bentalk

Autumn comes hesitatingly in montreal

2011-10-12T14:17:00.000-07:00

Photo from cimetière Notre-Dame des neiges

The miracle that was Mother Teresa ( re-post from THE HINDU)

2011-08-27T03:56:00.000-07:00

Navin Chawla

Mother Teresa's path was a unique one. While she never deviated from her faith, she reached out to millions of her special constituency, the deprived and the dying, recognising their faces to be the face of her God.

A few weeks ago I visited one of Mother Teresa's Sisters who was admitted for surgery in the PGI hospital in Chandigarh. Haryana Chief Secretary Urvashi Gulati and the Principal Secretary to the Governor accompanied me that morning to Sister Ann Vinita's bedside. Attending to her in the hospital were two companion Sisters of the Missionaries of Charity. In the course of conversation, one of them said that she was really happy to meet me. She went on to explain that as a young woman in Kerala, she had admired Mother Teresa's work, but it was when she chanced to read my biography of Mother Teresa that she decided to join the Order. That a young Catholic woman should have read a book written by one, who while he was unmistakably close to Mother Teresa yet did not share her faith, stunned me into silence. It made me reflect on a number of issues related and unrelated: of the strength of secular values; and of true compassion knowing no religious, ethnic, caste or geographical boundaries, and indeed being able to transcend altogether the formal contours of religious practice.

Mother Teresa understood her environment acutely. She was no evangelist in the 19th century mould. She remained true to her religion till her last breath, but chose not to impose it on others. Never once during my 23-year-long association with her did she ever suggest that her religion was the only path, or that it was in any way superior. Yet she often reminded those around her of the power of prayer. If I occasionally remarked on some initiative she had taken as a “good idea,” she would reply with a teasing smile that if I learned to pray I would get a few good ideas too! She often urged those who came to her that they must be good Hindus or Muslims or Christians or Sikhs, and in that process must learn to “find God.”

It was indicative of her success that she understood that in an overwhelmingly non-Christian India, her path had to be a unique one. So while she never deviated from her faith, she reached out to millions of her special constituency: the poorest of the poor, the leprosy sufferers, abandoned children or the hungry and dying, recognising their faces to be the face of her God. Their religious persuasion, or even its absence, hardly concerned her. In her ability to have found the middle path in an environment that could have easily become hostile, lay her genius. I once asked the legendary Chief Minster of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu, what he an atheist and a Communist could possibly have in common with a Catholic nun for whom God was everything. With a smile, he replied: “We share a love for the poor.” India revered her and gave her abundantly of its honours, including the Bharat Ratna. On August 26, 2010, a five- rupee coin was released to commemorate her birth centenary.

Over the years I witnessed many incidents that I called “co-incidences” and which others might well call “miracles.” One day in the 1980s at Mother House in Kolkata, a rare medicine was needed to save the life of a child. In those days it was not manufactured in India. When hope was almost lost, and as the Sisters prayed, a carton of assorted leftover medicines was donated by an unknown benefactor. Right on top was the very drug that was needed. The child's life was saved.

On another occasion, Mother Teresa arrived in Delhi from abroad. I was at the airport to receive her. Her flight was late. As she got off, anxiety was writ over her face. “You must get me on the flight to Calcutta. There is a dying child here; I am carrying a new medicine.” I told Mother that was impossible. Her flight had been late, and the last Calcutta-bound Indian Airlines flight was boarding. Mother Teresa's own luggage was also yet to come. But as word spread at the airport, the seemingly impossible happened. The first few items of luggage on the conveyer belt happened to be her cardboard cartons (she never owned a suitcase!). Someone informed air traffic control of Mother Teresa's efforts. The pilot happened to be a Calcutta man. Suddenly I was asked if I could drive Mother Teresa in my car to the tarmac — and she caught her flight. I rang her the next morning. The child had been administered the medicine on her arrival, and was now out of danger. “It is a first-class miracle,” said Mother Teresa.

Far from once not believing in miracles, I am now in little doubt that Mother Teresa's life itself was a miracle. Witness the facts: as a child of 14 in her native Albania, her imagination was stirred by the stories she heard from the Jesuit Fathers of their work in distant Bengal; at 18, still a teenager, her mind was made up. She took leave of her own beloved mother and joined the Loreto Order of teaching nuns, her only means in the year 1928 of reaching India. It was an age when missionaries seldom returned home, and she was embarking on a life in a world of which she knew nothing. She was sent to Darjeeling for training. She learned to speak Bengali fluently. After almost 20 happy years as a teaching nun, she audaciously sought (and finally received) permission from the Vatican to become the first nun in the history of the Church to step outside convent walls, not as a lay person, but as a nun with her vows intact, to start a mission of her own. She had no helper, no companion, and no money to speak of. Imagine the Calcutta of 1948, overflowing with refugees after Partition, homelessness, poverty and disease everywhere. She wore no recognisable nun's habit; instead a sari, akin to that worn by municipal sweepresses, that cost one rupee. This is where she started her life's arduous mission.

We know where she left off. By the time she passed away in 1997, she had created her presence in 123 countries. She ran a multinational run by 5,000 nuns of her Order, without the help of government grants or Church assistance. She had been awarded every conceivable prize of distinction. She was as warmly received in palaces and chancelleries as she was in the slums and streets of the world's cities. People sometimes accuse her of converting others to her faith: surely then there was no need for her to set up a branch in the heart of the Vatican. She cajoled Pope John Paul II to carve out a soup kitchen next to his grand audience chamber. Anyone today can witness the queues of Rome's poor, who are fed their only hot meal every evening. A former British Prime Minister told me not long ago that when Mother Teresa visited him at Downing Street she always managed to get his aides overruled, and got everything she wanted — because it was always for ‘her poor.' In any event, by now it was difficult for Prime Ministers to say ‘no' to her, for she was recognised as the conscience-keeper of her age.

As a Hindu, armed only with a certain eclecticism, I found it took me longer than most others to understand that Mother Teresa was with Christ in each conscious hour, whether at Mass, or with each of those whom she tended. The Christ on her crucifix was not different from the one who lay dying at her hospice in Kalighat. There could be no contradiction in her oft-repeated words that one must reach out to one's neighbour.

For Mother Teresa, to love one's neighbour was to love God. This was what was essential to her, not the size of her mission or the power others perceived in her. “We are called upon not to be successful, but to be faithful,” she explained. Mother Teresa exemplified that faith — in prayer, in love, in service, and in peace.

(Navin Chawla, a former Chief Election Commissioner of India, is the author of Mother Teresa: The Authorised Biography.)

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article2397132.ece?homepage=true#.TlezXB3vs9o.facebook

Re-post: if this doesn't warm your heart, you're awful.

2011-07-23T15:29:00.000-07:00

Play of the day! Selfless young fan returns ball to upset boy

There's hope for America's future yet!

In one of the most heartwarming scenes you'll ever see, a young Arizona Diamondbacks fan named Ian made Wednesday's play of the day at Chase Field after an even younger fan named Nicholas missed a ball thrown his way by Milwaukee Brewers second baseman Rickie Weeks(notes).

Though the dropped ball was instead handed to Ian by another person, he immediately recognized what he had to do after seeing Nicholas in a distraught state after botching an attempt at a souvenir. With an amazed audience looking on, Ian marched back down the stairs and graciously handed the baseball over to Nicholas, a Brewers fan, without any prodding from anyone else.

As Deadspin notes, "if this doesn't warm your heart, you're awful."

http://ca.sports.yahoo.com/mlb/blog/big_league_stew/post/Play-of-the-day-Selfless-young-fan-returns-ball?urn=mlb-wp13421

(re-post)- Recurring case of the idiot priest

2011-07-18T03:47:00.000-07:00

Recurring case of the idiot priest

Ordination changes many things about a man theologically, sociologically and emotionally. But there are some things the sacrament will not change. If you ordain an idiot, you wind up with an idiot priest.

Idiot priests, rather than loss of faith, have caused most of the cases I have encountered of people who have left the Catholic Church. Poorly-prepared or totally unprepared homilies are one major element, abuse is another, pastoral insensitivity in times of need is a big third, but by far the most faith-destructive encounters between idiot priests and the People of God occur in connection with the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

I know a woman whose journey away from Catholicism began as early as her first confession. The priest was nicknamed “Baby Jesus” by the other priests in the parish because “he thinks he’s God almighty.” His haughty disdain for her as a child taught her that God is not worthy of any form of relationship.

According to a news report from Kerala, India, a priest there has been reported to the police for slapping a nine-year-old girl. Her crime? The priest had decided that all the children of the parish must go to confession at least once every three months, and she admitted she had not.

In order to convince the children of the importance of celebrating God’s forgiving love, he allegedly sent one of them, perhaps the only one honest enough to admit to her “dereliction,” to the hospital with a swollen face and a loosened tooth. Besides not having any right to force others to receive the sacrament, he could not see the idiocy in thinking that punishment is the best way to teach the sacrament of forgiveness.

If that girl grows into a woman who avoids the Church, we will be able to accurately date the beginning of her departure to this past July 9.

Why do we over and over again hear from friends, family and the media about priests who drive people away from the Church? Isn’t a priest’s job to draw the sheep to the Good Shepherd?

Part of the problem is one of those sociological effects of ordination combined with idiocy. Most priests merely have status in the Christian community. Some priests enjoy status in the Christian community. If the priest is also an idiot, having status will merely make him more obviously ineffectual; if he enjoys having status, it will make him abusive and repulsive.

Such destructive men often get away with their idiocy because people are smart enough and faith-filled enough to know that our commitment is not to priests but to Christ. Others fear the status that priests have as somehow representing God almighty. So, people have often let priests get away with behavior they would not tolerate in anyone else. But, thanks in part to the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, more people are willing to act.

Such a one is the father of that girl in Kerala. He went to the police to report the beating of his child. He acted as a normal parent rather than an idiot.

When idiot priests are allowed to inflict themselves upon the Church with impunity, people either leave the Church or at least distance themselves from it emotionally and socially. That is changing. More and more often, people are speaking up, refusing to be victimized or to leave. They confront the idiocy for the sake of protecting their faith. We need that confrontation. The likelihood of reforming idiot priests is low, but at least we can present ourselves as a Church that is not idiotic.

In one of his own less forgiving moments, the Lord said, “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea.”

The news report did not mention if the priest in question is practicing holding his breath. It did, however, say that he is preparing to bring his vigorous sacramental pedagogy to the United States. Since the slapping incident has become international news, he will likely have trouble securing a visa to enter that country. He may want to stay away in any case, since his mode of religious education can get him put in jail there, though that may happen in India anyway.

Where the Gospel, common sense and common decency cannot restrain idiot priests, common law must. Of course, the better solution would be to not ordain idiots in the first place, but that would require that we be free of idiot superiors and idiot bishops. But they are simply idiot priests who have “made good.” So, we must rely upon non-idiot clergy and laity to rein in the idiots for the sake of the “little ones” of whatever age.

Father William Grimm is a Tokyo-based priest and publisher of UCA News, and former editor-in-chief of “Katorikku Shimbun,” Japan’s Catholic weekly.

Source: ucanews.com

http://www.cathnewsindia.com/2011/07/15/the-recurring-case-of-the-idiot-priest/

( re-post) Aseem Chhabra : Terrorism is a constant

2011-07-17T15:01:00.000-07:00

Aseem Chhabra Offers a weekly New York perspective on Indian issues
Terrorism is a constant

Our governments have little idea about how to eradicate those who are creating terror

Aseem Chhabra

Last week New York City witnessed a horrible tragedy. An eight-year old Hasidic Jewish boy was supposed to meet his mother in the afternoon, three blocks away from his summer camp, but he failed to show up. The city’s highly insulated, but tightly knit Hasidic community made major efforts to find the boy.

A few days later, a close circuit video led the police to the home of a Jewish man who confessed to killing the young boy, cutting his feet, which he stored in his freezer and then dismembering the rest of the child’s body. Marks on the boy’s arms indicated that he had put up resistance.

Even New York City’s police commissioner, Ray Kelly, who is used to handling the toughest terrorists and criminals, was visibly moved. “In this business, you see a lot of violence,” Kelly said at a press conference announcing the killer’s arrest. “Here, it defies all logic. That’s what is so disturbing about this case. It’s heartbreaking.”

I have been thinking about the young boy’s parents, what they must have gone through when he failed to show up, when he was supposed to see his mother. And now they will have to live with the tragedy for the rest of their lives.

Last week, there was the horrible news from Mumbai. The three bomb blasts on Tuesday evening left 18 people dead and over hundred injured. The last person to die was a 24-year-old man, who must have been someone’s son, brother, husband or father. It is hard to fathom what this young man’s family must have gone through on Tuesday night trying to locate him and now knowing that he will never come back.

Such thoughts take me back to the harrowing scene in Mani Ratnam’s Bombay when the film’s protagonists, played by Arvind Swamy and Manisha Koirala, search for their twin boys as Mumbai burns in the aftermath of the 1993 riots, and A R Rahman’s hypnotic background score silences their helpless voices. I have never been in a war zone, or witnessed a riot or a bomb explosion, but I always imagine it would be a scenario like the one created by Ratnam.

The night of the bombings there seemed to be a lot of anger that once again Mumbai had been targeted by terrorists.

Later, journalist Naresh Fernandes suggested in his thoughtful piece on The New Yorker’s website that a certain amount of cynicism had crept into the soul of Mumbai. But I would like to believe that many Mumbaikars still care for and feel the pain of those who have lost their loved ones.

We live in very difficult times. Death and destruction is in the news at all times from troubled spots in the world — Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq — and from within India (Kashmir, the North East or recently in Forbesganj, Bihar). Each time a person — man, woman and child dies — many family members mourn that death. Each of the 3,000 plus people, who died when Al Qaeda’s terrorists crashed their two planes in the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, left behind survivors and layers of heartbreaking stories.

What is more troubling is that our governments have little idea about how to eradicate organizations and individuals who are hell bent on destruction, revenge and creating terror. Ten years and trillions of dollars later, the US claims it is winning the war against terror, especially after Osama Bin Laden’s death, but I believe terrorism is not going to end, and will be a way of life for us for decades into the future.

The day after the gruesome discovery of the young Hasidic boy’s death in Brooklyn, I was chatting with a friend on Twitter who has a young son. He had been following the case of the missing boy and was shaken up by the news. I suggested to him that he should go give his son an extra hug that night. We should feel blessed that we have our loved ones with us. For there are many whose family members will never come back home again.

http://www.bangaloremirror.com/index.aspx?page=article&sectid=36&contentid=2011071620110716200434286ef5d355

interesting ad campaigns from canada ( part-3): Catholic Church of Quebec-Annual Collection

2011-05-27T16:08:00.000-07:00

Toujours ma paroisse :) Campagne de financement des paroisses

( intelligent use of émoticône / Emoticone :)

http://beta.ecdq.org/nouvelles/toujours-ma-paroisses-campagne-de-financement-des-paroisses-de-l’eglise-catholique-de-quebec/

interesting ad campaigns from canada ( part-2): Catholic Church of Montreal-Annual Collection ads

2011-05-27T16:02:00.000-07:00

CAMPAIGN 2011: LOVE

( talking the facebook language!)

Love: it's the key message of the biggest social network in the world, the one-billion-member Catholic Church. And that's what the Archdiocese of Montreal is inviting everyone to do with its 2011 annual campaign.
(http://www.diocesemontreal.org/en/the-church-in-montreal/annual-collection/articles/annual-collection.html)

'SAY A PRAYER'

In a campaign wink to Montrealers, the diocese put up a large billboard along the southbound lanes of the Turcot Interchange. The French-language sign, leading up to the Champlain Bridge, reads: "Say a prayer".

Local media have reported the precarious state of the bridge, which is currently undergoing major repairs to ensure its safety.

However, Lucie Martineau, diocesan communications director, did stress that bridge authorities have assured that there is no danger of sudden or imminent collapse.

"It's just a little humour to catch people's attention," said Martineau. "And to help them think of God, even if it's just for a second."

http://www.diocesemontreal.org/en/the-church-in-montreal/annual-collection/articles/annual-collection.html

2006: XVIIIe Collecte annuelle de l’Église catholique de Montréal

( this ad shocked the Canadian French population!)

Le concept (francophone) de cette année en surprendra plusieurs. Il s’agit de rappeler la définition réelle de trois mots : Hostie, Ciboire et Tabernacle. Nous croyons que ce concept publicitaire, en plus d’attirer l’attention, est en complet accord avec la mission catéchétique de l’Église. Il faut parfois savoir oser pour interpeller les adultes qui ont oublié et les plus jeunes pour qui ces mots n’ont peut-être jamais eu de véritable sens.

http://www.diocesemontreal.org/accueil/collecte/2006/index.htm

history : http://www.diocesemontreal.org/accueil/collecte/

interesting ad campaigns from canada : "Don't be that guy"

2011-05-27T15:50:00.000-07:00

"Don't be that guy" is a bold sexual assault awareness campaign- ( launched on November 22, 2010) targeting potential offenders (and not potential victims) by SAVE - Sexual Assault Voices of Edmonton.

http://www.sexualassaultvoices.com/our-campaign.html

Pope 'shuts down irregular monastery in Rome'

2011-05-27T03:59:00.000-07:00

famous monastery in Rome, Italian media reports say.

The Santa Croce in Gerusalemme church is being closed because of rumours of a lack of liturgical, financial and moral discipline, La Stampa reports.

It is understood the few remaining Cistercian monks will be transferred to other communities in Italy.

