There is humor everywhere!
Only thing is that you should be able to laugh at such things!
మేం బాగానే ఉన్నాం, మీ సంగతి చెప్పండి!!
How is that?
$$$$$
Monday, June 7, 2010
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Marcopolo and Asia - How much to believe?
The travellers in the history gave glimpses of many places that the people of the world could not see for themselves. We all thought that they have always told the truth. Whatif they have not told the truth?
It has become a fashion now to reenact their adventures with all the comforts of present day.
Such dramas are bringing out a lot of information and are testimonials to the original travellers.
The following account is really interesting and talks about the places near to us. Read on.....
Wonders and Whoppers
"I tell you," wrote Marco Polo, "that this palace is of... unmeasured wealth." Its roof is sheathed in gold "in such a way as we cover our house with lead." Even the floors are gold, "more indeed than two fingers thick. And all the other parts of the palace and the halls and windows are likewise adorned with gold." In this gilded domain, he declared, lived the ruler of an island kingdom called Cipangu (that is, Japan), whose waters yielded red pearls "very beautiful and round and large."
Scholars believe Europeans had never heard of Cipangu before Polo told them about it in The Description of the World, which he started writing about 1298, a few years after he returned home to Venice from a 24-year Asian odyssey. Though fascinated, Polo's readers, according to one account, concluded that his tales were "fabulous...mere dreams." But as decades passed, some began to take Polo seriously. In Christopher Columbus' copy of The Description, which survives, "gold in the greatest abundance" and "red pearls" are written in the margin beside the Cipangu reports. Although the handwriting may not be Columbus', he is said to have sought Cipangu among the Caribbean isles on his 1492 voyage.
Columbus never came anywhere near Japan, of course, but what would he have found? Red pearls? Experts say the oysters that produce them don't inhabit Japanese waters. A golden palace? Japan's Golden Pavilion, the gold-leaf-covered Kinkakuji, was built in 1397, a century after Polo published.
Truth to tell, many of Marco Polo's tales of treasure were just that—tales. Tall tales. Readers who persevere in Polo's often confusing, disjointed text will encounter preposterous supernatural events and an astonishing bestiary, including men with the features of dogs. Some readers have even concluded that the book is a total fake. If Marco Polo went to China, British Sinologist Frances Wood asked some years ago in a book titled, appropriately enough, Did Marco Polo Go to China?, why did he fail to mention chopsticks, tea and the binding of girls' feet?
At the British Library, where Wood curates the Chinese collections, the switchboard lit up with calls from journalists and scholars. After all, Polo's book has ornamented libraries the world over for centuries and is regarded, despite its flaws, as one of the world's greatest travel accounts. Wood had taken on a global icon. "I knew that Marco Polo was a household name," she told an interviewer, "but I was unaware that millions of people all over the world felt passionately about him and would be baying for blood."
Polo's fellow Italians have long assumed that he was a fibber; both he and his text are known in his homeland by the name Il Milione, and many think it's because the book includes a million tall tales. But didn't Polo enrich Italy by bringing home pasta and ice cream? Nope, those are myths. Still, Italians weren't about to tolerate a challenge to Polo's integrity by a foreigner, and many other people in the world are likewise invested in him. In China, historians staunchly defend the man who helped put their country on the map.
About ten years ago, a staff writer for National Geographic, followed Polo's journeys across Asia, from Iraq to China and homeward via Sumatra, India and Sri Lanka, using his book as guide. (There are about 120 versions of his narrative; the one carried, generally considered the most authentic, is translated from a 14th-century copy in the French National Library.) Like others who have examined his writings closely, this writer was dismayed by his omissions and floored by his whoppers. But ultimately convinced of his essential truthfulness. Why? For one thing, his itineraries, as laid out by the sequence of book chapters, are fundamentally accurate, whether he's crossing Central Asia or central China. Where did he acquire that geographical information if he didn't make these journeys himself? No skeptical investigator has ever proved that he copied from some Arab or Chinese source. And while it's true that Polo is guilty of curious omissions (those chopsticks, for example), he expanded medieval Europe's meager knowledge of Asia with such hitherto-unknown names as Cipangu, Java, Zanzibar and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), besides identifying China's great cities and describing such features as the Takla Makan Desert and the Yangtze River. Having followed Polo's tracks, this writer knew firsthand that he also got many things right, such as: both lapis lazuli and rubies are found in the Badakhshan region of Afghanistan; in China's southwest a minority people eat raw flesh; people in Sumatra and Sri Lanka make a joy juice from fermented palm tree sap.
Polo also produced an extensive report on Hindu customs in India, a country that clearly fascinated him. But his great love was Catai, as he called China. No kingdom ever had a better PR person. Time and again Polo wrote of Catai's wealth in silk and spices (no exaggeration) and declared that people had "all things in great abundance." So far, so good. But soon he was claiming that Hangzhou had 12,000 bridges arcing over its canals, a ludicrous inflation, even though Hangzhou was the world's largest city at the time; he even accorded the much smaller Suzhou 6,000 bridges. "Take that, Venice!" he seemed to be saying to his canal-rich hometown. (A later traveler could find only 347 bridges in Hangzhou, including those in its suburbs, and just 290 in Suzhou.)
