Wednesday 8 February 2012

Charles Dickens: A Few Images

I have collected these images from the internet and have arraged them randomly to give you a literal look at the author who has inspired me every since I was a boy. You can easily come across his biography anywhere so I am refraining from repeating it here. Here are just a few images to set your imagination on fire, as every Dickens novel does.I have not arranged the images in any order so that they all look fresh. The 7th of February, 2012, was celebrated as the 200th birth anniversary of Charles Dickens all over the world. Though writing in the 19th century, his works still hold meaning in the world of today where income disparity, poverty and corruption is as rampant as it was in 19th century Britain. I just hope we learn from his advice even if we are more than a hundred years late.

  
Charles Dickens as a young boy.
The author in his youth.  
The author as a yong man.
The house that Charles Dickens lived in.
Charles Dickens' house.

Charles The library at Charles Dickens' house.








The parlour at Charles Dickens' house.























Genealogy of the author.

The young Charles Dickens.

The library at Charles Dickens' House.







The author as a young man.




Charles Dickens with his family.


Charles Dickens with his family and friends.
Google's search page on 7th February, 2012, in honour of the 200th birth anniversary of Charles Dickens.

Valentine's Day: A Glimpse of History




People all over the world celebrate Valentine’s Day on the 14th of February, but few people ask why we do so. Most of my friends are unaware of the story behind this centuries-old ritual, but they are so eagerly looking forward to enjoying it. This is just an attempt  to put the day into perspective, especially for those conservative people in society who look upon the day with suspicion and disgust.

Valentine’s Day or St Valentine’s Day is celebrated to commemorate the death of St Valentine. It is not very clear who Saint Valentine actually was. There are about three Valentines who were martyred and mystery shrouds the fact as to who among these three is honoured by the celebration of Valentine’s Day. Valentine of Rome, a priest in Rome, was martyred in AD 269; Valentine of Terni was the bishop of Interamna (modern Terni) and is said to have been martyred during the persecution under Emperor Aurelian; and there is also a mention of a Valentine who was martyred on the 14th of February in Africa. None of the biographies of these men mention any romantic element about any of these Valentines, but by the 14th century Valentine’s Day was associated with romance and the distinction between the three Valentines had been completely lost.

Several legends abound as to the origins of Valentine’s Day. The most popular legend refers to a 3rd century Christian priest in Rome named Valentine. During the reign of Emperor Claudius II of Rome, marriage among young people was outlawed as the emperor came to believe that single men made better soldiers than married ones. But Valentine went on performing secret marriages among young couples. When the emperor came to learn of this, he put Valentine to death – somewhere around AD 269. Another legend talks of Valentine being put to death trying to assist Christians in escaping Roman prisons where they were tortured. Legend also has it that Valentine sent the first Valentine’s Day greeting while he was imprisoned to – most probably – the daughter of the jailer, who visited him every day in the prison, and with whom he had fallen in love. It is also said that this girl had been blind and Valentine cured her of her blindness. It is said that this greeting was signed, “From your Valentine”, a phrase that is still very alive.

But the celebration of the month of February as a month of romance has a much deeper root in the rituals of pre-Christian Rome. Many believe that the celebration of Valentine’s Day can be traced back to the celebrations of Lupercalia in Rome. Lupercalia was celebrated around the 13-15 February and was essentially a fertility cult dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome.

An order of the Roman priests, called the Luperci, gathered on that day at a secret cave that was believed to have been the cave in which infant Romulus and Remus were cared for by a she-wolf or lupa, and sacrificed a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification. The goat’s hide would be then stripped into strips and dipped in the sacrificial blood. The priests would then take to the streets, gently slapping women and crop fields with the strips as it was believed that the touch would make them more fertile. Legend has it that on that day, all the young women of the city placed their names in a big urn, from which the city’s bachelors drew a name and became paired with the woman for the year. This often ended in marriage.

Lupercalia prevailed during the early part of Christianity, but it was deemed “un-Christian” and outlawed during the 5th century, when Pope Gelasius I declared the 14th of February as St Valentine’s Day in AD 496. Valentine’s Day became associated with love much later, and at the time was believed by many in France and England to be the beginning of the mating season for birds. On the other hand, Valentine’s Day greetings were popular during the Middle Ages, but the first written greetings that we have today is a poem from 1415, written by Charles, Duke of Orleans, to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt. It is said that Valentine’s Day first became associated with Romantic love during the time of Geoffrey Chaucer when the tradition of courtly love flourished. A verse by Chaucer refers to the day and he is often seen as the first person who associated romantic love with Valentine’s Day. The day has been deleted from the General Roman Calendar of Saints in 1969 by Pope Paul VI, but many churches continue to celebrate the day.