The basilica's abbot, a flamboyant former Milan fashion designer, was moved two years ago.

Il Messaggero reports that Simone Fioraso transformed the church, renovating its crumbling interior and opening a hotel, holding regular concerts, a televised bible-reading marathon and regularly attracting celebrity visitors with an unconventional approach.

One of the nuns at the monastery, Anna Nobili, a former lap-dancer, reportedly took part in dance performances with other nuns during religious ceremonies.

But the Vatican was reportedly not pleased by rumours that circulated about the behaviour of the monks.

"An inquiry found evidence of liturgical and financial irregularities as well as lifestyles that were probably not in keeping with that of a monk," Father Ciro Benedettini, a Vatican spokesman, is reported as telling the Guardian newspaper.

An inquiry was carried out by the Vatican's Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life but has not yet been made public, La Stampa reports.

Santa Croce is one of Rome's oldest and most prestigious churches, and was built around a chapel dating back to the 4th Century.

It is one of the Italian capital's key places of pilgrimage as it is believed to house holy relics.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13559219http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13559219

'Lap-dancing nun' performs for Church'

Jesus is a God who dances, not one who stands still

Anna Nobili is no ordinary nun.

The 38-year-old used to be a lap-dancer, and spent many years working in Italian nightclubs.

She is now using her talents in a rather different way - for what she calls "The Holy Dance" in a performance on Tuesday evening at the Holy Cross in Jerusalem Basilica in Rome, in front of senior Catholic clerics including Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Vatican's Cultural Department.

Miss Nobili told the BBC World Service that the transformation from podium lap dancer to nun happened gradually.

"It was my mother who went about getting me involved in the faith - she had a powerful vision of Jesus," she says.

"At first I didn't want to know, but then Jesus appeared to me too, and I fell in love with him."
Jesus is a God who dances, not one who stands still

Sister Anna Nobili

Several years ago, she swapped her old life for the Church, after a visit to the shrine of St Francis in Assisi, a place of pilgrimage for millions of Catholics in Umbria.

Sister Nobili, then joined the order of nuns called the Working Lady Nuns of Nazareth House, and it is through them that she tours prisons and hospitals performing her modern Christian dance.

She says the Church is very open to what she does.

Sister Nobili says her dancing has changed since her lap-dancing days

"They understand that our hearts belong to Jesus, that means our moves also show that he is alive, and that he is a God of joy, not one of sadness," she explains.

"He is a God who dances not one who stands still."

Sister Nobili adds that it is for these reasons she has noticed that bishops, and priests in general, are struck by this new form of expression.

She does use some of her past life in her new shows, telling young people in the audience the story of how she converted.

Referring to the actual dancing she does today, with her group, the Jesus Dancers, Sister Nobili says it is different from what she did for her nightclub shows.

"My body has changed, so the way I dance has changed too."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7988322.stm

Vitesse au volant : Le prix de la vie

2011-05-18T08:25:00.000-07:00

Re-post: Stephen Hawking: 'There is no heaven; it's a fairy story'

2011-05-16T03:36:00.000-07:00

repost from http://www.guardian.co.uk

Hawking says there is no heaven.., but i am sure the hell exists!!! :)

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, the cosmologist shares his thoughts on death, M-theory, human purpose and our chance existence

A belief that heaven or an afterlife awaits us is a "fairy story" for people afraid of death, Stephen Hawking has said.

In a dismissal that underlines his firm rejection of religious comforts, Britain's most eminent scientist said there was nothing beyond the moment when the brain flickers for the final time.

Hawking, who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of 21, shares his thoughts on death, human purpose and our chance existence in an exclusive interview with the Guardian today.

The incurable illness was expected to kill Hawking within a few years of its symptoms arising, an outlook that turned the young scientist to Wagner, but ultimately led him to enjoy life more, he has said, despite the cloud hanging over his future.

"I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first," he said.

"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark," he added.

Hawking's latest comments go beyond those laid out in his 2010 book, The Grand Design, in which he asserted that there is no need for a creator to explain the existence of the universe. The book provoked a backlash from some religious leaders, including the chief rabbi, Lord Sacks, who accused Hawking of committing an "elementary fallacy" of logic.

The 69-year-old physicist fell seriously ill after a lecture tour in the US in 2009 and was taken to Addenbrookes hospital in an episode that sparked grave concerns for his health. He has since returned to his Cambridge department as director of research.

The physicist's remarks draw a stark line between the use of God as a metaphor and the belief in an omniscient creator whose hands guide the workings of the cosmos.

In his bestselling 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, Hawking drew on the device so beloved of Einstein, when he described what it would mean for scientists to develop a "theory of everything" – a set of equations that described every particle and force in the entire universe. "It would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God," he wrote.

The book sold a reported 9 million copies and propelled the physicist to instant stardom. His fame has led to guest roles in The Simpsons, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Red Dwarf. One of his greatest achievements in physics is a theory that describes how black holes emit radiation.

In the interview, Hawking rejected the notion of life beyond death and emphasised the need to fulfil our potential on Earth by making good use of our lives. In answer to a question on how we should live, he said, simply: "We should seek the greatest value of our action."

In answering another, he wrote of the beauty of science, such as the exquisite double helix of DNA in biology, or the fundamental equations of physics.

Hawking responded to questions posed by the Guardian and a reader in advance of a lecture tomorrow at the Google Zeitgeist meeting in London, in which he will address the question: "Why are we here?"

In the talk, he will argue that tiny quantum fluctuations in the very early universe became the seeds from which galaxies, stars, and ultimately human life emerged. "Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in," he said.

Hawking suggests that with modern space-based instruments, such as the European Space Agency's Planck mission, it may be possible to spot ancient fingerprints in the light left over from the earliest moments of the universe and work out how our own place in space came to be.

His talk will focus on M-theory, a broad mathematical framework that encompasses string theory, which is regarded by many physicists as the best hope yet of developing a theory of everything.

M-theory demands a universe with 11 dimensions, including a dimension of time and the three familiar spatial dimensions. The rest are curled up too small for us to see.

Evidence in support of M-theory might also come from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva.

One possibility predicted by M-theory is supersymmetry, an idea that says fundamental particles have heavy – and as yet undiscovered – twins, with curious names such as selectrons and squarks.

Confirmation of supersymmetry would be a shot in the arm for M-theory and help physicists explain how each force at work in the universe arose from one super-force at the dawn of time.

Another potential discovery at the LHC, that of the elusive Higgs boson, which is thought to give mass to elementary particles, might be less welcome to Hawking, who has a long-standing bet that the long-sought entity will never be found at the laboratory.

Hawking will join other speakers at the London event, including the chancellor, George Osborne, and the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.
Science, truth and beauty: Hawking's answers

What is the value in knowing "Why are we here?"

The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can't solve the equations, directly in the abstract. We need to use the effective theory of Darwinian natural selection of those societies most likely to survive. We assign them higher value.

You've said there is no reason to invoke God to light the blue touchpaper. Is our existence all down to luck?

Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in.

So here we are. What should we do?

We should seek the greatest value of our action.

You had a health scare and spent time in hospital in 2009. What, if anything, do you fear about death?

I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

What are the things you find most beautiful in science?

Science is beautiful when it makes simple explanations of phenomena or connections between different observations. Examples include the double helix in biology, and the fundamental equations of physics."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/may/15/stephen-hawking-interview-there-is-no-heaven

Re-post: Indian MP Tharoor: Europe must stop lecturing India

2011-05-15T18:16:00.000-07:00

While relations between India and China or India and the US have their moments of tension, nothing divides the country and Europe, except when Europe tries to give too much advice on domestic issues, said Shashi Tharoor, a former UN under-secretary general and a member of the Indian parliament, in an in interview with EurActiv.

Shashi Tharoor is a prominet member of the Lok Sabha, India's parliament. He has served as Under Secretary-General of the United Nations and has been Minister of State in the Ministry of External Affairs.

He was speaking to EurActiv Managing Editor Daniela Vincenti-Mitchener.

In your book 'The Elephant, the tiger and the cell phone', about the changing face of India, you said that the country's ability to manage diversity has resulted in a rise in its soft power internationally. What's your perception of Europe's proverbial soft power, particularly after the intervention in Libya?

It is absolutely clear that Europe represents itself a model of 'soft power' because it is a region of the world that attracts people for its culture, its history, its architecture, its cuisine.

Since you are not representing a menace for anyone you have a distinctive soft power. But sometimes people criticise you for being the example of soft power without hard power.

For example, in India we have always believed that to counter the threats we face at our immediate borders, or to face terrorism, you need a combination of soft and hard power, which in Europe you are starting to lose, as you are reducing your defence budgets.

Now, the intervention in Libya suggests that you are capable of using your military muscle to defend the values you promote with your soft power.

The problem here is that some might think that Europe is turning again towards colonialism and imperialism, which the world was starting to forget.

So there is a risk in the choices you have made.

India and the EU are currently negotiating a Free Trade Agreement (FTA). What will that change for India?

Trade between our countries will become more significant. For the moment, it is clear that the two most important trade partners for India are the US and China. And I believe that China is overtaking the US, if you exclude trade in services.

I believe the moment has come to enter this market; it is a very important market due to its size but also because its consumption capacity is growing annually. So for Europe this is important, and for us I believe that the diversification of our sources of imports is very useful.

A good thing with Europe is that nothing divides us. That is not the case with China, where we are in sort of strategic rivalry.

There are no complications with the USA, even if it behaves like a superpower and we sometimes have difficulties with some of its actions.

With Europe, we do not really have major difficulties. Sometimes Europe has a tendency to give too much advice on things that are domestic affairs, which is something we do not always appreciate. I believe that if we treat each other with the respect that is necessary for sovereign countries, we will have no problem in developing a real strategic partnership. But we will start with trade, because that is the easiest starting point.

But the deal could possibly be blocked by the European Parliament as the FTA lacks any mention of labour rights, in the fields of child labour or collective bargaining, for example. Is any dialogue taking place at parliamentary level between the Lok Sabha and the European Parliament?

We have bilateral parliamentary dialogue and this question has never been raised by Europeans.

Secondly, we should not forget that child labour is illegal in India. The parliament does not accept child labour, and civil society organisations do lead a constant fight against child labour.

We do not pretend that it does not exist in India. Unfortunately, because of poverty families send their kids to work. If the police finds out about cases of abuse, the children are sent to school. Unfortunately, it is the economic reality that leads to such cases.

Europe has to understand that we in India are very proud people and we do not accept that on problems that we are trying to solve ourselves, foreign powers or treaties try to impose one rule or the other.

For example, human rights. We are very proud to say that violations of human rights are mostly exposed, even in Kashmir, by either civil society, the media or public administration.

India is a country that likes to solve its own problems. Because of our colonial past, we don't like it when someone from outside India comes to gives us lessons.

I am convinced that if Europe were to insist on imposing conditionality of such a sort on the FTA, then India would refuse to cooperate.

You can't forget history, you can't forget that for 200 years others have led India's business and politics, and it is much more important for us to insist on our own rights than to strike an FTA. As simple as that.

Let's go back to the problem of poverty, which is still unresolved in India, and so is that of social inequality. Indian voters may well again sanction those in power at the ballot box in upcoming elections. What solutions can be found for the problem of poverty in India?

Democracy in itself is a solution because when one is unhappy, he/she can always seize power through votes rather than Kalashnikovs.

The big problem [in these elections] is with the Maoists, who are active especially in some central and eastern central states, [but who] will not succeed in really changing their destiny, because the reaction of the federal state would be to suppress any violent action that they would undertake.

Elsewhere, people have 50 years' experience of Indian democracy. Those who have tried to change the social and political order by calling on people to vote for them always have the possibility to win.

Of course this is the magic aspect of democracy: next time they may lose, and yesterday's secessionists then become today's prime ministers. Thanks to democracy, next month or next year they may become opposition leaders. That is how it works.

Democracy represents a solution and obviously there is also development. In this domain, there are several ways to see things.

You spoke of social inequalities and in a way that is not correct. In fact, liberalisation is pursued by all political parties in India – there are three different political trends that are represented within the Indian government: the Indian National Congress, the BJP, and the third political camp includes the Socialist Party and the Communist Party – all have followed the same policy of liberalisation and economic opening up.

It is through this policy that we sustain a growth rate of 8% per year and that we manage to pull 1% of our population out of poverty every year.

This is not much, true, yet 10 million people have managed to escape poverty this way. That explains why despite the fact that the population continues to grow, hitting 1.21 billion people, GDP per capita has also grown from year to year.

So we are lifting people out of poverty but maybe too slowly. Although it is true that rich people are growing richer, I would not say that the poor are becoming poorer.

As India's neighbour, Pakistan, is in the grip of secessionists, what guarantee of stability can India give to the international community and in particular, the European Union?

The strategic partnership comprises two aspects: there are regional responsibilities as India is the largest country of South-East Asia, it represents 80% of the economy and 70% of the population among the seven countries, or rather eight, as Afghanistan has joined the regional association of the countries of South-East Asia.

India can play a very important role here and is beginning to do so. For instance, India offers asymmetrical benefits. That means that we do not demand reciprocity when we make trade concessions and offer relationships with other countries. And this is quite rare in international relations.

The second issue lies with the so-called global partnership. There are several questions on which one can share a strategic opinion with the EU, one of which is human rights – although with some caveats, as India is never very favourable towards military intervention, which is why we abstained at the UN Security Council over Libya.

Apart from human rights, there is also the environment, there are matters of global commons, like the Internet, cyberspace and cybercrime. We have a certain know-how and potential in this area, which is becoming ever more important in the 21st Century.

If you think about how to manage that in a globalising world, where we are all more linked than we used to be, I believe that India has the capacity and the will to act, which I believe is important for Europe.

India prefers assured independence and is not planning any fixed, long-term partnerships with other states…

A little like the France gaulliste! India is a democracy and is proud of that, but it does not consider it a must to join NATO or accept all the other decisions that Western democracies take.

We have our history, we were colonised, we have all the memories of 200 years of history that are very different from those of a Western democracy. And for us, democracy is a means to deal with internal affairs, but regarding our international position one must not forget our colonial history and consider our solidarity with third-world countries on matters of development.

Also, we should not forget our moral, spiritual and political values and the importance of preserving our country's diversity in the world. For instance, in this famous battle of civilisations, we are a country in which all civilisations coexist, all religions coexist.

Now we have a woman as our president, a prime minister who is Sikh, a Muslim vice-president. The party leader of the governing party is a Catholic of Italian origin and 80% of the country is Hindu. So we have all that, and we manage this diversity in a friendly manner, but we also offer the possibility to change things through the ballot box.

Could India teach Europe about managing diversity, as the 27-country bloc struggles to exist as a political entity?

The European experience varies from country to country. In France, for example, you have a large minority that is not of French origin and cannot recongnise itself in 'our ancestors, the Gauls'. France is surely much less religious than other countries. But I also notice reactions to that in Europe. In Switzerland there has been the referendum against minarets, in Germany there have been local protests against mosques.

In India, on the other hand, we tend to say that you can be who you want to be, behave as you choose, dress as you wish, wear external symbols of your faith, it is your choice. But you will have to coexist with others who also wear such symbols. And if you accept this principle for everyone, then you can see burqas in the streets, turbans and Western garb, you can see all of this in the streets of any Indian town.

Do you think Indians see Europe as a political entity?

We have relations with the member states of the EU and we tend to think that it is more useful to speak to Prime Minister Cameron or President Sarkozy – both of them came to visit three times over the course of the past four, five weeks – rather than speaking to Baroness Ashton who takes care of European diplomacy.

There are EU countries with whom we have real diplomatic relations that go back a long time in history. Because the European institutions do not have the same weight, we will of course prefer to deal with the governments.

Perhaps within a few decades, or a hundred years, we could imagine a Europe that would be more like India. Because the real comparison should be made between Europe and India, these are nations with diverse languages, different appearances, different customs and cuisines, and all of that coexists in the same geographical and economic space. India is essentially like that.

We speak of an Indian nation, but strictly speaking and in the Marxist sense of the term, this is a country, a nation that comprises several nations. And I think that we have had the great chance to create a single country from roughly 25 different peoples, from an ethnical, cultural and linguistic point of view. And Europe is trying to do that, but obviously, the process will be a little slower.

http://www.euractiv.com/en/global-europe/indian-mp-tharoor-europe-lecturing-india-interview-504062

Re-post: « Nos corps cachent un mystère » : le pape évoque la théologie du corps

2011-05-14T04:15:00.000-07:00

Audience à l’Institut pontifical Jean-Paul II pour les études sur le mariage et la famille

ROME, Vendredi 13 mai 2011 (ZENIT.org) - « Nos corps cachent un mystère », a affirmé Benoît XVI en recevant ce vendredi au Vatican les participants à la rencontre organisée par l'Institut pontifical Jean-Paul II pour les études sur le mariage et la famille. Le corps n'est pas une matière « inerte, lourde » mais il parle « le langage de l'amour véritable », a-t-il ajouté en rappelant que c'est dans la famille que le langage du corps est préservé.

L'Institut Jean-Paul II a été voulu par le nouveau bienheureux il y a 30 ans exactement, « persuadé de l'importance décisive de la famille pour l'Eglise et la société ». « Il vous a confié, pour l'étude, la recherche et la diffusion, ses ‘Catéchèses sur l'amour humain' qui contiennent une profonde réflexion sur le corps humain », a rappelé Benoît XVI.