Polo practically bubbled with enthusiasm as he described the palace of Kublai Khan, the Mongol ruler of Catai, in what is today Beijing. (He called the capital Cambaluc, a corruption of its Turkish name, Khanbalikh, "Khan's city.") The palace was "the greatest that ever was seen," with a hall large enough to accommodate 6,000 diners, and was encompassed by a wall four miles around. In some versions of his book, the wall grew even longer, in one case to 32 miles. Mangling his claims according to their own whims, The Description's translators, scribes and finally printers (beginning in 1477) often took his inconstant veracity down a further peg or two.
Whenever Polo mentioned Kublai, he laid it on thick. His hunting retinue, we are told, included 20,000 dog handlers; 10,000 falconers carrying gyrfalcons, peregrines, saker falcons and goshawks (Polo showed himself to be an avid birder); and unstated numbers of lions, leopards and lynxes to go after wild boars and other big animals. Still extolling his overlord—he claimed to have been a trusted servant of Kublai's regime—Polo wrote that the new year was celebrated in Cambaluc with a parade of Kublai's elephants, "which are quite five thousand, all covered with beautiful cloths," and with gifts to the ruler of "more than 100,000 white horses very beautiful and fine."
It's true that Mongol lords reveled in the royal hunt, a huge spectacle, and that they celebrated holidays grandly. And no doubt Kublai, like many Asian potentates, kept stables of elephants as a mark of power—but nothing like 5,000. And historians are confident that he didn't hunt with any 20,000 dog handlers or 10,000 falconers. "The numbers are staggering—they're obviously exaggerated," says Professor Morris Rossabi of the City University of New York, author of the definitive study of Kublai's reign. It is difficult to imagine his people maintaining, for example, a royal herd of 100,000 steeds in the region of Beijing. "People in the north didn't grow enough food to sustain themselves," Rossabi says. "Most of it had to be brought from the south. I can't believe they devoted tremendous amounts of pastureland to having 100,000 horses." Some scribes who copied Polo's text shrank the elephant herd to 500 or omitted it altogether, probably smelling excess, while one version raised it to 105,000.
Still, Polo had plenty of authentic marvels with which to astonish his countrymen—black stones that burned better than wood; money made of paper, porcelain, asbestos; huge oceangoing ships. And he documented China's wealth in silk and spices as well as its commerce with India, Java and other parts of Asia—valuable information for a trading state like Venice.
So why all the hyperbole? We'll never know for sure, but exaggeration is sometimes a character defect in adventurers—Walter Raleigh's gold-strewn El Dorado comes to mind. And in 13th-century Europe, even outright lies were a literary conceit. Grotesque beasts and magical doings were routine in the modest libraries available to even the most educated Europeans. The Histories of Herodotus, for example, told of gold-digging ants in India and winged snakes in Egypt.
I believe Polo kept a journal during his travels; if not, how did he manage, when at last home in Venice, to set down the wealth of detail that he had accumulated during his two dozen years of travel? Polo's diary: what a sensational discovery that would be! He doesn't say he kept one, but a version of The Description that appeared in Venice in the 1500s, supposedly based on authentic manuscripts, declares that he brought home "writings and memoranda." And these, it is said, were shared with a writer who helped him produce his book. That person is identified at the beginning of the text as Rustichello of Pisa, who'd been reworking some of the romantic stories of King Arthur, and whose writings had found their way into European libraries. According to Polo, he met Rustichello in a Genoa prison, into which Polo had been thrown after being captured in a sea battle between Venice and rival Genoa about 1298. Sounds like another tall Polo tale, but so far as scholars know, it's true.
Scholars see the hand of Rustichello in the book's account of a battle between Genghis Khan and Prester John, a Christian ruler in Asia, early in the 13th century. With its huge loss of life—although no body count was recorded—the engagement made a good story. Too bad there was no such person as Prester John; as historians know today, he was entirely a European invention. The legend was no doubt well known to Rustichello, while less so to Polo.
It is suspected that Rustichello concocted the tale of robbers able to "make the whole day become dark" as they swept down upon travelers. Polo described such an attack on his caravan in the desert of Iran. The passage continues, suspiciously, in the third person: "Moreover I tell you that Master Marc himself was as good as taken by that people in that darkness."
Then there are the mangonels, or catapults, Polo writes about. According to the author, Polo, his father and uncle helped build huge rock-hurling machines that inflicted terrible damage on the city of Xiangyang as Kublai pressed his conquest of the southern Chinese dynasty, the Song. Chinese as well as Persian sources describe the destruction, but credit Syrians employed in Kublai's army for the catapults. In any case, the siege occurred in 1273, and almost all authorities believe the Polos didn't reach China until two years later. Polo probably heard of the siege and took note of it. It may be that Rustichello, always attracted to stories of battle, came across it somewhere in his reading and decided to make the Polos military engineers.
