In recent months, as the pandemic spreads and we have been forced to spend more time at home, with ourselves. It's given us a chance to get to know ourselves, our minds and it's innate wandering nature. The importance of the mind has been recognized from classical times. The Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, in his Meditations, says "The mind, unconquered by violent passions, is a citadel, for a man has no fortress more impregnable in which to find refuge and remain safe forever." "For corruption of the mind,” he writes, “is a far graver pestilence than any comparable disturbance and alteration in the air that surrounds us; for the one is a plague to living creatures as mere animals, and the other to human beings in their nature as human beings." According to classical Indian thought, the human consists of the body, the mind, the intellect, memory, ego and ultimately the Self, which is the changeless witness to the human condition. You are born with some menta...
Day Two We're awake at 5:30 AM and it's bright daylight. Our first sight of Sikkim in the daylight shows a land bursting with greenery and flowers. The valley is shrouded in fog. Occasionally the fog lifts to show glimpses of the mountainside. Everything we see is in panoramic mode - sweeping hills, rolling clouds and the fog appearing suddenly shrouding the entire landscape in grey. Before we have breakfast, we go for a quick round of birding - there are Mountain Bulbuls, Oriental White Eyes and lots of Mynas. We have a breakfast of Alu Parathas with yogurt and pickle, some toast and marmalade and the teas for which North East India is famous. Our plan for the day is to leave after breakfast for the town of Lachung, in Northern Sikkim. Lachung is the gateway to the Yumthang Valley and Zero Point in Yumesamdong beyond. While it is just 129 km (80 miles) away, the uphill ascent and the bad roads mean that it would take us close to six hours to get ther...
For me, as part of a generation which had its education in the last quarter of the 20th century, Savarkar was not mentioned in any of the official study materials except for the insinuation that he was involved in the murder of Mohandas Gandhi. In the absence of viable alternatives to arrive at one’s own conclusion, the official position on Savarkar was the only one. Now with the arrival of social media and history in India being liberated from the clutch of vested interests in central institutions, new light is being shed on the contributions of individuals other than Nehru and Gandhi to the freedom struggle. Volume 1 of Vikram Sampath’s epic biography deals with the upbringing of Vinayak Savarkar, the political environment in India and how it shaped him, his journey to England for his legal studies and his evolution as a political revolutionary plotting to overthrow the colonial British empire in India. It ends with his receiving conditional release from his sentence of life ...
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