Dans son discours, le pape a rappelé que l'esprit habitait le corps. « Nos corps cachent un mystère. En eux, l'esprit se manifeste et travaille. Loin de s'opposer à l'esprit, le corps est le lieu où l'esprit peut habiter. A la lumière de cela, il est possible de comprendre que nos corps ne sont pas une matière inerte, lourde, mais parlent, si nous savons écouter, le langage de l'amour véritable ».

« Le corps, en nous révélant l'Origine, porte en soi une signification filiale, parce qu'il nous rappelle notre génération qui, à travers nos parents qui nous ont transmis la vie, tient de Dieu créateur », a ajouté Benoît XVI. « Ce n'est que quand il reconnaît l'amour originaire qui lui a donné la vie que l'homme peut s'accepter lui-même, peut se réconcilier avec la nature et avec le monde ».

« La chair, reçue de Dieu, est appelée à rendre possible l'union d'amour entre l'homme et la femme et à transmettre la vie », a encore affirmé Benoît XVI qui explique qu'avant la Chute, les corps d'Adam et Eve étaient « en parfaite harmonie ». « Il y a en eux un langage qu'ils n'ont pas créé, un eros enraciné dans leur nature, qui les invite à se recevoir mutuellement du Créateur, pour pouvoir ainsi se donner. Nous comprenons alors que dans l'amour, l'homme est ‘recréé' ».

« La véritable fascination de la sexualité naît de la grandeur de cet horizon qui s'épanouit : la beauté intégrale, l'univers de l'autre personne et du ‘nous' qui naît dans l'union, la promesse de communion qui s'y cache, la fécondité nouvelle, le chemin que l'amour ouvre vers Dieu, source de l'amour », a poursuivi Benoît XVI. « L'union en une seule chair se fait alors union de toute la vie, jusqu'à ce que l'homme et la femme deviennent aussi un seul esprit. S'ouvre alors un chemin où le corps nous enseigne la valeur du temps, de la lente maturation dans l'amour ».

C'est pourquoi, explique encore le pape, « la vertu de la chasteté reçoit un sens nouveau ». « Elle n'est pas un ‘non' aux plaisirs et à la joie de la vie, mais un grand ‘oui' à l'amour comme communication profonde entre les personnes, qui demande du temps et du respect, comme un chemin ensemble vers la plénitude et comme un amour qui devient capable d'engendrer la vie et d'accueillir généreusement la vie nouvelle qui naît.

La famille : le lieu où s'entremêlent la théologie du corps et celle de l'amour

Benoît XVI souligne aussi le « langage négatif » que contient le corps, fruit du péché : « il nous parle de l'oppression de l'autre, du désir de posséder et d'exploiter ».

« Toutefois, nous savons que ce langage n'appartient pas au dessein originaire de Dieu mais qu'il est le fruit du péché. Quand on le détache de son sens filial, de sa connexion avec le créateur, le corps se rebelle contre l'homme, perd sa capacité de faire transparaître la communion et devient un terrain d'appropriation de l'autre ».

« N'est-ce pas peut-être cela, le drame de la sexualité - s'est interrogé le pape - qui reste aujourd'hui enfermée dans le cercle restreint du corps et de l'émotivité, mais qui ne peut en réalité que s'accomplir dans l'appel à quelque chose de plus grand ? ».

Benoît XVI a enfin rappelé que le langage du corps était « préservé dans la famille ». « La famille, voilà le lieu où la théologie du corps et la théologie de l'amour s'entremêlent. C'est ici que l'on apprend la bonté du corps, son témoignage d'une origine bonne, dans l'expérience de l'amour que nous recevons des parents ».

« C'est ici que se vit le don de soi en une seule chair, dans la charité conjugale qui relie les époux », a-t-il conclu. « C'est dans la famille que l'homme se découvre en relation, non comme un individu autonome qui s'auto-réalise mais comme enfant, époux, parent dont l'identité se fonde dans l'être appelé à l'amour, à se recevoir des autres et à se donner aux autres ».

http://www.zenit.org/rssfrench-27902

« Le corps est l'endroit où l’esprit peut habiter »

« C’est seulement quand il reconnait l’amour originel qui lui a donné la vie, que l’homme peut s’accepter lui-même », se réconcilier avec « la nature et avec le monde ». Telle est la réflexion offerte vendredi matin par Benoît XVI en rencontrant les membres de l’Institut Pontifical Jean Paul II pour les études sur le mariage et la famille. Au cours de l’audience, le Pape a dit que « la force du péché ne parvient pas effacer le langage originel du corps », qui « porte en lui une signification filiale ». « La vraie fascination de la sexualité » trouve donc sa racine dans « l’univers de l’autre personne et du ‘nous ‘ qui nait dans l’union », dans « la voie que l’amour ouvre vers Dieu ». On comprend mieux, dans cette optique que « la vertu de la chasteté » ne représente pas un « non aux plaisirs et à la joie de la vie », mais un « oui à l’amour comme communication profonde entre les personnes, qui exige temps et respect ». Sans cacher « le langage négatif » du corps, celui qui parle « d’oppression de l’autre, du désir de posséder et exploiter », le Pape a rappelé que « Dieu offre à l’homme une voie de salut du corps, dont le langage est préservé dans la famille ». C’est en effet là que l’ « on apprend la bonté du corps », que « l’on vit le don de soi en une seule chaire », que l’on « expérimente la fécondité de l’amour, et que la vie se mêle à celle d’autres générations ».

http://www.h2onews.org/francais/80-pape/224449166-«-le-corps-est-lendroit-ou-l’esprit-peut-habiter-».html#

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2011/may/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20110513_istituto_gpii_it.html

( re-post): Generational Differences Between India and the U.S.

2011-04-25T16:52:00.000-07:00

Tammy Erickson: Generational Differences Between India and the U.S.

Saturday February 28, 2009 |

I'm often asked if generations share common characteristics around the globe. The answer: to some extent, particularly among younger generations whose members were exposed to many of the same events through cable television and the Internet. But among older generations, the shared elements are much less significant and the national characteristics of the generations become increasingly unique.

By definition, a generation is a group a people who, based on their age, share not only a chronological location in history but also the experiences that accompany it. These common experiences, in turn, prompt the formation of shared beliefs and behaviors. Of course, the commonalities are far from the whole story. Even those of you who grew up in the same country also had unique teen experiences, based on your family's socioeconomic background, your parents' philosophies, and a host of other factors. But the prominent events you share - particularly during formative teen years - are what give your generation its defining characteristics.

Let me briefly compare some of the formative experiences - and resulting generational traits - of individuals growing up in the United States and India. I'm hoping you'll join the discussion to share your experiences.

Traditionalists - Born from 1928 to 1945

Traditionalists were teens in the 1940's and 1950's. In the United States, these teens experienced a booming post-War economy - rapid growth of suburbs, increased availability of consumer goods, and a boom in white collar jobs. It would be logical for any teen growing up in this atmosphere of budding opportunity to be excited about the possibilities of joining in. Traditionalists in the U.S. tend to be loyal to institutions and accepting of hierarchy and rules. For many, financial success is an important metric of achievement.

In India, the 1940's and 1950's saw the birth of India as an independent nation. Teens would have witnessed Mahatma Gandhi's non-violent, civil disobedient campaign for independence, the end of the British Raj, and Gandhi's assassination. Like the U.S., this was a time of patriotic pride, with the resurgence in Indian traditions and the establishment of a democratic republic with elections. But the living conditions in India at the time were difficult - a poor economy, short life expectancies, low rates of literacy, mass impoverishment, stalled industrial development, and destitute farmers. The Indo-Pakistani War of 1947 (also called the First Kashmir War) marked the beginning of a long border conflict.

For individuals in this generation in India, patriotic pride over newly established independent nation blended with loyalty to family and community. The concept of boundaries was an important element of an individual's mental model - boundaries of new states, local sects/groups, and the individual. Success was defined as obedience to traditional practices, while finding ways to participate in this new India.

Boomers - Born from 1946 to 1960/1964

Teens in the 1960's and 1970's, Boomers in the United States were heavily influenced by the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, widespread protests, the assassinations of Kennedy, King, and other idealistic leaders, and, toward the end of their teen years, Watergate and Nixon's resignation. Most emerged from this era suspicious of authority and idealistic about their role in the world. In addition, Boomers grew up competing for the limited number of seats available to their rapidly expanded cohort. From this, they internalized the message that life would be a perpetual game of musical chairs - Boomers are fundamentally competitive because they grew up in a world in which zero sum rules apply.

India, during these same years, shifted to a socialist economic model under Indira Gandhi's leadership: nationalization of industries, public works, social reforms, and public investment in education. Political factions grew and the Indian national Congress split into two: Old and New Congress. India signed a 20-year treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union; its first break from non-alignment. Wars around borders continued: Sino-Indian War, Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 (Second Kashmir War), and the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 (independence of Bangladesh). The rupee was liberalized and underwent severe devaluation. A "Green Revolution" improved agricultural productivity enabling India to feed its population self-sufficiently after two decades of food imports. Toward the end of the period, during the Indian Emergency of 1975-77, Gandhi is accused of corruption, rules by decree, suspends elections and civil liberties, and is removed from power by the opposition.

For teens in India at this time, economic options were limited by the sluggish economy; personal options are heavily influenced by the family, group, or caste into which one was born. For those who are able, success is linked with getting out of India to obtain higher education and work in the U.K. or U.S. Similar to U.S. teens' experience with Watergate, the Indian Emergency left this generation with skepticism of political leaders.

Generation X - Born from 1961/1965 to 1979

Generation X teens in the United States during the 1980's and 1990's lived through a period of extraordinary social change. The economy was poor and many saw important adults in their lives laid off from jobs where they had planned to spend their entire career. They were influenced by the Challenger disaster - the space shuttle that blew up shortly after takeoff, women entering the workforce, rising divorce rates, and the growth of electronic games and of the Internet. The first generation of "latch key kids," X'ers internalized the possibility that many of the institutions in their lives - whether marriage or corporate employment - could disappear. As a result, it is logical that self-reliance became an important life value - a desire to keep multiple options open if something bad were to happen. X'ers are generally mistrustful of institutions, loyal to their friends, and dedicated to being good parents.

Teens in India saw Indira Gandhi killed by her bodyguards and succeeded by her son Rajiv Gandhi, who instituted a number of important reforms: loosened business regulations, lower restrictions on foreign investment/imports, and reduced bureaucracy. Rajiv also led the country into a major expansion of the telecommunications industry, space program, software industry and information technology sector. Political conflict continued: Rajiv Gandhi's image as honest politician was shattered by the Bofors scandal and he was later killed by suicide bomber. P.V. Narasimha Rao became Prime Minister and initiated further economic liberalization and reform. Still, over 75% of 1980s Indian Institutes of Technology graduates emigrated to the United States.

Members of Gen X in India developed a mental model patterned on a rich, vibrant democracy - comfortable with many views, perspectives, and voices. The constraints of the caste system were giving way to the power of education, which was increasingly available for the best and brightest. Although success continues be associated with moving outside the country, economic opportunity is growing within India. Diaspora not only take care of and retain close ties with those in India, but are beginning to make investments in the country's economic future.

Generation Y - Born from 1980 to 1995

Globally, Generation Ys' immersion in personal technology enabled this generation to experience many of the same events and, as a result, develop as the most globally similar generation yet. Acts of terrorism and school violence were among this generation's most significant shared formative events. The random nature of terrorism - in which inexplicable things happen unexpectedly to anyone at any time - left many Y's with the view that it is logical to live life fully now. Around the world, this generation has a sense of immediacy that is often misinterpreted by older co-workers as impatience.

In the U.S., Y's teen years were marked by an unprecedented bull market and a strong pro-child culture. As a result, they are optimistic, goal-oriented, and very family-centric.

In India, the late 1990's and 2000's saw the development of a large middle-class and increased demand for and production of many consumer goods - in many ways, a situation reminiscent of the U.S. Traditionalists' experience with a rapidly expanding pie. The Indian economy grew under liberalization and reform policies, the country was stable and prosperous, and political power changed hands without incident. India became a prestigious educational powerhouse and respected source of IT talent. By 2008, 34 Indian companies were listed in Forbes Global 2000 ranking.

Y's in India share the generation's global sense of immediacy, coupled with the excitement of being part of the country's first wave of broad economic opportunity. As a result, young employees in India tend to share the rapid tempo of U.S. Y's ambitions, but with a greater emphasis on financial reward as a desired outcome. They have come of age in an exciting, dynamic country with significant economic opportunity. Most are entrepreneurial and business savvy, as well as technologically capable and connected. Their mental model is heavily influenced by India's rich, complex democracy - they easily accept diversity of opinion - as well as by the Western heritage of laws and customs left from the old days of British rule, making them strongly suited for global interaction.

So, bottom line: some common traits, particularly among Generation Y, and many differences, certainly in older generations. If you find this discussion helpful, I'll share my research on generations in other countries in future posts.

And I'd love to hear from you - particularly if you grew up in India. What events were most memorable and influential during your teen years?

* * *

Finally, I'm very excited to share with you that Harvard's Corporate Learning group has developed a terrific online program based on my work: "Leading Across the Ages." In this difficult economy, it's a great way to share insights broadly within your organization - to reduce intergenerational tensions, strengthen relationships among your colleagues, and increase productivity and the likelihood of innovation. I hope you'll check it out!

http://blogs.hbr.org/erickson/2009/02/global_generations_focus_on_in.html

Urumi theme song!!!!!

2011-04-21T19:13:00.000-07:00

so who will pay the copyright?

Satellite Photos of Japan, Before and After the Quake and Tsunami; http://goo.gl/p69js

2011-03-14T05:48:00.001-07:00

Satellite Photos of Japan, Before and After the Quake and Tsunami;

http://goo.gl/p69js

Amazing ad !!

2011-02-12T03:44:00.000-08:00

Internet role in Egypt's protests

2011-02-09T08:07:00.000-08:00

Internet role in Egypt's protests

9 February 2011 Last updated at 01:00 ET

By Anne Alexander
University of Cambridge

A few days after the fall of Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, a Jordanian newspaper printed a joke apparently doing the rounds in Egypt: "Why do the Tunisian youth 'demonstrate' in the streets, don't they have Facebook?"

Only six days later, protests across Egypt co-ordinated by a loose coalition of opposition groups - many of which are very largely organised through Facebook - seemed to prove this cynicism wrong.

Certainly, the Egyptian government reacted quickly: blocking social media sites and mobile phone networks before pulling the plug on Egypt's access to the internet.

This act of censorship was spectacularly unsuccessful.

Friday 28 January saw literally millions take control of the streets in an epic "Day of Rage". Nor did the blackout cut off news of the demonstrations and stop protesters communicating with each other.

Protest leaders had already agreed to call for demonstrations starting from key mosques, and marchers rallied at Friday prayers before heading for the city centres and key government buildings.

Satellite channels - particularly al-Jazeera - broadcast live coverage all day, constantly updated by telephone reports filed from landlines by its network of correspondents across Egypt.
Broad spectrum

The events of 28 January are particularly important, because they contain crucial clues to understanding the broader relationship between the media - both "new" and "old" - and the mass movement for change which has developed in Egypt over the past few weeks.

Firstly, the fact that an internet and mobile phone blockade failed shows clearly that this movement is not based on the web. In fact, the movement which erupted on 25 January has brought together many groups who have taken to the streets over the past 10 years.

They are varied socially and politically, ranging from workers to bloggers and democracy campaigners, to senior judges, to members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Coptic Christians.

This is the first time they have all demonstrated together, and the first time they have been joined by millions of their fellow citizens. But it is important to understand that this movement builds on a legacy of protest by many different activist networks, most of which are not primarily organised online.

Secondly, it is clear that the protesters use a range of different media to communicate with each other and to get their message across.

I was in Tahrir Square on Sunday: everywhere you look there are mobile phones, hand-written placards, messages picked out in stones and plastic tea cups, graffiti, newspapers and leaflets, not to mention al-Jazeera's TV cameras which broadcast hours of live footage from the square everyday. When one channel of communication is blocked, people try another.

Every mass movement needs spaces where political alternatives can be debated and organisation can take place.

In the 1940s, the last time that Egypt saw mass protests on a similar scale, radical bookshops, underground newspapers and illegal trade union meetings played this role.

For the current generation some of these spaces have been online.

I asked Ahmed, a socialist activist in Tahrir Square, what role he thought the internet was playing in mobilising protest.

"Online organising is very important because activists have been able to discuss and take decisions without having to organise a meeting which could be broken up by the police," he said.
'Offline' political action

Online networks are only relatively "safer" from repression: Khaled Said was dragged out of an internet cafe and beaten to death by policemen last summer.

The Egyptian security forces reportedly recently set up a special unit to monitor internet activists.

But in Egypt today, there are vast numbers of people online, making it far more difficult for the state to track them all.

Even in poor urban and rural areas people can access the internet through shared connections.

The Facebook group set up to protest at Khaled Said's death is "liked" by nearly 600,000 people and was a key organising centre for the current protests.

Mobile phone use has grown exponentially in the past few years, reaching around 80% of the population according to recent figures.

Now footage of protests and police repression filmed on mobile phone cameras is being broadcast back to millions of Egyptians by the satellite channels.

Online organising does not automatically bring people onto the streets. In 2008, a Facebook group calling for a general strike attracted tens of thousands of members but only relatively small street protests took place in Cairo, largely on the university campuses.

Ahmed believes that Egyptian activists have developed sophisticated ways of knowing when online protest will generate offline political action.

"People learn quickly. They look at who is calling for a protest, and if it is someone they know and trust they are much more likely to take part."