Starting home by ship in 1291 or 1292, Polo was forced to spend five months on "Java the Less"—Sumatra—waiting for monsoon winds to shift so that he and his shipmates could sail northwestward toward Ceylon and India. Polo reported, accurately, that cannibals dwelled on Sumatra and, less accurately, that the island was home to some strange beasts, including enormous unicorns, in size "not at all by any means less than an elephant."
"I tell you quite truly," Polo continued about Sumatra, "that there are men who have tails more than a palm in size." And on an island that he called Angaman—probably referring to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal—"all the men...have the crown of the head like a dog and teeth and eyes like dogs." Tales of strange creatures abounded in Asia as well, and Polo (who apparently never set foot on the Andamans) may have heard about them from sailors. It's also possible that he—or Rustichello—simply drew on the elaborate mythical bestiary of Europe's Middle Ages. (Or perhaps, as John Larner argues in Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, Polo was simply describing the islanders metaphorically.)
Even as he served up these wild reports, Polo methodically cataloged a South Asian cornucopia, about which Europe knew almost nothing: the nutmeg and aromatic roots of Java, the camphor and coconuts of Sumatra, the pearls, diamonds and pepper of India, ivory from several places—these and many other goods, all tantalizing to European merchants, were commingled with the beasts and fantasies. It's as if the world, as Europeans viewed it, were a mix of real and unreal.
Some readers took notice of things "which are reckoned past all credence," as a Dominican friar recorded. When Polo was dying, in 1324, friends urged him to remove "everything that went beyond the facts," presumably to cleanse his soul.
Polo refused, saying he had not written half of what he had seen. He might have added: "And only half of what Rustichello and I invented."
It has become a fashion now to reenact their adventures with all the comforts of present day.
Such dramas are bringing out a lot of information and are testimonials to the original travellers.
The following account is really interesting and talks about the places near to us. Read on.....
Wonders and Whoppers
"I tell you," wrote Marco Polo, "that this palace is of... unmeasured wealth." Its roof is sheathed in gold "in such a way as we cover our house with lead." Even the floors are gold, "more indeed than two fingers thick. And all the other parts of the palace and the halls and windows are likewise adorned with gold." In this gilded domain, he declared, lived the ruler of an island kingdom called Cipangu (that is, Japan), whose waters yielded red pearls "very beautiful and round and large."
Scholars believe Europeans had never heard of Cipangu before Polo told them about it in The Description of the World, which he started writing about 1298, a few years after he returned home to Venice from a 24-year Asian odyssey. Though fascinated, Polo's readers, according to one account, concluded that his tales were "fabulous...mere dreams." But as decades passed, some began to take Polo seriously. In Christopher Columbus' copy of The Description, which survives, "gold in the greatest abundance" and "red pearls" are written in the margin beside the Cipangu reports. Although the handwriting may not be Columbus', he is said to have sought Cipangu among the Caribbean isles on his 1492 voyage.
Columbus never came anywhere near Japan, of course, but what would he have found? Red pearls? Experts say the oysters that produce them don't inhabit Japanese waters. A golden palace? Japan's Golden Pavilion, the gold-leaf-covered Kinkakuji, was built in 1397, a century after Polo published.
Truth to tell, many of Marco Polo's tales of treasure were just that—tales. Tall tales. Readers who persevere in Polo's often confusing, disjointed text will encounter preposterous supernatural events and an astonishing bestiary, including men with the features of dogs. Some readers have even concluded that the book is a total fake. If Marco Polo went to China, British Sinologist Frances Wood asked some years ago in a book titled, appropriately enough, Did Marco Polo Go to China?, why did he fail to mention chopsticks, tea and the binding of girls' feet?
At the British Library, where Wood curates the Chinese collections, the switchboard lit up with calls from journalists and scholars. After all, Polo's book has ornamented libraries the world over for centuries and is regarded, despite its flaws, as one of the world's greatest travel accounts. Wood had taken on a global icon. "I knew that Marco Polo was a household name," she told an interviewer, "but I was unaware that millions of people all over the world felt passionately about him and would be baying for blood."
Polo's fellow Italians have long assumed that he was a fibber; both he and his text are known in his homeland by the name Il Milione, and many think it's because the book includes a million tall tales. But didn't Polo enrich Italy by bringing home pasta and ice cream? Nope, those are myths. Still, Italians weren't about to tolerate a challenge to Polo's integrity by a foreigner, and many other people in the world are likewise invested in him. In China, historians staunchly defend the man who helped put their country on the map.
