Girish's Blog

We woke up to a cloudy and rainy day in Paris. It was drizzling on and off and we decided to step out with our raincoats, shortly after breakfast. Our first halt is the Tuileries Gardens. As we walk towards these gardens, the only other people we see on the streets at this early hour on a Saturday morning are other tourists like us wanting to make the most of their visit to Paris. The Tuileries Gardens, which lies between two major Parisian landmarks - the Louvre Musuem in its south-east and the Arc de Triomphe in its north-west direction, was created by Catherine de' Medici as the garden of the Tuileries Palace in 1564 and it became a public park after the French Revolution. It's a bit like the Lal Bagh of Paris, however with the difference that it has seen a fair share of battles from the French Revolution to World War II. We walk by some of the sculptures in the garden - among historical characters there's Augustus Caesar, still looking like he was an emperor and there...

“Paris is always a good idea.”  - Audrey Hepburn On Summer Solstice day in June 2024, when the world was looking east for the International Day of Yoga, we headed west to Europe.  We had an ambitious plan of conquering Paris in three days,  swinging by the sunny coastal town of Montpellier in South of France,  hopping over to Marseille and then a flight to Rome  where we would see the legacy of the Romans and the Renaissance before heading to Florence to see some of Michelangelo's classics  such as David. We would then come back towards Asia by taking the  morning train from Florence to Rome,  the afternoon flight from Rome to Paris  and the night flight from Paris to New Delhi. The morning flight from Bangalore to Mumbai at 8:30 AM was packed with mostly people heading to Maximum City for a day of business and perhaps try to come back by a late evening flight. We reached Mumbai, crossed Immigration and reached the Vistara gate for our Paris...

The one vital duty incumbent on you, if you really love your religion, if you really love your country, is that you must struggle hard to be up and doing, with this one great idea of bringing out the treasures from your closed books and delivering them over to their rightful heirs. - Swami Vivekananda, Lectures from Colombo to Almora The occasion of the re-establishment of the Sri Rama temple at the Shri Rama Janmabhoomi in Ayodhya on 22 January 2024 is a time to reflect on and learn from Sri Rama's life as depicted in Valmiki's Ramayana. The source of much of the content below is the two-volume publication of Srimad Valmiki Ramayanam by the Gita Press, Gorakhpur. E thics vs Duty: The slaying of the demoness Tataka One of the first conflicts that Sri Rama faced was when the sage Viswamitra asked him to kill the demoness Tataka. One of the codes of conduct for a Kshatriya was not to kill a woman. Tataka was a Yasksa woman, capable of assuming any form at will and possessing at...

The Vishnu SahasranAmam describes the 1000 names of Lord Vishnu. Some of them describe the Lord, some his attributes and some his powers. As many spiritual masters have said, there is no difference between the name of the Lord and the Lord Himself. Sri Ramakrishna said, “ There is infinite glory in God’s Name. The Name is the seed; the Name is the tree; and the Name is the fruit. God dwells in His own Name. ”  The Srimad Bhagavatam (1:1:14) states, " By resorting to His name, be it even in a mood of distress and helplessness, one entangled in the cycle of births and deaths would at once get release. " There are over a hundred names that describe the Lord in the Vishnu SahasranAmam. His vastness and His subtlety Vishnu is वामनः (152), the One who has a small body and प्रांशुः(153), One whose body is vast. He is ब्रह्म(664), the biggest, the vastest and the all-pervading and अणुः(835), the subtlest and the all-pervading. He is बृहत् (836), the greatest in dimension. He is al...

  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 ...

Swami Vivekananda proceeded to Jaffna from Colombo. He had to shelve his plan of sailing for Madras (Chennai) from Colombo as he was receiving numerous telegrams from various Tamil-inhabited towns of Sri Lanka to visit them. On January 19, he took the train to Kandy — the hill station inhabited by tea plantation workers from Tamil Nadu. He was welcomed at the Kandy railway station by a traditional band and temple insignia amid loud cheers.  After delivering a brief speech, Swami Vivekananda set out for a long, arduous journey to Jaffna by a stagecoach as there were no railway line linking Kandy and Jaffna in those days. It was during this 200-mile journey that an outrageous incident happened. After nearly 50 miles, the coach broke down near Dambulla, known for its famous cave temple complex. This forced him to take a bullock-cart to reach Anuradhapuram, the ancient capital of Sri Lanka and the largest ‘buried city’ of the world.  Anuradhapuram hosts the Bo-tree, offshoot of th...