They also learn by example. The fall of Mr Ben Ali showed people across the Arab world, and not just political activists, that popular protests could bring down a dictator.

It is that hope, and not the internet, which is driving this movement forward.

Anne Alexander is a Buckley Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12400319

What the Bible Really Says About Sex

2011-02-07T08:38:00.000-08:00

New scholarship on the Good Book’s naughty bits and how it deals with adultery, divorce, and same-sex love.

More Ways Than Two

The poem describes two young lovers aching with desire. The obsession is mutual, carnal, complete. The man lingers over his lover’s eyes and hair, on her teeth, lips, temples, neck, and breasts, until he arrives at “the mount of myrrh.” He rhapsodizes. “All of you is beautiful, my love,” he says. “There is no flaw in you.”

The girl returns his lust with lust. “My lover thrust his hand through the hole,” she says, “and my insides groaned because of him.”

This ode to sexual consummation can be found in—of all places—the Bible. It is the Song of Solomon, a poem whose origins likely reach back to the pagan love songs of Egypt more than 1,200 years before the birth of Jesus. Biblical interpreters have endeavored through the millennia to temper its heat by arguing that it means more than it appears to mean. It’s about God’s love for Israel, they have said; or, it’s about Jesus’ love for the church. But whatever other layers it may contain, the Song is on its face an ancient piece of erotica, a celebration of the fulfillment of sexual desire.

What does the Bible really say about sex? Two new books written by university scholars for a popular audience try to answer this question. Infuriated by the dominance in the public sphere of conservative Christians who insist that the Bible incontrovertibly supports sex within the constraints of “traditional marriage,” these authors attempt to prove otherwise. Jennifer Wright Knust and Michael Coogan mine the Bible for its earthiest and most inexplicable tales about sex—Jephthah, who sacrifices his virgin daughter to God; Naomi and Ruth, who vow to love one another until death—to show that the Bible’s teachings on sex are not as coherent as the religious right would have people believe. In Knust’s reading, the Song of Solomon is a paean to unmarried sex, outside the conventions of family and community. “I’m tired,” writes Knust in Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions About Sex and Desire, “of watching those who are supposed to care about the Bible reduce its stories and teachings to slogans.” Her book comes out this month. Coogan’s book God and Sex: What the Bible Really Says was released last fall.

Conservative critics say that coherence is precisely what the Bible offers on sex. Reading it in the context of the Christian tradition, and with an awareness that the text is “divinely inspired”—that is, given to people directly by God—a believer can come to only one conclusion on questions of sex and marriage. “Sexual intimacy outside of a public, lifelong commitment between a man and woman is not in accordance with God’s creating or redeeming purposes,” explains Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. Liberals may wish the Bible were more permissive on sex, conservative religious scholars say, but it’s not.

These battles over the “right” interpretation are, of course, as old as the Bible itself. In today’s culture wars, the Bible—specifically a “one man, one woman” argument from the Book of Genesis—is employed by the Christian right to oppose gay marriage. This fight, as well as those over the efficacy of abstinence-education schools and intra-denominational squabbles over the proper role of women in church-leadership roles, have led many Americans (two thirds of whom rarely read the Bible) to believe that the Good Book doesn’t speak for them. Knust, a religion professor at Boston University, is also an ordained minister in the American Baptist denomination. Coogan, director of publications at Harvard University’s Semitic Museum, once trained as a Jesuit priest. With their books, they hope to steal the conversation about sex and the Bible back from the religious right. “The Bible doesn’t have to be an invader, conquering bodies and wills with its pronouncements and demands,” Knust writes. “It can also be a partner in the complicated dance of figuring out what it means to live in bodies that are filled with longing.” Here, in summary, are the arguments:

The Bible is an ancient text, inapplicable in its particulars to the modern world.

In the Bible, “traditional marriage” doesn’t exist. Abraham fathers children with Sarah and his servant Hagar. Jacob marries Rachel and her sister Leah, as well as their servants Bilhah and Zilpah. Jesus was celibate, as was Paul.

Husbands, in essence, owned their wives, and fathers owned their daughters, too. A girl’s virginity was her father’s to protect—and to relinquish at any whim. Thus Lot offers his two virgin daughters to the angry mob that surrounds his house in Sodom. Deuteronomy proposes death for female adulterers, and Paul suggests “women should be silent in churches” (a rationale among some conservative denominations for barring women from the pulpit).

The Bible contains a “pervasive patriarchal bias,” Coogan writes. Better to elide the specifics and read the Bible for its teachings on love, compassion, and forgiveness. Taken as a whole, “the Bible can be understood as the record of the beginning of a continuous movement toward the goal of full freedom and equality for all persons.”

Sex in the Bible is sometimes hidden.

Those who follow the gay-marriage debate are likely familiar with certain bits of Scripture. Two verses, from Leviticus, describe sex between men as “an abomination” (in the King James translation). Another, from Romans, condemns men who are “inflamed with lust for one another.” But as Coogan quips, “there is sex in the Bible on every page, if you just know where to look.” A full understanding of biblical teachings on sex requires a trained eye.

When biblical authors wanted to talk about genitals, they sometimes talked about “hands,” as in the Song of Solomon, and sometimes about “feet.” Coogan cites one passage in which a baby is born “between a mother’s feet”; and another, in which the prophet Isaiah promises that a punitive God will shave the hair from the Israelites’ heads, chins, and “feet.” When, in the Old Testament, Ruth anoints herself and lies down after dark next to Boaz—the man she hopes to make her husband—she “uncovers his feet.” A startled Boaz awakes. “Who are you?” he asks. Ruth identifies herself and spends the night “at his feet.”

From this, Coogan makes a rather sensationalistic exegetical move. When he is teaching to college students, he writes, someone inevitably asks about the scene in Luke, in which a woman kisses and washes Jesus’ feet—and then dries them with her hair. Is that author speaking about “feet”? Or feet? “As both modern and ancient elaborations suggest,” Coogan writes, “sexual innuendo may be present.” Scholars agree that in this case, a foot was probably just a foot.

That which is forbidden is also allowed.

The Bible is stern and judgmental on sex. It forbids prostitution, adultery, premarital sex for women, and homosexuality. But exceptions exist in every case, Knust points out. Tamar, a widow without children, poses as a whore and solicits her own father-in-law—so that he could “come into” her. Her desire to ameliorate her childlessness trumps the prohibition against prostitution. Knust also argues—provocatively—that King David “enjoyed sexual satisfaction” with his soulmate, Jonathan. “Your love to me was wonderful,” laments David at Jonathan’s death, “passing the love of women.”

Divorce is permitted in the Old Testament—but it’s forbidden in the Gospels. Jesus didn’t like it: that much is clear. “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery,” he says in the Gospel of Mark. But in Matthew’s telling, Jesus softens his position slightly and leaves a loophole for the husbands of unfaithful wives. “When it comes to sex, the Bible is often divided against itself,” writes Knust.

Accepted interpretations are sometimes wrong.

The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is, as everyone knows, a story of God’s judgment against homosexuality, promiscuity, and other kinds of illicit sex. Except, Knust argues, it’s not. It’s a story about the danger of having sex with angels. In the biblical world, people believed in angels, and they feared them, for sex with angels led inevitably to death and destruction. In the Noah story, God sends the flood to exterminate the offspring of “the daughters of man” (human women) and “the sons of God” (angels, in some interpretations). Non-canonical Jewish texts tell of angels, called Watchers, who descend to earth and impregnate human women, who produce monstrous children—thus inciting God’s terrible vengeance. God razes Sodom not because its male inhabitants are having sex with each other, as so many contemporary ministers preach, Knust argues, but in part because the men of the town intended to rape angels of God who were sheltered in Lot’s house. And when the Apostle Paul tells women to keep their heads covered in church, he’s issuing a warning against inciting angelic lust: “The angels might be watching,” Knust writes.

Coogan and Knust are hardly the first scholars to offer alternative readings of the Bible’s teachings on sex. What sets them apart is their populism. With provocative titles and mainstream publishing houses, they obviously hope to sell books. But their greater cause is a fight against “official” interpretations. Knust, who was raised in a conservative Christian home, recalls with intensity reading the Bible on the couch with her mother, and—with a mixture of faith and skepticism—talking aloud about what it might mean. With her book, she encourages readers to do the same.

A person alone on her couch with Scripture can also come to some dangerous conclusions: the Bible has, at certain times in history, been read to support slavery, wife-beating, kidnapping, child abuse, racism, and polygamy. That’s why Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, that citadel of Christian conservatism, concludes that one’s Bible reading must be overseen by the proper authorities. Just because everyone should read the Bible “doesn’t mean that everyone’s equally qualified to read it, and it doesn’t mean that the text is just to be used as a mirror for ourselves,” he says. “All kinds of heresies come from people who read the Bible and recklessly believe that they’ve understood it correctly.” As the word of God, he adds, the Bible isn’t open to the same level of interpretation as The Odyssey or The Iliad.

Yet in a democracy, even those who speak “heresies” are allowed a voice. And whether readers accept Coogan’s and Knust’s interpretations, the authors are justified in their insistence that a population so divided over questions of sex and sexual morality cannot—should not—cede the field without exploring first what the Bible actually says. The eminent Bible historian Elaine Pagels agrees. To read the Bible and reflect on it “is to realize that we have not a series of answers, but a lot of questions.”

http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/06/what-the-bible-really-says-about-sex.html#

My Super Bowl Commercial- 2011

2011-02-06T10:14:00.000-08:00

Volkswagen Commercial: The Force

What India And Pakistan Have In Common?

2011-02-05T07:13:00.000-08:00

Nuclear arsenal?

No sir,… it is their “political deafness”.

(Even though, India is far better than

Pakistan

with an excellent record of peaceful and stable democracy, with all its bends and curves, of course! Being an Indian, I am extremely proud of my mother soil, a country that do not use terrorism as its foreign strategy, a country in constant pursuit of harmony within and without, in spite of the occasional speed bumps. )

The recentnews from America on Pakistan’s nuclear capacity is a matter of jubilation for the Pakistan mob. Today “TheExpress Tribune” carries a thought provoking article by Pervez Hoodbhoy, on this matter. I believe it indeed is an eye-opener at the both sides of the LOC.

I know, permit me this pessimism, his voice will be obscured by that of the euphoric victory cry of the Pakistani crowd: “We have more & we want even more”

But I am sure that a new generation will arise one day to make things change for ever… but do not ask me when?

Re-posting this interesting Pervez Hoodbhoy article:

Pakistan’s nukes: How many are enough?
By Pervez Hoodbhoy
Published: February 5, 2011

The latest news from America must have thrilled many: Pakistan probably has more nuclear weapons than India. A recent Washington Post article, quoting various nuclear experts, suggests that Pakistan is primed to “surge ahead in the production of nuclear-weapons material, putting it on a path to overtake Britain as the world’s fifth largest nuclear weapons power”.

Some may shrug off this report as alarmist anti-Pakistan propaganda, while others will question the accuracy of such claims. Indeed, given the highly secret nature of nuclear programmes everywhere, at best one can only make educated guesses on weapons and their materials. For Pakistan, it is well known that the Kahuta complex has been producing highly enriched uranium for a quarter century, and that there are two operational un-safeguarded plutonium-producing reactors at Khushab (with a third one under construction). Still, the exact amounts of bomb-grade material and weapons are closely held secrets.

But for argument’s sake, let’s assume that the claims made are correct. Indeed, let us suppose that Pakistan surpasses India in numbers – say by 50 per cent or even 100 per cent. Will that really make Pakistan more secure? Make it more capable of facing current existential challenges?

The answer is, no. Pakistan’s basic security problems lie within its borders: growing internal discord and militancy, a collapsing economy, and a belief among most citizens that the state cannot govern effectively. These are deep and serious problems that cannot be solved by more or better weapons. Therefore the way forward lies in building a sustainable and active democracy, an economy for peace rather than war, a federation in which provincial grievances can be effectively resolved, elimination of the feudal order and creating a tolerant society that respects the rule of law.

Pakistanis have long imagined the Bomb as a panacea for all ills. It became axiomatic that, in addition to providing total security, the Bomb would give help us liberate Kashmir, give Pakistan international visibility, create national pride and elevate the country’s technological status. But these promises proved empty.

The Bomb did nothing to bring Kashmiri liberation closer. India’s grip on Kashmir is tighter today than it has been for a long time and is challenged only by the courageous uprising of Kashmiris. Pakistan’s strategy for confronting India — secret jihad by Islamic fighters protected by Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella — backfired terribly after Kargil and nearly turned Pakistan into an international pariah. More importantly, today’s hydra-headed militancy owes to the Kashmiri and Afghan mujahideen who avenged their betrayal by Pakistan’s army and politicians by turning their guns against their former sponsors and trainers.

What became of the claim that pride in the bomb would miraculously weld together the disparate peoples who constitute Pakistan? While many in Punjab still want the bomb, angry Sindhis want water and jobs — and they blame Punjab for taking these away. Karachi staggers along with multiple ethnically motivated killings; Muhajirs and Pakhtuns are locked in a deadly battle. As for the Baloch, they are in open revolt. They resent that the two nuclear test sites — now radioactive and out of bounds — are on their soil. Angry at being governed from Islamabad, some have taken up arms and demand that army cantonments be dismantled. The Bomb was no glue.

Some might ask, didn’t the Bomb stop India from swallowing up Pakistan? The answer is, no. First, an upward-mobile India has no reason to want an additional 180 million Muslims. Second, even if India wanted to, territorial conquest is impossible. Conventional weapons, used by Pakistan in a defensive mode, are sufficient protection. If the mighty American python could not digest Iraq or Afghanistan, there is zero chance for a middling power like India to occupy Pakistan, a country four times larger than Iraq.

It is, of course, true that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons deterred India from launching punitive attacks at least thrice since the 1998 tests. India could do nothing after Pakistan’s secret incursion in Kargil during 1999, the Dec 13 attack on the Indian parliament the same year (initially claimed by Jaish-i-Muhammad), or the Mumbai attack in 2008 by Lashkar-i-Taiba. So should we keep the Bomb to protect militant groups? Surely it is time to realise that conducting foreign policy in this manner will buy us nothing but disaster after disaster.

It was a lie that the Bomb could protect Pakistan, its people or its armed forces. Rather, it has helped bring us to this grievously troubled situation and offers no way out. It is time for Pakistan to drop its illogical opposition to the Fissile Materials Cutoff Treaty which, incidentally, would impact India far more than Pakistan. We need fewer bombs on both sides, not more.

The author teaches nuclear and particle physics in Islamabad and Lahore

Published in The Express Tribune, February 5th, 2011.

The Muslim Mary By Jennifer Green, The Ottawa Citizen

2011-02-01T16:46:00.000-08:00

The Muslim Mary

If you are looking for the religious text with the most references to Mary, the mother of Jesus, look no further than the Koran, Jennifer Green writes.

By Jennifer Green, The Ottawa Citizen

Islam and Christianity revere Mary above all other women, a human divinely appointed to bear Jesus in a virgin birth. But the Koran mentions Mary 34 times, and names an entire chapter after her -- more than she gets in the Bible, according to Cruden's Complete Concordance. She is the only woman mentioned by name in the Koran, and some scholars say Muslims actually revere her more than Christians do.

"Without a doubt, she is the most spectacular female figure that appears in the whole of the Koran," says Bruce Lawrence, Islamic scholar and author of The Qur'an: A Biography. "That's quite something extra for Christians to have to deal with."

Robert Moynihan, editor of Inside the Vatican magazine, agrees. In one sense, "I would say Muslims have more veneration of Mary -- those who are believing Muslims -- than most Christians today. That's because of the decline of Marion veneration in Christianity."

Pockets of worshippers around the world still pray extensively to Mary, especially among Catholics, but her influence has waned in the last generation. As women struggled to be heard, in church hierarchies and society at large, exhortations to follow Mary's example of chastity and acceptance of God's will started sounding like clerical spin designed to keep the ladies in line.

"She is not out of the picture, but she is not woven into the warp and woof of the faith," Mr. Moynihan said from his office in Rome. "That shattered with the confrontation with the modern world."

Muslim women are not as likely to have submitted Mary to this political litmus test, so they are still comfortable turning to her, he says.

Aynur Gunenc is a 37-year-old Ottawa native who commutes to Montreal every week to complete her master's degree in bioresource engineering at McGill University. She is also a practising Muslim and the mother of two sons.

Like many Muslim women, she looked to Mary while she was pregnant and when went into labour, reading Surah 19, the chapter in the Koran named for the virgin. She also ate dates as Mary did while giving birth to Jesus.

"It is supposed to help for an easy delivery." Did it work? "Yes."

"For us, Mary is a symbol of purity and patience, honesty and believing 100 per cent in God, even when things are difficult. I am full of respect and love for her. I cannot imagine, myself, keeping your faith when you have had a baby without a husband, close to people who disapprove. It would not be bearable.

"If there had been a woman prophet, it would have been Mary. She knew this life is temporary."

Christianity and Islam differ on the fundamental nature of Jesus. For Christians, he is God the Son; for Muslims, he is a prophet who was fully human.

But their accounts around his birth are startlingly similar. Both tell of an elderly couple beseeching God for a child.

In the Bible, Elizabeth and her husband, the temple priest Zachary, become parents to John the Baptist.

In the Koran, the elderly Zakariya pleads to God for a son, and his prayer is answered with the birth of "Yahya" -- John.