About ten years ago, a staff writer for National Geographic, followed Polo's journeys across Asia, from Iraq to China and homeward via Sumatra, India and Sri Lanka, using his book as guide. (There are about 120 versions of his narrative; the one carried, generally considered the most authentic, is translated from a 14th-century copy in the French National Library.) Like others who have examined his writings closely, this writer was dismayed by his omissions and floored by his whoppers. But ultimately convinced of his essential truthfulness. Why? For one thing, his itineraries, as laid out by the sequence of book chapters, are fundamentally accurate, whether he's crossing Central Asia or central China. Where did he acquire that geographical information if he didn't make these journeys himself? No skeptical investigator has ever proved that he copied from some Arab or Chinese source. And while it's true that Polo is guilty of curious omissions (those chopsticks, for example), he expanded medieval Europe's meager knowledge of Asia with such hitherto-unknown names as Cipangu, Java, Zanzibar and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), besides identifying China's great cities and describing such features as the Takla Makan Desert and the Yangtze River. Having followed Polo's tracks, this writer knew firsthand that he also got many things right, such as: both lapis lazuli and rubies are found in the Badakhshan region of Afghanistan; in China's southwest a minority people eat raw flesh; people in Sumatra and Sri Lanka make a joy juice from fermented palm tree sap.
Polo also produced an extensive report on Hindu customs in India, a country that clearly fascinated him. But his great love was Catai, as he called China. No kingdom ever had a better PR person. Time and again Polo wrote of Catai's wealth in silk and spices (no exaggeration) and declared that people had "all things in great abundance." So far, so good. But soon he was claiming that Hangzhou had 12,000 bridges arcing over its canals, a ludicrous inflation, even though Hangzhou was the world's largest city at the time; he even accorded the much smaller Suzhou 6,000 bridges. "Take that, Venice!" he seemed to be saying to his canal-rich hometown. (A later traveler could find only 347 bridges in Hangzhou, including those in its suburbs, and just 290 in Suzhou.)
Polo practically bubbled with enthusiasm as he described the palace of Kublai Khan, the Mongol ruler of Catai, in what is today Beijing. (He called the capital Cambaluc, a corruption of its Turkish name, Khanbalikh, "Khan's city.") The palace was "the greatest that ever was seen," with a hall large enough to accommodate 6,000 diners, and was encompassed by a wall four miles around. In some versions of his book, the wall grew even longer, in one case to 32 miles. Mangling his claims according to their own whims, The Description's translators, scribes and finally printers (beginning in 1477) often took his inconstant veracity down a further peg or two.
Whenever Polo mentioned Kublai, he laid it on thick. His hunting retinue, we are told, included 20,000 dog handlers; 10,000 falconers carrying gyrfalcons, peregrines, saker falcons and goshawks (Polo showed himself to be an avid birder); and unstated numbers of lions, leopards and lynxes to go after wild boars and other big animals. Still extolling his overlord—he claimed to have been a trusted servant of Kublai's regime—Polo wrote that the new year was celebrated in Cambaluc with a parade of Kublai's elephants, "which are quite five thousand, all covered with beautiful cloths," and with gifts to the ruler of "more than 100,000 white horses very beautiful and fine."
It's true that Mongol lords reveled in the royal hunt, a huge spectacle, and that they celebrated holidays grandly. And no doubt Kublai, like many Asian potentates, kept stables of elephants as a mark of power—but nothing like 5,000. And historians are confident that he didn't hunt with any 20,000 dog handlers or 10,000 falconers. "The numbers are staggering—they're obviously exaggerated," says Professor Morris Rossabi of the City University of New York, author of the definitive study of Kublai's reign. It is difficult to imagine his people maintaining, for example, a royal herd of 100,000 steeds in the region of Beijing. "People in the north didn't grow enough food to sustain themselves," Rossabi says. "Most of it had to be brought from the south. I can't believe they devoted tremendous amounts of pastureland to having 100,000 horses." Some scribes who copied Polo's text shrank the elephant herd to 500 or omitted it altogether, probably smelling excess, while one version raised it to 105,000.
Still, Polo had plenty of authentic marvels with which to astonish his countrymen—black stones that burned better than wood; money made of paper, porcelain, asbestos; huge oceangoing ships. And he documented China's wealth in silk and spices as well as its commerce with India, Java and other parts of Asia—valuable information for a trading state like Venice.
So why all the hyperbole? We'll never know for sure, but exaggeration is sometimes a character defect in adventurers—Walter Raleigh's gold-strewn El Dorado comes to mind. And in 13th-century Europe, even outright lies were a literary conceit. Grotesque beasts and magical doings were routine in the modest libraries available to even the most educated Europeans. The Histories of Herodotus, for example, told of gold-digging ants in India and winged snakes in Egypt.
I believe Polo kept a journal during his travels; if not, how did he manage, when at last home in Venice, to set down the wealth of detail that he had accumulated during his two dozen years of travel? Polo's diary: what a sensational discovery that would be! He doesn't say he kept one, but a version of The Description that appeared in Venice in the 1500s, supposedly based on authentic manuscripts, declares that he brought home "writings and memoranda." And these, it is said, were shared with a writer who helped him produce his book. That person is identified at the beginning of the text as Rustichello of Pisa, who'd been reworking some of the romantic stories of King Arthur, and whose writings had found their way into European libraries. According to Polo, he met Rustichello in a Genoa prison, into which Polo had been thrown after being captured in a sea battle between Venice and rival Genoa about 1298. Sounds like another tall Polo tale, but so far as scholars know, it's true.