Valentine’s Day began to be popular in Great Britain around the 17th century, and by the 18th century it became a common practice for friends and lovers to exchange tokens of affection (called valentine) and hand-written notes. By the beginning of the 20th century, due to the improvement in printing technology, cheap postal rates and social prohibition on direct expression of one’s feelings, printed cards began to be popular. In America, hand-written greetings became popular during the early 18th century, but it was Esther A. Howland, known as the “Mother of the Valentine”, who made printed cards popular during the 1840s. At present, the Greeting Card Association claims that an estimated 1 billion Valentine’s Day cards are sold every year, with women buying 85% of those.

Another piece of information that I came across in Wikipedia is that “the modern cliché Valentine's Day poem can be found in the collection of English nursery rhymes Gammer Gurton's Garland (1784):
The rose is red, the violet's blue
The honey's sweet, and so are you
Thou are my love and I am thine
I drew thee to my Valentine
The lot was cast and then I drew
And Fortune said it shou'd be you.”


Courtsey: The Internet, especially Wikipedia.

Tuesday 7 February 2012

NEED HELP! NEED A GOOD SAMARITAN!

A visually-challenged friend of mine has been diagnosed with Leukemia. The treatment for Leukemia includes Chemotherapy and/or Bone Marrow transplant. Both these processes are extremely expensive for a person coming from a lower middle class background. The estimated cost of the treatment varies from hospital to hospital but is around the sum of Rs 20 Lakhs. He is at present undergoing preliminary treatment at CMCH Vellore.

Is there anyone out there who would be willing to sponsor the treatment of my friend? Is there anyone out there who knows of someone else who can sponsor the treatment? Does anyone know of any organization that sponsors such treatment? My friend needs help and I request you all, on his behalf, to come forward and help him. If there is anyone willing to help or knows people or organizations that can help, please get in touch with me as soon as possible.

Monday 6 February 2012

Ramblings of an 18 Year Old


Munni is my friend from school. We live in the same town and have been friends for a few years. She is very pretty but is not very smart. She now goes to a local college while I go to a well known one in the city. I have always liked her and whenever I come home from college during vacations we spend a lot of time together. She also likes me a lot and we have long heart to heart conversations. But we are not dating. We are just friends – good friends.

Then there is Sheila in college. She is also a very close friend of mine in college and we hang out together a lot. She is not that beautiful but she is very smart. I really like her company and she also seems to like mine. But we are not dating. We are just friends – good friends.

I guess I am in love. I love both Munni and Sheila but in a different way and I can simply not make up my mind whom to chose as my girlfriend. I would like my girlfriend to be beautiful, in which case I have to go with Munni. But I would also like my girlfriend to be smart, in which case Sheila is the obvious choice.

I have known Munni for a longer time than I have Sheila. I know Munni much better and she seems to understand me, but she is not very smart. She does not read too many books and does not speak or understand English very well. How can I take her in front of my other friends? What will they think of her? It is true that she makes me laugh and I really care about her, but she won’t fit my social status. Undoubtedly she is much more beautiful than any of my friends’ girlfriends, but she will be the odd one out as she won’t be able to participate in discussions. I mean, come on, she likes Bollywood movies and she has no clue who Johnny Depp is or who won the Oscars or what the series Friends is all about!

Sheila is not that pretty but she is smart. She reads a lot and has read all the Nobel laureates in Literature. She watches French and Italian movies and she is suave. But she is very moody. She throws her temper all around and does not understand me most of the time. This does not matter much as she is so busy all the time doing something or the other. She is kind of attractive in her own intellectual way.

I guess I should go with Sheila. She has a very good social standing and she would increase my cool quotient among my friends. I know Munni cares for me and all but I need something more. I am so better than her. Sheila is just my type. This time when I go back to college I shall propose to her. God, I love her so much!

[P.S.: It so turns out that when the boy goes back to college he finds Sheila already dating a guy. He planned to come back and propose to Munni during the vacations, but Munni was also dating someone by then.]

Sunday 22 January 2012

Chitrangada Singh


The first time I saw her she was mesmerizing! I kept waiting for her to appear. I just could not take my eyes off her. It was in the movie Desi Boyz that I first noticed Chitrangada Singh Randhawa. I had seen her earlier movies like Hazaron Khwahishe Aisi and  Sorry Bhai but had never been able to find her name. I have found her extremely pretty. Now, when I say this to my friends, some of them start a discussion on how she is hot and not pretty or how she is pretty and not hot. How do I care? I just like her and find her really pretty in my own way. It is a heart breaker that she is married, and even if she was not she would never notice me. But the fact remains a fact – she looks fabulous! Thanks to a dear friend of mine, I had an opportunity today to watch her on the TV in an award show. She was simply mesmerizing! Maybe one day I shall meet her and then I shall tell her how pretty she is – however cheezy that might sound!