Mary's mother, Anna, offers her child-to-be to God, but she is surprised and dismayed to see that she has given birth to a girl, whom she names Mary, or Maryam. She offers the child to God anyway and brings her to the temple, where she comes under the protection of Zakariya.

Every day she has holy visions, and when Zakariya comes with food, he finds angels have already provided for the young girl -- details remarkably similar to the Proto Gospel of James, scripture that is not included in the Bible, but is considered credible by Roman and Eastern Orthodox Catholics.

In the Koran, the angel Gabriel comes to tell Mary she will bear a child, to which she says: "How shall I have a son, seeing that no man has touched me, and I am not unchaste?"

He said: "So (it will be): Thy Lord saith, 'that is easy for Me: and (We wish) to appoint him as a Sign unto men and a Mercy from Us': It is a matter (so) decreed.

"So she conceived him, and she retired with him to a remote place."

In the Koran, there is no Joseph to protect her reputation. Instead, Mary goes off to an unspecified location to bear the child. Once there, she cries out in pain and says she wishes she had died before this.

In response, God provides a stream for water, and dates from a tree above.

When she returns home with the babe in arms, the villagers are horrified. How could she have a child without a husband? Jesus himself speaks to them from her arms, even though he is only a few days old.

Mary is also a bridge between Islam and Christianity, something Pope Benedict XVI touched on in his recent trip to Turkey, where he celebrated Mass at Ephesus, the western town in which Mary is said to have lived her last days.

The Pope pointed to her as an explicit link between Islam and Christianity, stressing that a common devotion to Mary can help bind the two faiths.

Vatican expert and author John Allen also commented on the link: "It is true that Mary is actually referred to more often in the Koran than she is in the New Testament," he told reporters during the pope's visit.

"She has always been a figure of strong popular devotion for Muslims as well as Christians. And it would not at all be surprising if Benedict XVI were to want to build on that in some fashion."
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/food/eade/Muslim+Mary/825120/story.html

The Lord of the Storm by Bishop Kenneth Ulmer

2011-01-27T06:51:00.000-08:00

The Lord of the Storm

This message was delivered by Bishop Kenneth Ulmer from the pulpit of the Crystal Cathedral. It was aired during the Hour of Power program on Hong Kong's ATV World Channel on 7 Feb 2010.

Psalm 29 has been called by some the Psalm of the storm. Throughout this Psalm, there are pictures, motifs, and images of storms and storm language - thunder and wind and lightening. Psalm 29 speaks of a storm and the voice, almost as though there were chess match with one move by the storm, one move by the voice, one move by the storm, one move by the voice. It's a jousting match, if you will. It's a tit for tat, back and forth between the voice and the storm. Seven times sprinkled in this short Psalm, the Psalmist speaks of the voice. The voice and the storm.

"When you walk through the storm," as it says it that beautiful song,"hold your head up high." What is your storm today? I've come to believe that storms are customized, tailor-made. Your storm may not be the storm of the person sitting next to you. Storms are personalized.

What is your storm today? Maybe it's a relational storm; there's a storm in the relationships in which you're involved. And maybe it's a financial storm. Maybe it's an emotional storm and you find yourself being shifted and tossed. Maybe it's a spiritual storm. What is your storm today? Personalize this word as we walk through this Psalm and allow the Lord to speak to you with His voice in your storm.

The Psalmist says the voice of the Lord is upon the storm, upon the waters, upon the flood. One verse says the voice of the Lord sits upon the waters and sits upon the storm. It pictures God being enthroned on top of your storm. It paints an interesting sequence and an interesting picture. It is as though, when you look up wherever you are in this room, in this house, in the hotel room, in your bedroom, wherever you may be, if you look up, whatever you see above you, maybe the roof, maybe the ceiling, whatever it is, imagine the storm that covers you. Imagine the storm in which you find yourself, and you look up and you see storm clouds.

According to the Psalmist, above that storm there's God. And the voice of God sits enthroned above the storm that is above you. And through that storm, He speaks a word. His voice pierces the clouds of that storm. His voice breaks through the calamities that He might get a word to you. For it is in this storm that God speaks. He speaks first to the storm that you are experiencing, that enshrouds you, that covers you, that frightens you. The storm that has you tossing back and forth with the waves and the winds and the billows. You're tossing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and yet He speaks to the storm.

The disciples were out one day on the boat and Jesus said to them, "Get in the boat and let's go to the other side." Actually He said, "Get in the boat and let's go over." Let's go over. Don't miss that. Jesus says, "Get in this boat and let's go over to the other side." About midway, about halfway in the journey, a storm arises. And someone remembers that Jesus is in the boat. It's not bad being in a storm when Jesus is on your boat. I'd rather be in the storm with Him than on the shore without Him.

So, the disciples went and awakened Him, and they said, "Master, Master." There's an old song in the African American tradition that says, "Master, the tempest is raging. The billows are tossing high. The sky is overshadowed with blackness. No shelter or help is nigh. Hearest thou not that we perish, how canst thou lie there asleep, when each moment so madly is threatening, a grave in the angry deep."

The disciples said, "Get up Jesus." And He took His position at the helm of the ship and pronounced the benediction upon the storm. He stood and spoke to the storm and said, "Peace be still."

Jesus speaks to the storm that you are in today, as well. As the Lord of the storm, His voice pierces the thunder, the anger, the lightening, and the angry sea, and He says peace! Be still. He speaks to the storm that you are in today.

Not only that, but He speaks to you in the storm. Did you get that? Maybe you missed it. I'll give it to you again. He speaks to the storm that you are in, but He also speaks to you in the storm.

I need help from the disciples again. Again, they were on a ship in a storm, in a boat. And the Bible says that Jesus came walking to them on the water. Ah, Jesus came walking in the midst of the storm, with the wind blowing in His hair with the wind and the waters misting against His face, He comes walking on the storm. And Peter sees Him and says, "Lord, if it's You, and I know it is, let me come to You."

And Jesus said to Peter, "I'll call your bluff. Come to Me." He speaks to you in the storm and He says if you want to walk on water, you must get out of the boat. He says to you that you can walk on the waters of impossibility, you can walk with the possibilities of His presence, but you're stuck in the boat, and He says to step out, for He speaks to you in the storm.

An old song from the African American tradition says, "Steal away, steal away, steal away to Jesus. I ain't got long to stay here." Then the line says, "My Lord, He calls me, He calls me by the thunder." Even in the midst of the thunder of the storms, He calls you. He says, "Come to me. You don't have long to stay where you are. You're just passing through."

It's a storm that's moving. The storm in this passage is shifting. Jesus, the Lord, becomes a storm tracker in this very Psalm. The storm begins out in the water and then the storm moves to the mountains and then the storm moves to the desert, to the wilderness. You didn't get that; I'll give it to you one more time. The storm is moving. God is a storm tracker. It begins on the waters, raging, tossing back and forth, to and fro. It then moves to the mountains, the mountaintops, the peaks. Then it moves to the dryness of the valleys in the wilderness.

This lets me know everyone in this room is in one of three places. Some of us just came out of a storm. Praise the Lord. Some of us, if we tell the truth, we came here today in a storm. But you didn't just leave a storm and you're not in a storm. As my mother would say, "Keep on living because that means you're on your way to a storm." But the Lord of the storm - listen now - speaks to the storm that you are experiencing, speaks to you in the storm. And here's the last thing: And then He speaks to the storm that is in you. I know you missed that one. I'll give you that one more time. He speaks to the storm that you are in, He speaks to you in the storm, and He speaks to the storm that is in you.

James says that sometimes we are rocked and we are tossed by doubts and by fears like a wave rising up within us. He speaks of the storm that is within. What is that raging storm within you? A raging storm of fear? A raging storm of frustration? A raging storm of doubt? How will I make it out? How will I make it through? How will I make it over?

But remember, Jesus told the disciples to get in the boat and let's go over. I came to tell you, today, that you cannot go under when He says go over. I wonder, today, what is the storm that's raging in you?

I have good news. Jesus speaks to the storm that is in you, and He speaks His peace. He speaks peace to the storm of your mind. He speaks peace to the storm in your body. He speaks peace to the storm in your relationships. He speaks peace in the storm of your future. He is the God and the voice in the storm. He speaks to the storm that you are in. He speaks to you in the storm. And He speaks to the storm that is in you.

Well, I have the weather report. And the weather report is the storm is passing over. Hallelujah. Hallelujah! There has never been a storm that did not end. The storm is passing over, hallelujah!

© Copyright Hour of Power 2009. This message was delivered by Bishop Kenneth Ulmer from the pulpit of the Crystal Cathedral and aired on the Hour of Power, July 19, 2009.

JANUARY-14: Sabarimala stampede : Why tragedy repeats the same day over the years?

2011-01-15T03:46:00.000-08:00

A Sabarimala pilgrim awaits news of his relative outside Kumily Thaluk Hospital in Idukki district on Saturday. The death toll in the stampede that occurred on Friday at Pulmedu near Vandiperiyar has gone up to 102. Photo: H. Vibhu (www.thehindu.com)

Why tragedy repeats the same day over the years?

1952, January 14 : 66 persons dead.
1999, January 14 : 52 persons dead
2011, January 14 : 102 and counting

This is a sad fact. It was an avoidable waste of life.
Kerala has the excellent man / brain / economic resources to change things at Sabarimala but why it is not happening?

The traditional Political Mudsling has begun in Kerala.
Will it bring at least some considerable improvements in sabarimala ?
or, these 102 precious lives go waste and we hear the same news repeating over the years?
I have many questions, sir, because i want answers.

To a friend: The river bends..

2011-01-07T18:43:00.000-08:00

If my ship sails from sight,
it doesn't mean my journey ends,
it simply means the river bends.
-J. Enoch Powell-

BBC Guide: Christians in the Middle East

2011-01-06T05:33:00.000-08:00

NDLR / ed:
With all the talks about the religious freedom and minority respect / privileges in Europe and North America, it is important to know what happens in the middle East, where Christianity is just an another minority.
How much religious minorities are respected in the that part of the world.
It is far from the ideal!
Is it not necessary that the justice be equal?

BBC Guide: Christians in the Middle East
The Middle East is the birthplace of Christianity and home to some of the world's most ancient Christian denominations. But Christian communities across the region are declining in numbers because of a combination of low birth rates, emigration and, in some places, persecution.

LEBANON

Lebanon is the only Middle Eastern country where Christians were once dominant and retain considerable political power.

The country's religious breakdown is deeply sensitive as the country's 1975-1989 civil war was fought largely along religious lines.

LEBANON'S CHRISTIANS
Total population: 4m
Estimated Christians: 1.35m-1,6m
% Christian: 34-41%
Main churches: Maronite, Greek Orthodox
Issues: Political change
The last official census was done in 1932, but current estimates suggest there are slightly more Muslims than Christians. There is a widespread perception among Christians that their numbers and influence are declining.

The constitution dictates that the president is always Christian, the prime minister Sunni Muslim, and the parliamentary speaker Shia Muslim.

The largest church is the Maronite Church, which traces its origins to a 4th Century Syrian hermit, St Maron. The church united with the Catholic Church in 1736, although it retains its own traditions and practices.

The Greek Orthodox church is also strong in Lebanon, and there is a wide range of other denominations. Most religious groups operate freely.

Muslim-Christian relations have generally been calm in recent years. However, general political tensions in the country increased in 2005 with the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the withdrawal of Syrian troops and a wave of bombings in Christian areas.

Sources: The CIA World Factbook estimates that 39% of Lebanon's population is Christian. Al-Nahar, a major national daily newspaper estimated in 2005 that Christians made up 40.8% of the population. The World Christian Database says there are approximately 1,350,000 Christians. UNDP estimates the country's population to be 4m.

ISRAEL

About 19% of the country's population are Israeli-Arab - and about 9% of those are Christian.

As such the Christians are a minority within a minority, facing both the well-documented discrimination that all Israeli-Arabs are subject to and also the struggle to maintain their identity as part of an overwhelmingly Muslim population group.

ISRAEL'S CHRISTIANS
Total population: 6.8m
Estimated Christians: 144,000-196,000
% Christian: 2.1-2.8%
Main churches: Greek Orthodox, Catholic
Issues: Discrimination against Arabs, falling numbers
The majority are from Catholic - both Eastern and Western rite - denominations and the Greek Orthodox church.

The remaining Christians include increasing numbers of immigrants from around the world. A vast number of denominations are represented, including Copts, Armenians, Russian Orthodox, Lutherans and a wide range of other Protestant groups.

There are also Messianic Jews who consider themselves Jewish but recognise Christ as the Messiah, and Christian Zionists who profess strong support the Jewish people.

Although there are some inequalities in the treatment of different religious groups in the predominantly Jewish state, there is full freedom of worship and proselytising is allowed.

Sources: Government figures put the Israeli Christian population at 144,000, of which 117,000 are Christian Arabs. The World Christian Database, working mainly from church estimates, puts the total 50,000 higher. This may be partly due to an estimated 100,000 illegal workers in the country, many of whom are Christian. The World Bank estimates Israel's population to be 6.8m.

WEST BANK AND GAZA

Christian communities in the West Bank and Gaza have been declining for several decades because of conflict, economic decline and low birth rates.

The World Christian Database says they accounted for 5.3% of the population in 1970 and have dropped to less than half that now.

WEST BANK AND GAZA CHRISTIANS
Total population: 3.76m
Estimated Christians: 40,000-90,000
% Christian: 1.1-2.4%
Main churches: Greek Orthodox and Catholic
Issues: Falling numbers, economic decline, occupation
Some Christian leaders also cite the rise of radical Islam in the area as a growing pressure on Christian communities.

Christians are concentrated in and around the towns of Bethlehem and Ramallah. A pastor in Gaza City estimates there are a mere 2,000 Christians among the Gaza Strip's 1.3 million in habitants.

The two largest churches are the Greek Orthodox and Catholic churches, although the Assyrian, Armenian Orthodox and Syrian Orthodox churches, as well as many Protestant denominations, are also represented.

Christian-Muslim relationships are largely peaceful and Christians have reached senior positions in the Palestinian Authority, although some Palestinian Christians complain of harassment and discrimination.

Sources: The most recent PA census in 1997 recorded just over 40,000 Christians. The World Christian Database says there are about 90,000. The Palestinian Authority says the population of Gaza and the West Bank is 3.76 million.

EGYPT

Most Christians in Egypt are Copts - Christians descended from the ancient Egyptians.

Their church split from the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches in 451AD because of a theological dispute over the nature of Christ, but is now, on most issues, doctrinally similar to the Eastern Orthodox church.

EGYPT'S CHRISTIANS
Total population: 68.7m
Estimated Christians: 5.8m-11m
% Christian: 8-16%
Main church: Coptic Orthodox
Issues: Some discrimination

The Coptic language - a descendent of the ancient Egyptian language, written mainly in the Greek alphabet - is still used for small parts of services.

Although Christian-Muslim relations are relatively peaceful, Copts complain of discrimination in the workplace and restrictions on church construction, and are concerned that new electoral rules are benefiting Islamist parties but not increasing Coptic political representation.

A plethora of other Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant and Armenian churches are present in smaller numbers in Egypt.

Sources: The Egyptian government estimates there are 5.6 million Christians; church estimates rise to 11 million.

SYRIA

Syria has for much of the century had a sizeable Christian minority making up at least 10% of the population. The proportion is thought to be declining due to emigration and low birth rates, although there are few reliable statistics.

SYRIA'S CHRISTIANS
Total population: 18.1m
Estimated Christians: 970,000-1.7m
% Christian: 5.4-9.4%
Main church: Greek Orthodox, Catholic
Issues: Declining numbers
In recent years Syria has been considered one of the easier Middle Eastern countries for Christians to live in. Power is concentrated in the hands of the Alawite minority - a Shia sect considered heretical by many Muslims - who have clamped down hard on extreme forms of Islam.

Although some Christians have been successful in professions and business - with a few rising relatively high in the administration - others have followed relatives to the West for economic reasons or to escape the general repression of the regime.

The largest churches are the Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches. There are also Syrian Orthodox, Syrian Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, Armenian Catholic, Assyrian and Chaldean (see Iran and Iraq) Christians.

Sources: The World Christian Database put the number of Christians at 970,000, while a US State Department report says there are 1.7m. According to UNDP, the population is 18.1m.

JORDAN

Jordan's Christian population has dropped from about 5% of the population in 1970 to the current estimated 3%.

The main churches are Eastern and Western-rite Catholic and the Greek Orthodox church.

JORDAN'S CHRISTIANS
Total population: 5.4m
Estimated Christians: 163,000-220,000
% Christian: 3-4%
Main churches: Catholic, Greek Orthodox
Issues: Declining numbers
There is generally freedom of religion, apart from for Muslims converting to Christianity who sometimes face severe discrimination.

All churches must be recognised by the government. Nine of the 110 parliamentary seats are reserved for Christians. There are many missionary groups in the country, although proselytising Muslims is not allowed.

Relations between Christians and Muslims are amicable and Christians do not generally face discrimination, according to a US Department of State report.

Sources: Official government figures estimate that 4% of the population is Christian, although according to a US State Department report, government and Christian officials privately estimate the true figure to be closer to 3%. The World Christian Database estimates the Christian population to be 168,000. The World Bank puts the population at 5.4m.

IRAQ

There has been a Christian presence in what is now Iraq since the 2nd Century. The largest groups are the Chaldean and Assyrian churches, which are descended form similar roots but generally seen as separate ethnic groups.
IRAQ'S CHRISTIANS
Total population: 27.3
Estimated Christians: 700,000-1m
% Christian: 2.7- 3.5%
Main churches: Chaldean, Assyrian
Issues: Falling numbers, security

The Chaldeans are Eastern-rite Catholics - autonomous churches of Eastern origin which retain their own liturgy and traditions, but recognise the Pope's authority.