Scholars see the hand of Rustichello in the book's account of a battle between Genghis Khan and Prester John, a Christian ruler in Asia, early in the 13th century. With its huge loss of life—although no body count was recorded—the engagement made a good story. Too bad there was no such person as Prester John; as historians know today, he was entirely a European invention. The legend was no doubt well known to Rustichello, while less so to Polo.
It is suspected that Rustichello concocted the tale of robbers able to "make the whole day become dark" as they swept down upon travelers. Polo described such an attack on his caravan in the desert of Iran. The passage continues, suspiciously, in the third person: "Moreover I tell you that Master Marc himself was as good as taken by that people in that darkness."
Then there are the mangonels, or catapults, Polo writes about. According to the author, Polo, his father and uncle helped build huge rock-hurling machines that inflicted terrible damage on the city of Xiangyang as Kublai pressed his conquest of the southern Chinese dynasty, the Song. Chinese as well as Persian sources describe the destruction, but credit Syrians employed in Kublai's army for the catapults. In any case, the siege occurred in 1273, and almost all authorities believe the Polos didn't reach China until two years later. Polo probably heard of the siege and took note of it. It may be that Rustichello, always attracted to stories of battle, came across it somewhere in his reading and decided to make the Polos military engineers.
Starting home by ship in 1291 or 1292, Polo was forced to spend five months on "Java the Less"—Sumatra—waiting for monsoon winds to shift so that he and his shipmates could sail northwestward toward Ceylon and India. Polo reported, accurately, that cannibals dwelled on Sumatra and, less accurately, that the island was home to some strange beasts, including enormous unicorns, in size "not at all by any means less than an elephant."
"I tell you quite truly," Polo continued about Sumatra, "that there are men who have tails more than a palm in size." And on an island that he called Angaman—probably referring to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal—"all the men...have the crown of the head like a dog and teeth and eyes like dogs." Tales of strange creatures abounded in Asia as well, and Polo (who apparently never set foot on the Andamans) may have heard about them from sailors. It's also possible that he—or Rustichello—simply drew on the elaborate mythical bestiary of Europe's Middle Ages. (Or perhaps, as John Larner argues in Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, Polo was simply describing the islanders metaphorically.)
Even as he served up these wild reports, Polo methodically cataloged a South Asian cornucopia, about which Europe knew almost nothing: the nutmeg and aromatic roots of Java, the camphor and coconuts of Sumatra, the pearls, diamonds and pepper of India, ivory from several places—these and many other goods, all tantalizing to European merchants, were commingled with the beasts and fantasies. It's as if the world, as Europeans viewed it, were a mix of real and unreal.
Some readers took notice of things "which are reckoned past all credence," as a Dominican friar recorded. When Polo was dying, in 1324, friends urged him to remove "everything that went beyond the facts," presumably to cleanse his soul.
Polo refused, saying he had not written half of what he had seen. He might have added: "And only half of what Rustichello and I invented."
Friday, June 4, 2010
Change, A Challenge - The Story of the Changing Waters
మారిన నీరు - మారిన మనిషి
మోజెస్ గురువుగారయిన ఖిధ్ర్, ఒకానొకప్పుడు మానవాళికి ఒక హెచ్చరిక చేశారు. ఒకానొక దినాన, ప్రత్యేకంగా నిలువ చేసి ఉంచినవి తప్ప, ప్రపంచంలోని నీళ్లన్నీ మాయమవుతాయన్నారాయన. తరువాత కొత్తరకం నీళ్లు వస్తాయి. ఆ నీళ్లు తాగినవారికి పిచ్చి ఎక్కుతుంది. అది ఆయనగారి హెచ్చరిక. ఆ మాటలోని అసలు సందేశం ఒక మనిషికి మాత్రం అర్థమయింది. అతను నీటిని సేకరించి, ఒక రహస్యమయిన చోట దాచుకున్నాడు. మిగతా నీటి లక్షణం ఎప్పుడు మారుతుందా అని ఎదురు చూడసాగాడు.
అన్నట్టే ఒక రోజున నదులన్నీ స్తంభించాయి. బావులు ఎండిపోయినయి. ఈ మనిషి సంతోషంగా తను నీళ్లు దాచుకున్న చోటికి చేరాడు. ఆ నీటిని తాగుతూ ఉన్నాడు. ఒకటి రెండు రోజుల్లో తిరిగి జలపాతాలనుంచి నీరు దూకసాగింది. అంటే కొత్త నీళ్లు వచ్చినట్టు లెక్క. ఈ మనిషి, తరువాత అందరిలోకీ వెళ్లి గమనించసాగాడు.
అందరి ఆలోచనలు, మాటతీరు మారినట్టు సులభంగానే గమనించగలిగాడు. వారికెవరికీ గతం గుర్తు లేదు. గురువుగారి హెచ్చరిక అంతకన్నా గుర్తులేదు. ఈ మనిషి వాళ్లతో మాట్లాడే ప్రయత్నం చేసి, అందరిచేతా పిచ్చివాడు అనిపించుకున్నాడు. అందరూ ఇతనిని అవహేళన చేశారు కూడా.
