worked as a day laborer on farms from the 5th to 7th grades. To continue her education through secondary school, she moved to Ranchi and worked as maid to pay her way through University. She sometimes slept in Railway stations in order to continue her education in Journalism.

Barla works in a popular Hindi newspaper Prabhat Khabar to bring attention to myriad problems facing the Munda people and other tribal communities in the Jharkhand region. She is the National President of Indian Social Action Forum INSAF. Earlier her journalistic work was supported by a small fellowship for some years by Association for India’s Development(AID). Barla owns and runs a tea shop that effectively supports her journalistic desire and career. She chose the business consciously because tea shops are gathering places where social issues are discussed.

Rosalina Tan – An Inspiration to All

Oliver Samson presents the story of Rosalina S. Tan, a 70 year-old advocate for organic farming.  An inspiring person and an inspiring story:

ROSALINA S. TAN, owner of Nature Wonders Enterprises, a company engaged in making organic cosmetic products, is still active at 70. She is an epitome of a healthy and active septuagenarian. Her day is spoiled if she has nothing to do.

‘There is no life in being idle,” she said. “You will get sick in doing nothing.’

This workaholic Chinese lady is second among 10 children. Their father passed away when her mother was 37, when the youngest in the brood was only four years old. Their mother did everything she could to raise them, which included putting up and running a sari-saristore and driving a trailer truck to deliver goods to Balintawak.

Tan duplicates her mother’s diligence. She has run Nature Wonders Enterprises since 2007, and happy that all her products are organic and laced with pili oil. To her, pili oil parallels olive oil. She produces lipsticks, lip balms, soaps, shampoos, skin lotions and hand sanitizers.