The Assyrian church - the Ancient Church of the East, also sometimes referred to as the Nestorian church - traces its roots back to 2nd Century Mesopotamia and is not Catholic.

The traditional liturgical language of both Assyrian and Chaldean churches is Syriac - a descendent of Aramaic, the language thought to have been spoken by Jesus and his disciples. Some Iraqi Christians still speak Syriac.

Iraq also has communities of Syrian Catholics, Syrian Orthodox, Copts, Armenian Orthodox, Armenian Catholics, Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholics, as well as Anglicans and Evangelicals.

A rise in attacks on Christians since the US-led invasion in 2003 has prompted many to leave, although estimates that some 40,000 - 60,000 have left cannot be confirmed.

Although the Iraqi government has made commitments to enshrining the rights of religious minorities in the country's new constitution, the lack of security makes these difficult to enforce on the ground.

Sources: The World Christian Database says there are about 700,000 Christians in Iraq, while estimates from local church leaders and a US government report put the figure close to a million. There were 1.4 million in 1987 when the country's last census was conducted under Saddam Hussein. The UNDP estimates the total population to be 27.3 million.

IRAN

The largest church in Iran is the Armenian Apostolic Church, which dates back to around 300AD.

Its doctrines are similar to the Eastern Orthodox Church, although services follow traditional Armenian rites and the Armenian language is used.

IRAN'S CHRISTIANS
Total population: 66.9m
Estimated Christians: 79,000-400,000
% Christian: 0.1-0.6%
Main church: Armenian
Issues: Declining numbers, discrimination

There has been an Armenian community in Iran for several centuries.

The second largest church is the Assyrian church (see Iraq).

Iran's traditional Christian populations are recognised in the constitution, guaranteed freedom to worship and allocated seats in the parliament, but face some discrimination in employment and political rights.

Numbers are thought to be decreasing.

Evangelical Christians are not recognised and face heavy discrimination.

Sources: The World Christian Database estimates the Christian population at 400,000, although the most recent government census (1996) puts the figure at 79,000. The UN Special Representative for Iran estimated there were 300,000 Christians in 2001, but that 15,000 - 20,000 were leaving every year.

GULF STATES

All the Gulf countries have very few, if any, indigenous Christians. Most, however, have large populations of expatriate workers from around the world, many of which include sizeable Christian communities.

In most countries the expatriates have freedom of worship but are not allowed to try to convert Muslims to Christianity. In Saudi Arabia, public expressions of non-Muslim religion in Saudi Arabia are banned. Private religious gatherings are also prohibited, although the ban is only enforced intermittently.

World Christian Database figures include several thousand Arab Christians in isolated churches linked by TV or radio networks in the UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Yemen - and another 13,000 "hidden Muslim believers" in Saudi Arabia. All figures are estimates derived from the claims of Christian organisations.

Bahrain:
Population 710,000
Foreign workers: 270,000
Christians: 70,000

Oman:
Population: 2.3m
Foreign workers: 500,000
Christian: 88,000

Saudi Arabia:
Population: 26.7m
Foreign workers: >7m
Christians: 1.3m

Yemen: Population: 20m
Foreign workers: unknown
Christians: 3,000 - 38,000 Kuwait:
Population: 2.8m
Foreign workers: 1.8m
Christians: 260,000

Qatar:
Population 744,000
Foreign workers: 544,000
Christians:11,900

UAE:
Population 4.3m
Foreign workers: 3.7m
Christian: 316,000

Sources: World Christian Database and US State Department reports on religious freedom

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/4499668.stm

Published: 2005/12/15 15:16:04 GMT

© BBC 2011

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4499668.stm

6 Janvier : Aujourd’hui nous célébrons Saint frère André Bessette...

2011-01-05T16:26:00.000-08:00

"Aimer…écouter….prier"

Les saints ont fait briller le visage du Christ dans leur vie, à travers leurs actions, leurs paroles et par leurs intercessions; et Dieu continue son travail à travers leur intercession même après leur mort.

Saint Thomas d’Aquin, par le travail de toute sa vie, nous a montré la sagesse de Dieu révélée dans les Écritures Saintes.

Saint Dominic, par sa vie et ses prédications, nous a témoigné le Christ qui enseigne le monde, le Christ qui fait la proclamation de la Bonne Nouvelle.

Saint François d’Assise, par sa vie et à travers sa fraternité, nous a montré le Christ pauvre et crucifié. Il a appelé Jésus « le frère ». François nous a invité à vivre pleinement le mystère de l’Incarnation en appelant Jésus son « frère ». Jésus est notre frère, c’est le mystère de l’incarnation : Dieu fait home.

Une tapisserie représentant le frère André

Aujourd’hui nous célébrons frère André. Par son accueil, sa compassion et son intercession, il nous a montré le visage de Dieu qui nous écoute, qui nous accueille et qui nous guéri par sa Grâce.

Il faut comprendre L’homme selon son époque, selon son temps.

Comme notre archevêque cardinal Jean Claude Turcotte l’a bien observé dans son homélie au stade olympique le 30 octobre 2010 (dernier) :

« Le frère André a vécu à une époque bien différente de la nôtre. Mort en 1937, il n’a rien connu ni rien prévu des profondes transformations survenues dans notre société et notre Église depuis les années 1960.

À divers égards, sa façon de penser, sa manière de se comporter, ses propos, les expressions de sa foi chrétienne et de sa piété diffèrent des nôtres. Il est d’une autre époque, peut-on dire. »

Mais malgré ces différences, même aujourd’hui, nous sommes tous attiré par sa vie.

Sa vie nous parle de la compassion, de l’écoute et de l’Intercession.

Aimer…écouter….prier.

« Mange - Prie - Aime » nous dit Mme Gilbert Elizabeth dans son livre autobiographique au succès international et par le film du même nom, qui a connu un énorme succès aux cinémas à travers le monde de l’an dernier (en 2010.)

Par sa vie, saint frère André nous invite à « Aimer…écouter….prier. »

Toute sa vie, il s’est caché derrière le manteau de Saint Joseph.

Frère André, lui-même disait :

« Le monde est-il bête de penser que frère André fait des miracles!

C’est le bon Dieu et saint joseph qui peuvent vous guérir. Pas moi. Je prierai saint joseph pour vous. »

Même aujourd'hui il nous donne le même message :

C’est le bon Dieu et saint joseph qui peuvent vous guérir.

Pas moi. Je prierai saint joseph pour vous.

Saint frère André, nous avons besoin de vos prières…

Frère André intercède pour nous…

The Great Indian Onion Crisis

2010-12-23T04:01:00.000-08:00

After the great European Freeze, read on the great Indian onion crisis.
This is a re-post from BBC India's Soutik Biswas' blog.
interesting.....

Stink over onion crisis is enough to make you cry
Soutik Biswas | 12:35 UK time, Wednesday, 22 December 2010

A spectre is haunting India - the spectre of an onion-less life.

Onion prices have shot through the roof this week, climbing to an eye-watering 85 rupees ($1.87; £1.20) a kilo from 35 rupees only last week. Crop damage due to unseasonal rains has apparently led to a shortage. Traders have been hoarding stockpiles of the staple food to make a killing, despite official threats to punish them.

A fretful government has banned exports till mid-January to bring prices down, and cut import duties on the vegetable. The prime minister, we are told, is busy writing letters imploring his farm and consumer affairs ministries to bring down prices quickly. The opposition is breathing fire.

Onions have stormed their way to the front pages of newspapers and the top of TV news bulletins. I counted two dozen stories on onions in a dozen-odd English papers today. One editorial chides the government for the price rise and asks it to "know your onions". "UPA [United Progressive Alliance, another name for the ruling Congress-led government] lands in onion soup", is a particularly colourful banner headline in another paper. "Onions: Weep till March", bemoans yet another headline, alluding to a minister's deadline to fix the crisis. And a tabloid's onion edit - teasingly called "More at work than onions" - is strategically placed between one on a corruption scandal besieging the government and another on the sizzling alleged affair between the British actress Liz Hurley and the Australian cricketer Shane Warne.

Chefs and cookbook writers have come out in droves giving out free tips on how to cope without onions. "My advice, especially to those who want to eat out," says one chef, "would be to shift to different cuisines for a while as onions are primarily used in Indian cooking." So try European and other Asian foods, he advises. At home, he says, substitute onions with tomatoes and curds. Onion lovers may not find that a very convincing answer.

Everyone is concerned about the prospect of life without onions in India. Most worried of all are the politicians. In 1998, onion inflation was partly blamed for the unseating of the Hindu nationalist BJP government in Delhi's state polls. Political pundits insist that steep onion prices also contributed to the now-defunct Janata Party's debacle in the 1980 general elections.

So why do high onion prices drive Indians up the wall and unseat governments? One onion exporter said to a paper: "Why does the consumer never compare prices of onions with those of other vegetables? No vegetable is available at less than 40 rupees a kg in the retail market."

It's simple. Onion is a vegetable that no Indian kitchen can do without. It is also the most egalitarian of vegetables. A poor peasant or worker's sparse meal is incomplete without a bite of the pungent bulb. The onion is pureed, satueed, fried and garnished in the rich man's feast as well. It also occupies a unique culinary space in Indian cooking.

It is a must for adding taste and crunch to many vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes. It is eaten raw as a salad, pureed for flavouring and sauce for meats and garden vegetables; used as a dip; fried as fritters and crisps. Rustic medicinal beliefs have it that it has healing properties and reduces acidity. Indians believe onions cool the body in the searingly hot summers and keep fungal infections away during muggy monsoons. In the old days Hindu widows kept away from onions after their husbands' deaths as the humble bulb was believed to have aphrodisiac qualities. How can you possibly compare such an exalted vegetable with any other?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/soutikbiswas/2010/12/indias_onion_crisis.html

Manorama IPAD APP is coming!

2010-12-11T19:35:00.000-08:00

This is official: Manorama IPAD APP is coming!
this is a re-post from on kerala by Dr. Mario R. Garcia.

Kerala: an enchanted land with millions of newspaper readers!

TAKEAWAY: This is an industry that needs good, encouraging news, right? Well, take a detour to Kerala, in the scenic cone of southern India, a sort of Land of Oz for newspaper readers.

Recent front page of Malayala Manorama

It has been an intense two days here at Malayala Manorama, the newspaper that is read by approximately 10 million readers daily.

Yes, it takes your breath away just to mention that number in connection with a printed newspaper—-or in any platform for that matter.

My visit here this time has nothing to do with print. We at Garcia Media did a full redesign of Malayala Manorama (in Malayalan) and its sister weekly magazine The Week (in English) in 2004.

Figures just released today, tell us the happy story: Malayala Manorama retains the number 1 position among regional language dailies in India with 99.27 lacs readers (approximately 10 million). With this reanking, Malayala Manorama becomes the 4th largest read newspaper in the country, and the only non-Hindi publication in the top 5 list.

The honor of being number one, the most widely read newspaper in India is Dainik Jagran (Hindi) with close to 16 million readers, followed by Dainik Bhaskar (Hindi), 14 million; Hindustan——a current Garcia Media project—-with almost 11 million. The Times of India (English) is #7 on the list and the most widely read English language daily, with over 7 million daily readers.

By the way, another one of our Indian regional newspaper projects, Sakshi (in Telugu), published in Hyderabad, and which we created as a newspaper in March 2008, ranks #15 on the list with close to 5 million daily readers.

Indian readers take their newspapers seriously, and although the use of mobile telephones is widespread, they are used for conversation more than to read newspapers in them, obviously. As I have travelled through the rural stretch that connects the city of Cochin with Kottayam in scenic Kerala, I was impressed by the number of men and women sitting outdoors, or on the floor, with a newspaper open in front of them.

Are you listening, Ross Dawson?

Dawson, as readers of this blog may know, is the author of a much discussed Newspaper Extinction Deadline. In it, India truly got the honors of being the last country to say goodbye to printed newspapers as we know them.

According to Dawson, it will be India that will pull the plug, sell the old printing presses, turn off the light and hang a sign that reads: Gone apping!

Dawson’s website is about “opportunities for business and society in a hyper-connected world.

I am surprised that so many Indian publishers had no idea they were so honored. Twice this month, while conducting sessions, I have joked that I expect to be working in India till the very end of my career. Heck, I will be 93 in 2040 if I make it that far. But I don’t think I, or anyone, will be helping the Indians to hang that sign outside the door. However, I see surprise in the Indians’ faces when I tell them they have been given the honor of being the last country to still have printed newspapers.

“Nonsense,“ a publisher told me here. “Pure nonsense, this prediction.“ (I have heard the same reaction from others outside of India)

Not even an hour after this discussion came the report with those incredible, but true, numbers about Indian newspaper readership: 15 million readers here and 10 million there. The newspaper that was #33 on the list , Punya Nagari (in Marathi) even gets two million readers.

“We at Malayala Manorama see various platforms, and we are going to be represented in all of them,“ says Mammen Mathew, Editor

And, of course, Mr. Mathew made this statement as he joined us in the kick off of the Malayala Manorama iPad app workshop.

Six years after my first visit here to redesign Malayala Manorama, my visit this time is to help Malayala Manorama as it looks to the future in a new platform—-the tablet.
The iPad workshop

Many ask me what my IPad workshop involves. As I have just completed today here in Kerala, let me share the information with you:

Two days, that is what it takes to get a group of devoted members of the iPad project team ready to understand how the tablet works, how print and online relate to the tablet, how to create a model.

First, the workshop is scheduled as Phase One of the iPad project, once the management has decided to go iPad—-or at least to explore its grand possibilities.

The two-day workshop involves the following:

--Introduction: a presentation of about 90 minutes outlining all that we know about the iPad and how to get started in the creation of a news app.
-Exploring the existing publiation’s DNA: a discussion of the strenghs of the newspaper or magazine and how to enhance them and give them longer legs on the app.
Sketching: first basic aspects of sketching. I am a firm believer that the discussion of what will be cannot go too far without screens showing it.
Information architecture: a key part of the workshop, involving the entire team, but especially the technical ones, how navigation will be carried out; how do we move from here to there; the maps that lead us to our destinations inside the app. Perhaps the most important point of the workshop.
A final working sketch: at the end of the two days, we have a full working sketch with the main parts of the architecture, content flow, visual details (tyography, color palette) and the basics of storytelling.

Of special interest

The Great Murdoch iPad Debate | The New York Observer
http://www.observer.com/2010/great-murdoch-ipad-debate

Why the iPad should rival the web
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6130938a-fd85-11df-a049-00144feab49a.html?ftcamp=crm/email/2010122/nbe/MediaInternet/product#axzz16wE3T2UF

USA: Wall Street Journal Magazine, New York Section Profitable, CEO Hinton Says
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-02/wall-street-journal-magazine-new-york-section-profitable-ceo-hinton-says.html

TheMarioBlog post #684

Posted by Dr. Mario R. Garcia on December 02, 2010

Urban Legends at 'snopes.com"

2010-12-04T17:17:00.000-08:00

http://www.snopes.com/ is a great read.
a lot of Urban Legends...read and re-read!
have a great week-end!

WikiLeaks Cable Gate and the phophesy of Simon in the temple

2010-12-02T08:40:00.000-08:00

WikiLeaks Cable Gate:
"This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel,
and to be a sign that will be spoken against,so that the thoughts of many
hearts will be revealed...."( Luke 2:33-35)

The Guardian - "Where are the Wikileaks Cables From?

Wikileaks cablegate is an important event in our recent history.
It is important not because of its content alone, but also because of the reactions it generates, short-term as well as long-term.
It reveals the thoughts of many hearts, to the grand public. This is a way of viewing the world in all its colors possible...the fears, the doubts, the silences, the silent wishes...
anyway, Hello world, have a great cablegate journey!

a re-post from THE ECONOMIST

point of WikiLeaks Dec 1st 2010, 22:54 by W.W. | IOWA CITY

DAVID BROOK's recent column and Ross Douthat's reply to my defence of WikiLeaks have helped me to pin down and articulate the source of a nagging but previously inchoate sense that somehow we're all missing the bigger picture.

Let me start by suggesting that the politicians and pundits calling for Julian Assange's head are playing into his hands. As all eyes track the international albino of mystery, the human and physical infrastructure of a much larger, more distributed movement continues to expand and consolidate far beyond the spotlight. If Mr Assange is murdered tomorrow, if WikiLeaks' servers are cut off for a few hours, or a few days, or forever, nothing fundamental is really changed. With or without WikiLeaks, the technology exists to allow whistleblowers to leak data and documents while maintaining anonymity. With or without WikiLeaks, the personel, technical know-how, and ideological will exists to enable anonymous leaking and to make this information available to the public. Jailing Thomas Edison in 1890 would not have darkened the night.

Yet the debate over WikiLeaks has proceeded as if the matter might conclude with the eradication of these kinds of data dumps—as if this is a temporary glitch in the system that can be fixed; as if this is a nuisance that can be made to go away with the application of sufficient government gusto. But I don't think the matter can end this way. Just as technology has made it easier for governments and corporations to snoop ever more invasively into the private lives of individuals, it has also made it easier for individuals, working alone or together, to root through and make off with the secret files of governments and corporations. WikiLeaks is simply an early manifestation of what I predict will be a more-or-less permanent feature of contemporary life, and a more-or-less permanent constraint on strategies of secret-keeping.