అతను చాలా కాలం వరకు కొత్త నీటిని తాగకుండా గడిపాడు. రహస్యస్థలంలో తను దాచుకున్న నీటిని మాత్రమే తాగుతున్నాడు.
కానీ రానురాను అతనికి అందరి మధ్యన ఉంటూ కూడా ఒంటరివాడయిన భావం కలిగింది. తాను అందరిలాగ ఆలోచించడు. అందరిలాగ మాట్లాడడు. అది అతనికి కష్టంగా తోచింది.
చివరకు అతను కొత్త నీటిని తాగాలనే నిర్ణయానికి వచ్చాడు. తాగాడు. అందరిలాగే తానూ మారిపోయాడు.
అతనికి కూడా గురువుగారి హెచ్చరిక, తను నిలువ చేసిన నీళ్లు ఏవీ గుర్తు లేవు. మిగతా వారందరూ ఈ మనిషిని చూచి, “పిచ్చివాని పిచ్చి కుదిరింది లాగుంది. మళ్లీ మామూలు మనిషయ్యాడు!” అన్నారు.
అతనూ అందరిలాగే బతకసాగాడు.
When the Waters Were Changed
ONCE upon a time Khidr, the Teacher of Moses, called upon mankind with a warning. At a certain date, he said, all the water in the world which had not been specially hoarded would disappear. It would then be renewed, with different water, which would drive men mad.
Only one man listened to the meaning of this advice. He collected water and went to a secure place where he stored it, and waited for the water to change its character.
On the appointed date the streams stopped running, the wells went dry, and the man, who had listened, seeing this happening, went to his retreat and drank his preserved water.
When he saw, from his security, the waterfalls again beginning to flow, this man descended among the other sons of men. He found that they were thinking and talking in an entirely different way from before; yet they had no memory of what had happened, or of having been warned. When he tried to talk to them, he realized that they thought that he was mad, and they showed hostility or compassion, not understanding.
At first he drank none of the new water, but went back to his concealment, to draw on his supplies, every day. Finally, however, he took the decision to drink the new water because he could not bear the loneliness of living, behaving and thinking in a different way from everyone else. He drank the new water, and became like the rest. Then he forgot all about his own store of special water, and his fellows began to look upon him as a madman who had miraculously been restored to sanity.
So, Does that mean we have to change to keep up with the world?
?????????
మోజెస్ గురువుగారయిన ఖిధ్ర్, ఒకానొకప్పుడు మానవాళికి ఒక హెచ్చరిక చేశారు. ఒకానొక దినాన, ప్రత్యేకంగా నిలువ చేసి ఉంచినవి తప్ప, ప్రపంచంలోని నీళ్లన్నీ మాయమవుతాయన్నారాయన. తరువాత కొత్తరకం నీళ్లు వస్తాయి. ఆ నీళ్లు తాగినవారికి పిచ్చి ఎక్కుతుంది. అది ఆయనగారి హెచ్చరిక. ఆ మాటలోని అసలు సందేశం ఒక మనిషికి మాత్రం అర్థమయింది. అతను నీటిని సేకరించి, ఒక రహస్యమయిన చోట దాచుకున్నాడు. మిగతా నీటి లక్షణం ఎప్పుడు మారుతుందా అని ఎదురు చూడసాగాడు.
అన్నట్టే ఒక రోజున నదులన్నీ స్తంభించాయి. బావులు ఎండిపోయినయి. ఈ మనిషి సంతోషంగా తను నీళ్లు దాచుకున్న చోటికి చేరాడు. ఆ నీటిని తాగుతూ ఉన్నాడు. ఒకటి రెండు రోజుల్లో తిరిగి జలపాతాలనుంచి నీరు దూకసాగింది. అంటే కొత్త నీళ్లు వచ్చినట్టు లెక్క. ఈ మనిషి, తరువాత అందరిలోకీ వెళ్లి గమనించసాగాడు.
అందరి ఆలోచనలు, మాటతీరు మారినట్టు సులభంగానే గమనించగలిగాడు. వారికెవరికీ గతం గుర్తు లేదు. గురువుగారి హెచ్చరిక అంతకన్నా గుర్తులేదు. ఈ మనిషి వాళ్లతో మాట్లాడే ప్రయత్నం చేసి, అందరిచేతా పిచ్చివాడు అనిపించుకున్నాడు. అందరూ ఇతనిని అవహేళన చేశారు కూడా.
అతను చాలా కాలం వరకు కొత్త నీటిని తాగకుండా గడిపాడు. రహస్యస్థలంలో తను దాచుకున్న నీటిని మాత్రమే తాగుతున్నాడు.
కానీ రానురాను అతనికి అందరి మధ్యన ఉంటూ కూడా ఒంటరివాడయిన భావం కలిగింది. తాను అందరిలాగ ఆలోచించడు. అందరిలాగ మాట్లాడడు. అది అతనికి కష్టంగా తోచింది.