Consider what young Bradley Manning is alleged to have accomplished with a USB key on a military network. It was impossible 30 years ago to just waltz out of an office building with hundreds of thousands of sensitive files. The mountain of boxes would have weighed tons. Today, there are millions upon millions of government and corporate employees capable of downloading massive amounts of data onto tiny devices. The only way WikiLeaks-like exposés will stop is if those with the permissions necessary to access and copy sensitive data refuse to do so. But as long as some of those people retain a sense of right and wrong—even if it is only a tiny minority—these leaks and these scandals will continue.

The basic question is not whether we think Julian Assange is a terrorist or a hero. The basic question certainly is not whether we think exposing the chatter of the diplomatic corps helps or hinders their efforts, and whether this is a good or bad thing. To continue to focus on these questions is to miss the forest for the texture of the bark on a single elm. If we take the inevitability of future large leaks for granted, then I think the debate must eventually centre on the things that will determine the supply of leakers and leaks. Some of us wish to encourage in individuals the sense of justice which would embolden them to challenge the institutions that control our fate by bringing their secrets to light. Some of us wish to encourage in individuals ever greater fealty and submission to corporations and the state in order to protect the privileges and prerogatives of the powerful, lest their erosion threaten what David Brooks calls "the fragile community"—our current, comfortable dispensation.

UNE BELLE LEÇON DE CIVILISATION !

2010-11-19T12:40:00.001-08:00

Mother Teresa : some people are never OUT

2010-11-01T10:14:00.000-07:00

Here is a blog-post from the net ( © http://cmpaul.wordpress.com)

Mother Teresa habit: From one stripe sari to 3 stripes

KOLKATA – On the evening of 16 August 1948, Mother Teresa removed her Loreto Sisters (IBVM) religious habit (dress) and wore a cheap new habit of her future ‘Missionary of Charity’ Order. Her new dress consisted of a simple, cotton, white sari with blue stripe (blue is the color of Virgin Mary) along with white habits to be worn under the sari. (Please see right side photo and notice the single striped sari). For over ten years Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity Sisters used the single border sari until few pious parents of some Bengali MC Sister protested at the lack of decorum of their daughter’s religious habit. In those days, the single blue border white sari was worn by poor sweeper women working for Calcutta corporation.

Mother Teresa ( single stripe sari) with Bishop Morrow and Miss Eileen Egan of CRS in Calcutta, May 1960.

It was at this time that the American born Salesian Bishop Louis Morrow (1939-1969) of neighbouring Krishnagar diocese founded the Sisters of Mary Immaculate (SMI) on 12 December 1948. It was Bishop Morrow who developed three striped blue border white cotton sari for his Sisters, after more than two years of study, consultation and trials. The SMI Sisters had their first solemn clothing ceremony in April 1952 when they wore their current sari with three blue stripes for the first time.
It was in May 1960 that Mother Teresa approached Bishop Morrow, to seek his permission to adopt the SMI sari design for the MCs.
“More the merrier,” the delighted Bishop was reported to have told Mother Teresa encouraging her to use the SMI style sari! Since then the MC Sisters use the SMI design sari but wear it in the rural Bengali women’s style. Today the MC Sisters sari is produced at the MC run leper colony in Titagarh, outside Kolkata.
Novices wear white saris without the blue stripe. They also receive the blue striped sari when they profess. A Sister’s possessions include: three saris (one to wear, one to wash, one to mend), a pair of sandals, flour sack underclothes (used to be), a crucifix and rosary. They also have a plate and metal spoon, a canvas bag, and prayer book. In cold countries, possessions also include a cardigan. They never wear anything but sandals on their feet.

Cholera death toll jumps in Haiti

2010-10-24T10:06:00.000-07:00

The death toll from a cholera outbreak in Haiti has leapt past 250, officials say.

More than 3,000 people were infected, said Gabriel Thimote, director general of Haiti's health department.

Five cases of cholera were detected in the capital Port-au-Prince but UN officials said the patients had been quickly diagnosed and isolated.

Around a million survivors of January's quake are living in tents near the city with poor sanitary conditions.

Health officials have been trying to contain the outbreak in areas north of the capital.

The five victims isolated in Port-au-Prince had become infected in the Artibonite region - the main outbreak zone - and then travelled to the capital where they developed symptoms, the UN's humanitarian affairs agency said.

This meant Port-au-Prince was "not a new location of infection", it added.

Aid officials have described the prospect of a cholera outbreak in the city as "awful".

Those in the camps are highly vulnerable to the intestinal infection, which is caused by bacteria transmitted through contaminated water or food.

Cholera causes diarrhoea and vomiting leading to severe dehydration, and can kill quickly if left untreated through rehydration and antibiotics.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11616535

“The ley lines of globalization”: Ethan Zuckerman

2010-10-21T05:47:00.000-07:00

This is a re-post.
i saw an interesting post by ethan zuckerman here: Around the world for $0.10 per kilo.

indeed a good and thoughtful read...

http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFTosjzVnMI

http://www.mediacloud.org/

http://www.worldchanging.com/

She sells sea shells: Mary Anning

2010-10-21T04:19:00.000-07:00

Audio slideshow: Jurassic woman ( on BBC)http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11590505 She survived a lightning strike as a child, and it's suggested that she inspired the tongue-twister "She sells sea shells" - but it was her prolific work on the Dorset beaches, known now as the Jurassic Coast, that earned Mary Anning her place in scientific history.

Her fossil discoveries 200 years ago near Lyme Regis - are being celebrated by the Royal Society, The Natural History Museum and the town's museum. With novelist Tracy Chevalier, who has written extensively about the early fossil-hunter, take a look back at Mary Anning's remarkable life.
http://www.paleomania.com/article-3652910.html

Les médias doivent savoir informer et former: Benoît XVI

2010-10-07T16:13:00.000-07:00

07/10/2010 (1:12)
La foi chrétienne et la communication ont en commun une structure fondamentale : le fait que message et moyen coïncident ; en effet le Fils de Dieu, le Verbe incarné, est à la fois le message de salut et le moyen par lequel le salut se réalise. Ceci n’est pas un simple concept mais une réalité accessible pour tous. Il constitue un moyen pour contraster l’indifférence face au Vrai, la spectacularisation à tout prix. Benoît XVI l’a réaffirmé dans son discours aux participants du congrès international de la presse catholique organisé par le Conseil pontifical pour les Communications sociales. L’Eglise, a-t-il dit, alimente la capacité à nouer des relations plus fraternelles et plus humaines, s’offrant comme lieu de communion entre les croyants mais aussi comme signe et instrument, pour tous, de vocation à la communion. Face à la crise religieuse actuelle, le monde de la communication catholique doit s’engager davantage car, a dit le Pape, même s’il n’a pas de force pour y croire, le monde a besoin de vivre comme si Dieu existait, autrement il risque de ne produire qu’un humanisme inhumain. C’est pour cela qu’il faut des communicateurs crédibles, efficaces, qui croient de façon authentique.

http://www.h2onews.org/francais/1-Pape/224446508-les-medias-doivent-savoir-informer-et-former.html

L'interactivité interpelle les médias catholiques

2010-10-07T16:11:00.000-07:00

07/10/2010 (1:41)

Clôture à Rome du congrès mondial sur la presse catholique organisé par le Conseil Pontifical pour les communications sociales. Jesús Colina, président d’H20news et directeur de ZENIT donne un avis d’expert sur les réseaux sociaux, et sur leurs risques et avantages pour les catholiques.

Jesús Colina: “La production de contenus réalisés directement par les internautes a généré ces dernières années des services à gros succès come : Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter. Flicker, Google News... Même Open Source est une forme d’interactivité et de production partagée ».

Jesús Colina estime que le modèle web2.0 a une marge de risque pour ainsi dire « relativiste ». Il se demande alors de quelle façon les communicateurs catholiques devraient adopter le modèle de l’interactivité?

Jesús Colina: « L’objectif de toute l’initiative web 2.0 se base sur la mise en place d’une community”.
Sur Internet, la communication doit suivre le modèle de l’Eglise comme communion, auquel Benoît XVI consacre son pontificat.Quand une Eglise transmet par Internet le sens de la communion, c’est-à-dire de manière interactive, elle fait la communauté. Dans ce cas Internet cesse d’être un espace virtuel pour se transformer en une opportunité de rencontre»

http://www.h2onews.org/francais/1-Evénements/224446509-linteractivite-interpelle-les-medias-catholiques.html

Getting reacquainted with Satan ( www.ottawacitizen.com)

2010-09-29T12:25:00.000-07:00

A Carleton University professor throws new light on the Prince of Darkness, Jennifer Green reports

By Jennifer Green, The Ottawa Citizen September 25, 2010

The devil is not who we think he is. In fact, for much of ancient history, he wasn't even a "he," says Kimberly Stratton, who is teaching a new Carleton University course on the history of Satan.

The earliest Biblical references use "satan" as a verb, meaning to block or prevent something.

In the Book of Numbers, an angel blocks or "satans" Balaam from cursing the Israelites. "In the original Hebrew, the verb is to 'satan' him," says Stratton. "The angel himself was a normal angel of God." In the Book of Job, "satan" is a job title, something like a Crown prosecutor who seeks sinners and brings them to justice.

"He is still an angel in God's court. There is no indication that he is an opponent of God. He just seems to be an angel doing his job. If anything, he has a higher-ranking position in heaven." Even in the New Testament's Gospel of Matthew, the Devil tests Jesus in the desert, but then he disappears, and ministering angels come in. "So it's not clear there that he isn't still part of God's entourage. ... acting somehow as the Crown attorney." Stratton outlines in her course how man's ideas of God and goodness, evil and misfortune, are shaped by history.

In 586 BC, the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, the sole place of Jewish sacrifice, and dragged the nation into exile.

Once there, they tried to reconcile their misfortune with God's justice. They also started to believe there was only one God -- their own.

"If your god uses other nations to punish you, he must be in charge of those other nations and if he's in charge of those other nations, he must be more powerful than those other gods," says Stratton. "Eventually, you conclude there is just one god." The other gods became characterized as demons, traced back to the race of giants mentioned in Genesis, the offspring of "fallen angels" who came down from heaven and mated with human women. Stratton stresses that this is the only mention in the Bible of fallen angels, later stories notwithstanding.

The early church father Origen of Alexandria first suggested several hundred years after Christ's death that Satan fell because he refused to bow down to humans.

We also hear that he is the snake in the garden, trying to tempt Adam and Eve, but we are never told why, says Stratton.

"We're left with some guy who's evil for no reason. He is just an opponent of God, out to create havoc and ruin the world and ruin mankind, just because." In the Middle Ages, the devil becomes a useful tool for inflicting horrific measures against whoever might be in the way. If Jews or women or Knights Templar control too much of the economy, don't submit to their husbands, or own too much land, those in control could accuse them of worshipping Satan, making it perfectly acceptable to seize their goods, torture them, and burn them at the stake.

In the 16th century, as Protestants broke away from the Catholic Church, both competed to enforce moral reform, clamping down on women in particular.

"So there starts to be this association that women are running amok, striving to overthrow their husbands, and overturning domestic duties. They are so sexually insatiable they have to go to the devil to be satisfied." Once they have sold themselves to the devil purely for sexual reasons, they are in his thrall.

In preparation for the course, Stratton spent the better part of one summer looking at movies about Satan. Her favourite, Bedazzled, a 1967 movie with Dudley Moore, is surprisingly close to the Old Testament.

"(Satan's) job is to throw little things in (people's) way, to see how they react, and whether they roll with it and manage to keep their faith." Six years later, The Exorcist scorched the popular imagination. But, as creepy as it was, offers a surprisingly lazy devil. "This is the arch enemy of God and the worst he has to offer is a girl swearing and masturbating?" Al Pacino's Satan in The Devil's Advocate calls himself the first humanitarian, and offers this critique of religion: "God gives you all these desires and passions and then he gives you all these rules: look but don't touch, touch but don't taste, he's up there laughing." The devil in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is so androgynous that Stratton figures the director was linking Satan with homosexuality, another vilified group.

One scholar on Stratton's recommended reading list argues that Satan is not really that important, not even in the Bible.

Nor is he all that evil, writes Henry Ansgar Kelly in Satan: A Biography.

Kelly, distinguished professor emeritus in UCLA's English department, calls for a return to the original biblical view of Satan as a sort of prosecuting attorney rather than an embodiment of evil bent on destroying humankind.

Kelly says the latter characterization of Satan tars God with the same dark brush: "The ... vilification of Satan as the great enemy of God, to whom God delivered the entire human race for punishment, casts God not as the merciful father of the gospels but as an inept and irrational tyrant." Christ's sacrifice redeems relatively few, leaving millions of others, conceived and born in the state of guilt without having committed any personal sin, to suffer in Hell forever.

He writes: "It's a miserable picture isn't it? And it is owing in the large part to the unjustifiably bad press given to Satan over the centuries." Moving away from the "Prince of Evil" nomenclature brightens our view of God and human nature, allowing us to focus "on the real causes of the evil actions that people actually commit." At the end of all this research, Stratton believes there is no devil out there. "But what we have is people who create devils by believing in devils." Her course, limited to 20 students in the third or fourth year of the bachelor of humanities program, meets once a week for three hours.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Getting+reacquainted+with+Satan/3578666/story.html

croireTV : François reçoit les stigmates

2010-09-20T08:47:00.001-07:00

http://mesvideos.croire.com/video/iLyROoafIZCU.html

media analysis: from LE DEVOIR

2010-09-13T06:09:00.000-07:00

Pasteur en délire - Les médias ont-ils joué avec l'autodafé du Coran ?
Jean-Claude Leclerc 13 septembre 2010 Éthique et religion

Le pasteur Terry Jones aura réussi à retenir l’attention des médias avec sa menace de brûler le Coran.
En faisant le jeu d'un pasteur en mal de brûler le Coran un 11 septembre 2010, les médias ont-ils failli provoquer un grave incident? Avant même que Terry Jones n'ait pu mettre son projet à exécution, plusieurs ont posé la question. Le président Barack Obama, ayant pressenti le danger, hésitait à donner trop d'importance au personnage. Mais comment un pareil type, hier inconnu, a-t-il pu retenir ainsi l'opinion mondiale?

En juillet, à l'annonce de sa «Journée internationale pour brûler le Coran», le chef spirituel du Dove World Outreach Center n'avait guère capté l'attention des médias. Certes, un site «athée» avait noté la parution d'une page sur Facebook. Et aux États-Unis comme à l'extérieur, une vidéo placée sur YouTube le 17 juillet avait provoqué des réactions. Parmi les premiers à s'y intéresser, on relève le blogue d'un Michael Tomasky au Guardian de Grande-Bretagne.

Deux jours après, une association américaine d'Églises évangélistes diffusait, il est vrai, une déclaration pressant le groupe de Jones d'abandonner son idée de brûler des exemplaires du Coran. Mais, le 31 juillet, une entrevue du pasteur intégriste à CNN lui donnait une tribune internationale. Une agence de presse ayant relevé cette nouvelle affaire de Coran, plusieurs médias la mentionnèrent, dont le Times of India!

Au début d'août, le Sun de Gainesville — 115 000 habitants, et site de l'Université de Floride — interviewe le maire, Craig Lowe, qui réprouve le comportement du pasteur. Et les citoyens qui s'expriment semblent, pour la plupart, du même avis. Or, d'après une des analyses de cette étrange initiative, même si le débat se poursuit alors sur les réseaux sociaux ainsi qu'à la télévision et à la radio, l'histoire n'a pas encore pris une importance internationale.

Les uns attribuent l'escalade à la distribution de corans gratuits par le Conseil des relations américano-islamique. D'autres trouvent plutôt que David Petraeus, chef des forces de l'OTAN en Afghanistan, a mis le feu aux poudres en intimant à Jones de cesser de mettre en danger la vie de soldats et de civils à l'étranger. Des journalistes l'ayant interrogée, la secrétaire d'État, Hillary Clinton, a condamné, bien sûr, l'autodafé. Il ne restait plus au secrétaire à la Défense, Robert Gates, puis au président lui-même qu'à interpeller Jones pour que l'homme devienne un acteur mondial.

Qui est responsable alors de ce délire collectif, la presse ou la Maison-Blanche?

La presse a raté une bonne occasion d'examiner la source de cette «nouvelle». Quelle compétence théologique, en effet, permettait à Jones — qui n'a jamais étudié l'islam — de condamner le Coran ou de dicter aux musulmans où bâtir une mosquée? Quelle expérience à titre de «pasteur» l'autorisait à presser les adeptes de la vraie foi de «se tenir debout»? Aucune. Il aura fallu que son bûcher soit à la veille de flamber pour que des médias s'intéressent au passé du personnage.

Qui est-il ?

Cet ancien gérant d'hôtel a pris la direction, il y a 15 ans, d'une petite secte fondée par un homme d'affaires en 1986. Avec son épouse, il en habitait une grande propriété, mais surtout y gérait une entreprise de meubles, vendus sur eBay. Ses ouailles ne dépassaient pas la cinquantaine. Et dans une «académie» attenante, des pensionnaires s'occupaient aussi à travailler pour l'entreprise du pasteur.

D'après des rapports de presse en Allemagne, Jones y a été associé à une «communauté chrétienne» à Cologne, avant d'en être écarté. Son style de leadership était contesté, ainsi que son diplôme de théologie, obtenu d'une école biblique non reconnue. En Floride, sa petite Église s'était donné un mandat universel, comme son site le proclame, mais elle n'avait guère de succès.