చివరకు అతను కొత్త నీటిని తాగాలనే నిర్ణయానికి వచ్చాడు. తాగాడు. అందరిలాగే తానూ మారిపోయాడు.
అతనికి కూడా గురువుగారి హెచ్చరిక, తను నిలువ చేసిన నీళ్లు ఏవీ గుర్తు లేవు. మిగతా వారందరూ ఈ మనిషిని చూచి, “పిచ్చివాని పిచ్చి కుదిరింది లాగుంది. మళ్లీ మామూలు మనిషయ్యాడు!” అన్నారు.
అతనూ అందరిలాగే బతకసాగాడు.
When the Waters Were Changed
ONCE upon a time Khidr, the Teacher of Moses, called upon mankind with a warning. At a certain date, he said, all the water in the world which had not been specially hoarded would disappear. It would then be renewed, with different water, which would drive men mad.
Only one man listened to the meaning of this advice. He collected water and went to a secure place where he stored it, and waited for the water to change its character.
On the appointed date the streams stopped running, the wells went dry, and the man, who had listened, seeing this happening, went to his retreat and drank his preserved water.
When he saw, from his security, the waterfalls again beginning to flow, this man descended among the other sons of men. He found that they were thinking and talking in an entirely different way from before; yet they had no memory of what had happened, or of having been warned. When he tried to talk to them, he realized that they thought that he was mad, and they showed hostility or compassion, not understanding.
At first he drank none of the new water, but went back to his concealment, to draw on his supplies, every day. Finally, however, he took the decision to drink the new water because he could not bear the loneliness of living, behaving and thinking in a different way from everyone else. He drank the new water, and became like the rest. Then he forgot all about his own store of special water, and his fellows began to look upon him as a madman who had miraculously been restored to sanity.
So, Does that mean we have to change to keep up with the world?
?????????
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Vemana verses
Vemana is known to us a man without clothes. He was certainly a renounced. But not before he made a comment on the man woman relations.
He said certain interesting things about women. The beliefs are stereotypes for our present understanding. A female was an undeserving person and was only meant for procreation and keeping the hearth warm.
ఆలు మగని మాట కడ్డంబు వచ్చెనా
ఆలుగాదు నుదుటి వ్రాలుగాని
అట్టియాలు విడిచి యడవి యుండుటమేలు
Alu magani mATakaDDambu vaccenA
AlugAdu nuduTi vralugAni
aTTi yAli viDici YaDaviyunDuTa mElu
Vemana says that if the wife comes in the way of the man’s talking, that is if she talks back, she would not be a wife but the fate so written. He says that it would better to leave such a wife and live in a forest.
Difference of opinion is different from being adamant. I am sure the poet is talking about an adamant wife here. If the wife does not understand and keep harmony at the palce, the life is abd even for the wife. Vemana has also said about looking after the wife.
See the next verse.
కావవలయు మగడు కాంతనెల్లప్పుడు
కావలేని నాడు చావవలయు
కాపులేని దాని కాపురమడుగరా
kAvavlayu magaDu kAntanellappuDu
kAvlEninADu cAvvalayu
kApulEni dAni kApuramaDugarA
A husband should always protect the wife says Vemana. Is it protecting or taking care? Protection is when she is at risk. “Bharya roopayutah shatruh” said the tradition. If the wife is good looking, she would turn an enemy. It is not exactly about her trying to antogonise the man, but becoming a problem for him because every man in the land being interested in her. She then deserves protection. Vemana also says if you cannot protect the wife it si better you die. If the honor is at risk, it sure calls for some serious thinking. If teher is no protection for a woman whether good looking or otherwise, the family life is at risk.
Here I am in doubt about the word used.
It must be kApuramagaDura. agadu means at a low level. Such a family life will be not exactly good.
Another verse on man and wife relation.
ఆలి వంచలేక యధమత్వమున నుండి
వెనుక వంతుననుట వెర్రితనము
చెట్టు ముదరనిచ్చి చిదిమిన పోవునా
Ali vanca lEka Yadhamatvamuna nunDi
venuka vantunanuTa verritanamu
ceTTu mudaranicci cidimina pOvunA
If you are not able to control an adamant wife and say you will take it up later, you are mad says Vemana. Direct challenge to the man from Vemana here. Man is supposed to be at the helm and controlling the wife. Does that sound good at the present juncture? He says if you allow the plant to grow and become string, it cannot be nipped.
Vemana has written a lot of verses about man woman relations. I found these verses in a book of lectures by Sriman Rallapalli Anantakrishna Sharma garu, an authority on Vemana.
We shall share some of his impressions on Vemana in the coming posts on the subject.
Words of wisdom also call for some rethinking!
$$$$$$
He said certain interesting things about women. The beliefs are stereotypes for our present understanding. A female was an undeserving person and was only meant for procreation and keeping the hearth warm.
ఆలు మగని మాట కడ్డంబు వచ్చెనా
ఆలుగాదు నుదుటి వ్రాలుగాని
అట్టియాలు విడిచి యడవి యుండుటమేలు
Alu magani mATakaDDambu vaccenA
AlugAdu nuduTi vralugAni
aTTi yAli viDici YaDaviyunDuTa mElu
Vemana says that if the wife comes in the way of the man’s talking, that is if she talks back, she would not be a wife but the fate so written. He says that it would better to leave such a wife and live in a forest.
Difference of opinion is different from being adamant. I am sure the poet is talking about an adamant wife here. If the wife does not understand and keep harmony at the palce, the life is abd even for the wife. Vemana has also said about looking after the wife.
See the next verse.
కావవలయు మగడు కాంతనెల్లప్పుడు
కావలేని నాడు చావవలయు
కాపులేని దాని కాపురమడుగరా
kAvavlayu magaDu kAntanellappuDu
kAvlEninADu cAvvalayu
kApulEni dAni kApuramaDugarA
A husband should always protect the wife says Vemana. Is it protecting or taking care? Protection is when she is at risk. “Bharya roopayutah shatruh” said the tradition. If the wife is good looking, she would turn an enemy. It is not exactly about her trying to antogonise the man, but becoming a problem for him because every man in the land being interested in her. She then deserves protection. Vemana also says if you cannot protect the wife it si better you die. If the honor is at risk, it sure calls for some serious thinking. If teher is no protection for a woman whether good looking or otherwise, the family life is at risk.
Here I am in doubt about the word used.
It must be kApuramagaDura. agadu means at a low level. Such a family life will be not exactly good.
Another verse on man and wife relation.
ఆలి వంచలేక యధమత్వమున నుండి
వెనుక వంతుననుట వెర్రితనము
చెట్టు ముదరనిచ్చి చిదిమిన పోవునా
Ali vanca lEka Yadhamatvamuna nunDi
venuka vantunanuTa verritanamu
ceTTu mudaranicci cidimina pOvunA
If you are not able to control an adamant wife and say you will take it up later, you are mad says Vemana. Direct challenge to the man from Vemana here. Man is supposed to be at the helm and controlling the wife. Does that sound good at the present juncture? He says if you allow the plant to grow and become string, it cannot be nipped.
Vemana has written a lot of verses about man woman relations. I found these verses in a book of lectures by Sriman Rallapalli Anantakrishna Sharma garu, an authority on Vemana.
We shall share some of his impressions on Vemana in the coming posts on the subject.
Words of wisdom also call for some rethinking!
$$$$$$
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Kunnakkudi Vaidyanathan - Taye Yashoda
Sri Kunnakkudi Vaidyanathan is known for his variety and style.
I have already presented some of his albums.
Here is one more for your listening pleasure.
This is a very old and interesting album.
List:
01-Srimahaganapathi-Gaula.mp3
02-Rama_Ninnu-Mohanam.mp3
03-Sarasara-Kuntalavarali.mp3
04-Taye_Yashoda-Todi.mp3
05-Light_Items.mp3
Link:
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=10f3f26dc390f408ab1eab3e9fa335cae71bb01fcb0faf2d
Let us enjoy good music!!
@@@@@
Here is one more for your listening pleasure.
This is a very old and interesting album.
List:
01-Srimahaganapathi-Gaula.mp3
02-Rama_Ninnu-Mohanam.mp3
03-Sarasara-Kuntalavarali.mp3
04-Taye_Yashoda-Todi.mp3
05-Light_Items.mp3
Link:
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=10f3f26dc390f408ab1eab3e9fa335cae71bb01fcb0faf2d
Let us enjoy good music!!
@@@@@
Balamurali Sarvasri
The versatile Balamurali must have recorded many things and forgotten about them also.
The number of his recordings is mind boggling.
I am listening to some of his old albums and am stunned at the variety of content.
Here is another album for you from the one and only Dr. M Balamuralikrishna.
I don't have to tell about the unique nature if this album.
List:
01 - Uma Sutam Namami.mp3
02 - Siddhi Nayakena.mp3
03 - Ganadhipam.mp3
04 - Mahaniya.mp3
05 - Mahadeva Sutham.mp3
06 - Heera Ganapathiki.mp3
Link:
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=10f3f26dc390f408ab1eab3e9fa335ca1c1611eee3fc1087
Let us enjoy good music!!
@@@@@
The number of his recordings is mind boggling.
I am listening to some of his old albums and am stunned at the variety of content.
Here is another album for you from the one and only Dr. M Balamuralikrishna.
I don't have to tell about the unique nature if this album.
List:
01 - Uma Sutam Namami.mp3
02 - Siddhi Nayakena.mp3
03 - Ganadhipam.mp3
04 - Mahaniya.mp3
05 - Mahadeva Sutham.mp3
06 - Heera Ganapathiki.mp3
Link:
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=10f3f26dc390f408ab1eab3e9fa335ca1c1611eee3fc1087
Let us enjoy good music!!
@@@@@
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Photographs from Swathy Collection
Here are some interesting photos captured by my daughter on her way to Tirumala.
Up up and above!
The way up!
The steps
My daughter sure is a good photographer!
A doctor in the making!
*******
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