Jones a certes publié un livre dont la page titre affirme que «l'islam vient du Diable». Mais ses affaires vivotaient. Les autorités locales de Gainesville mettaient en question son statut fiscal. Le moment pour le prophète de frapper un grand coup n'était-il pas venu? Avec tous ces musulmans osant implanter une mosquée à deux pas de Ground Zero, Dieu lui en aura, dit-on, donné l'inspiration.

L'Amérique s'éveillant au péril, le pasteur de Gainesville allait enfin fournir de quoi la galvaniser. Pourtant, rappellent des chroniqueurs, il n'aura pas été le premier à lancer l'idée d'un autodafé du Coran. Plus tôt, en 2008, un pasteur de la Westbobo Baptist Church de Topeka, au Kansas, en avait brûlé un exemplaire en pleine rue, et immortalisé la scène sur un film. Même illustré, l'événement, pourtant, ne fit pas le tour du monde. Les médias n'en avaient pas fait une nouvelle.

(Radio-Canada fit mention de cette Église de Topeka, — non reconnue par la confession baptiste — quand certains de ses membres, déjouant les gardes-frontières, vinrent au Manitoba, à l'occasion des funérailles d'une victime d'acte criminel. Ce crime était la punition de Dieu pour la tolérance de l'avortement, de l'homosexualité et autres plaies sévissant au Canada.)

Cette fois, les médias n'auraient probablement pas parlé de Jones si son projet, circulant sur les réseaux sociaux et sur les stations qui y prennent leur pâture, n'avait ameuté un plus grand public. Quand le public s'émeut, les médias s'agitent, et les politiciens également. C'est ainsi qu'un pasteur sans envergure, mais friand de notoriété, a réussi à kidnapper jusqu'au président des États-Unis.

Bref, ce «media event» spectaculaire mais débile n'aurait obtenu qu'une mention à la chronique des incidents loufoques, si les médias s'étaient le moindrement enquis du triste curriculum de Terry Jones. Par contre, en donnant une grande visibilité à une violence symbolique, ils risquaient de provoquer ailleurs des réactions extrêmes qui, elles, auraient été fort réelles.

***

redaction@ledevoir.com

***

Jean-Claude Leclerc enseigne le journalisme à l'Université de Montréal

http://www.ledevoir.com/societe/ethique-et-religion/296069/pasteur-en-delire-les-medias-ont-ils-joue-avec-l-autodafe-du-coran

« Une réalité toute simple »: frère Roger de Taizé

2010-09-12T18:19:00.000-07:00

Ouvrant l’Évangile, chacun peut se dire : ces paroles de Jésus sont un peu comme une lettre très ancienne qui me serait écrite dans une langue inconnue ; comme elle m’est adressée par quelqu’un qui m’aime, j’essaie d’en comprendre le sens, et je vais aussitôt mettre dans la pratique de ma vie le peu que j’en saisis…

Ce ne sont pas les vastes connaissances qui importent au début. Elles auront leur grande valeur. Mais c’est par le cœur, dans les profondeurs de soi-même, que l’être humain commence à saisir le Mystère de la Foi. Les connaissances viendront. Tout n’est pas donné d’un seul coup. Une vie intérieure s’élabore pas à pas. Aujourd’hui plus qu’hier, nous pénétrons dans la foi en avançant par étapes.

Au tréfonds de la condition humaine repose l’attente d’une présence, le silencieux désir d’une communion. Ne l’oublions jamais, ce simple désir de Dieu est déjà le commencement de la foi.

De plus, personne ne parvient à comprendre tout l’Évangile à lui seul. Chacun peut se dire : dans cette communion unique qu’est l’Église, ce que je ne comprends pas de la foi, d’autres comprennent et en vivent. Je ne m’appuie pas sur ma foi seulement mais sur la foi des chrétiens de tous les temps, ceux qui nous ont précédés, depuis la Vierge Marie et les apôtres jusqu’à ceux d’aujourd’hui. Et jour après jour je me dispose intérieurement à faire confiance au Mystère de la Foi.

Alors il apparaît que la foi, la confiance en Dieu, est une réalité toute simple, si simple que tous pourraient l’accueillir. Elle est comme un sursaut mille fois repris tout au long de l’existence et jusqu’au dernier souffle.

frère Roger, de Taizé

http://www.taize.fr/fr_article1072.html

Bishop Kenneth Ulmer: The king still has one more move!

2010-09-12T08:03:00.000-07:00

This week i heard Bishop Kenneth Ulmer speaking about a chess-painting, most probably by Friedrich Moritz August Retzsch on Goethe´s Faust.

Eric S. Ritz writes this note about this picture :

On display in the magnificent Louvre Museum in Paris, France, is that dramatic painting of Goethe's Faust. Faust is seated at a table engaged in a competitive game of chess. And at first glance, it looks like Faust is losing. His opponent in the chess game is Satan. The devil sits there grinning smugly. He thinks he has the victory in hand. He is pointing at the chessboard with an evil leer and he is gloating.

As you look at the painting, you can almost hear the devil shouting: "Checkmate! Game’s over! I win!"

However, a person with a keen eye who knows the game of chess can see that the match is not over at all. As a matter of fact, just a few years ago, an internationally famous chess player was admiring the painting when all of a sudden he lunged forward and exclaimed:
"Wait a minute! Look! Faust has another move and that move will give him the victory!"

http://www.hourofpower.org/messages/detail.php?contentid=5258

http://witandwisdom.org/archive/20060504.htm

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090125204811AAxHbbV

http://www.artnet.com/Artists/LotDetailPage.aspx?lot_id=029943A35BF30DA1

Le Père Boulad chrétien d' Egypte

2010-09-10T08:28:00.001-07:00

Stephen Hawking: God did not create Universe

2010-09-02T05:09:00.000-07:00

There is no place for God in theories on the creation of the Universe, Professor Stephen Hawking has said.

He had previously argued belief in a creator was not incompatible with science but in a new book, he concludes the Big Bang was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics.

The Grand Design, part serialised in the Times, says there is no need to invoke God to set the Universe going.

"Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something," he concluded.

'Planetary conditions'

In his new book, an extract of which appears in the Times, Britain's most famous physicist sets out to contest Sir Isaac Newton's belief that the universe must have been designed by God as it could not have sprung out of chaos.
Continue reading the main story

Citing the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting a star other than our Sun, he said: "That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions - the single Sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass - far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings."

He adds: "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.

"Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

The book was co-written by US physicist Leonard Mlodinow and is published on 9 September.

In his 1988 bestseller, A Brief History of Time, Prof Hawking appeared to accept the role of God in the creation of the Universe.

"If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we should know the mind of God," he said.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11161493

Kerala, Asia's best travel destination

2010-09-01T09:44:00.000-07:00

read this MSN article: http://news.in.msn.com/gallery.aspx?cp-documentid=4327531

Even as Kerala is named the best travel destination in Asia, we bring you 25 reasons to visit God's Own Country. That is, if you haven't already.

Kerala Tourism got a boost when the million-plus readers of the acclaimed travel portal, SmartTravelAsia.com, placed the state as the best Asian holiday destination ahead of Bali, Phuket and the Maldives in a poll conducted over 3 months across Asia (India, Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong, China, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, and the Middle East), Europe and North America.

"This is a phenomenal recognition for Kerala and the people who are working in the tourism sector," said V. Venu, secretary, Kerala Tourism.

The only other Indian destinations to be listed in the top 10 were Rajasthan and Goa - at eighth and 10th spot respectively.

So, here's why you should pack your bags and get those tickets for Kerala.

read this MSN article: http://news.in.msn.com/gallery.aspx?cp-documentid=4327531

Transformed into the Likeness of Christ

2010-08-19T17:20:00.000-07:00

The Conversion of St. Francis of Assisi
By: Jeanne Kun

How did the son of a wealthy merchant become the town beggar? What would prompt a popular young bachelor to start talking dreamily about “Lady Poverty”? What would cause a carefree “King of Feasts” to abandon the party scene and spend his time rebuilding a ramshackle old chapel stone by stone?

The story of Francis of Assisi’s conversion is the story of how deeply God can change a human heart. And it is the story of one man’s response to God’s call—a response that was at times uncertain and searching, at times anguished, yet always wholehearted.

Seeking Adventure and Fame

Born in Assisi in central Italy sometime during 1181 or 1182, Francis was the son of Pietro de Bernardone, and his wife, Pica. As heir to Pietro’s prosperous cloth business, Francis enjoyed wearing fashionable clothes made from his father’s inventory and entertaining his friends with lavish meals. He was captivated by stories of knights in shining armor and longed for the day when he would ride gloriously into battle. High-spirited and generous, Francis was a favorite among his peers. But when he was about twenty years old, his life took a turn that began to reveal to him its emptiness.

In 1202, Francis joined his townsmen in a petty war against the neighboring city of Perugia. It was his “big chance” as a knight, but the adventure ended in defeat. He spent a year in captivity, where he kept up the spirits of his fellow inmates with his good-natured patience and cheerful songs. After his release, Francis suffered a prolonged fever. During his convalescence, he had time to think about his life and the things of eternity. But his desire for adventure was still strong. When he did recover, he joined a company of knights serving the Pope.

Francis set off for battle again in 1205, but another illness dashed his hopes. In a feverish dream, he heard a voice asking, “Who do you think can best reward you, the master or the servant?” “The master,” Francis answered. The voice then replied, “Then why do you leave the master for the servant, the rich Lord for the poor man?” Francis returned home, uncertain what the dream meant, but convinced that God was speaking to him.

Won by Lady Poverty

Back in Assisi, Francis took up his familiar pastimes, but his heart was no longer in them. He began to disdain the old ways and believed that he had wasted his life on trivial and transitory things. Wrestling with himself and searching for his way, he spent hours in intense prayer out in the countryside or in dark caves, all the time seeking to understand God’s will. Slowly, he began to feel a desire to live like Jesus, whom he called the “poor Christ.”

One evening after partying with his friends, Francis experienced a sense of God’s love that was so profound that he felt enraptured. When his friends jested that he had fallen in love, he replied, “Yes, I am thinking of marrying. But the bride I am going to woo is nobler, richer, and fairer than any woman you know.” Francis pledged himself to “Lady Poverty” and chose to live simply, in imitation of the poor Christ who was capturing his heart.

Inspired to go on a pilgrimage to Rome, Francis came face to face with the poverty to which he had pledged himself. In Rome, he exchanged his costly clothes for rags and begged for his bread. Finally, the idealistic troubadour had the chance to put into practice the ideals that had filled his imagination.

Mastered by Love

Francis’ experiment in poverty proved liberating, and, when he returned home, he no longer feared living on the edge of necessity. Still, he knew that more steps lay ahead of him. The final test came a few years later when he caught sight of a man afflicted with leprosy on the road before him. Francis was repulsed by the terrible sight and instinctively retreated. But then he stopped. He felt the time had come to deal with the pride and lack of love inside of him.

Francis turned back and embraced the leper. He kissed the man’s diseased hand and pressed a few coins into it. In this simple act of love, Francis felt his natural aversion to the sick and outcast disappear. Instead, he was filled with such compassion that the next day he gave away money to all the lepers at the local hospital and begged their pardon for having so often despised them.

Francis began to care for the sick, but he also continued to ask God to show him a fuller purpose for his life. One day in 1207, while praying in the ruined church of San Damiano, he heard Jesus speaking to him from the crucifix: “Francis, go and repair my house, which you see is falling down.”

In his eagerness to respond to God, Francis took these words literally and set about repairing the dilapidated chapel. Impulsively, he sold some of his father’s cloth to get money for stones. Pietro, however, wasn’t as thrilled over the liberality with which he treated his father’s stock. Indignant and angry, he hauled Francis before the episcopal court.

On trial before the bishop, Francis performed a dramatic gesture that marked a final break with his old life: He returned even the clothes on his back to his father. “Hitherto I have called Pietro de Bernardone my father on earth,” he declared. “Henceforth I desire to say only ‘Our Father who art in heaven.’ ” Bishop Guido recognized that somehow the Spirit was at work in Francis, so he took the naked man under his cloak to signify the protection of the church. From that time on, Francis dressed in a rough tunic and lived “according to the gospel.”

A Brotherhood Is Born

Francis went about Assisi proclaiming God’s love to all and singing his praises. Soon, other young men felt attracted to his way of life and began to follow him. But they were uncertain how they should proceed, so they decided to ask God for guidance.

With the simplicity that characterized all of Francis’ decisions, he and his new brothers randomly opened a book of the gospels three times. The first passage read, “If you will be perfect, go and sell what you have and give to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; come, follow me.” Then, “Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money.” And finally, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself.” “Brothers,” Francis said, “this is our life and our rule. Let us fulfill all that we have heard.”

Later Francis described these early days in his Testament: “When the Lord gave me some brothers, no one showed me what I ought to do, but the Most High himself revealed to me that I ought to live according to the model of the holy Gospel.” In 1210, the new brotherhood obtained the approval of Pope Innocent III.

Calling themselves Friars Minor—the “lesser” people of society—the brothers went about preaching not only in Italy, but in Germany, Spain, France, Morocco, and the Orient. Like troubadours, they sang of God’s love and called the people of the towns and villages to repent of their sins and receive forgiveness through the cross of Jesus Christ. The brothers lived simply: They worked for their food and begged when they found no work. They freely gave to anyone who asked anything of them and kept nothing for themselves.

Crucified with Christ

The gospel that Francis and his brothers preached—along with the witness of their lives—had a profound effect. Not only did countless people give their lives to the Lord, but the brotherhood itself grew at a pace that soon challenged Francis’ ability to guide it. Over time, many of the newer brothers found the heroic poverty that Francis and the first friars practiced too difficult. The more learned brothers criticized their founder’s carefree spirit and accused him of being improvident and naïve. They wanted more material security and clearer organization and pressed Francis into writing a new rule.

Francis complied, but many still thought that even his modified rule was too hard. Consequently, Cardinal Ugolino—the advisor of the order—amended it further and won its approval by Pope Honorius in 1223. Deeply hurt by the changes to his “gospel ideal,” Francis sought consolation by frequently secluding himself with God in prayer.

Francis spent September 1224 praying and fasting in a hermitage on the rugged mountain of Alverno. There, during a blazing vision of the wounded Christ, he was imprinted in his hands and feet and side with marks of the crucified Lord. Francis had become so completely converted to Jesus Christ that he resembled his Lord even in physical appearance.

“I Have Done What Was Mine to Do”

In the remaining two years of his life, Francis suffered from pleurisy, stomach ulcers, and blindness, in addition to the wound-marks. Yet as death approached, he was content—confident that, through all his struggles and attempts to understand how to respond to God, he had obeyed God’s call to him as he best understood it. “I have done what was mine to do,” he told his brothers. “May Christ teach you what you are to do.”

On the evening of October 3, 1226, in the forty-fifth year of his life, Francis asked to be laid on the bare ground in the chapel where he had prayed so often with his companions. After the passion was read to him, Francis sang the Evening Office with his brothers. His frail voice intoned Psalm 142: “Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise your name; the just wait for me, until you reward me.” Then, he fell silent.

Francis once encouraged his beloved Brother Leo, “In whatever way you think you will best please our Lord, take that way.” Even when, time and again, he had been unsure what to do, Francis always tried to “best please our Lord.” Each step he took had opened his heart more widely to God’s transforming grace until he was fully conformed to Christ. May we, too, like Francis, always seek “that way” which makes us pleasing to Christ.

http://wau.org/resources/article/re_transformed_into_the_likeness_of_christ

Northern Spain's Camino de Santiago 2010

2010-08-15T17:21:00.000-07:00

|
By Andy Symington, Lonely Planet

Santiago Cathedral – the final destination for pilgrims on the Camino. (Wayne Walton/LPI)

These days do people really believe that the apostle James, a fisherman from the Holy Land, was buried at Santiago? Get the polygraph out and not many will pass. But this rainy, glorious, granite town in Spain’s northwest is today a bigger draw than ever. The medieval pilgrim trail, the Camino de Santiago, has been revitalized by a new generation of voyagers – on foot, bike, or horseback – who, for as many reasons as you care to count, are taking on what is a substantial physical challenge.

Why the pilgrimage?
The devout and the atheist march abreast here. Time to think is often cited as a motivating factor. And time there is: although many opt for shorter sections, the full path from the French border is a good five week walk or a fortnight by bike. Friendships forged along the way are another life-enhancing aspect of the journey.

Yet it is the interaction with Spain itself that draws many. Interaction of a slow-paced kind: if you really wish to know a country, walk it. The principal route across Northern Spain, the camino francés, is the most popular, and tracks through the noble cathedral cities of Burgos and León, as well as a slice of the Pyrenees and Rioja wine country. It is an inspiring route, but it is far from the only path. There are several waymarked caminos to Santiago across Spain - and indeed from all over Europe - allowing you to choose the path that most interests you. Cider and green hillscapes, for example, are features of the camino del norte along the verdant northern coast, as are handsome beaches whose bracing waters are sweet relief between hill trudges.

Santiago cathedral
After any stirring journey, the destination, when reached, can often be a disappointment. While in some ways the Camino is merely an excuse for testing yourself on a damn long walk or ride, Santiago itself is a place to make the soul sing. Its cathedral, whose fittingly-named Portico of Glory is covered by a soaring, mossy Baroque façade, is an icon of Galicia and the pilgrim's reward on arrival.

Xacobeo 2010 - a holy year
The high point of Santiago's year is the feast day of St James, the 25th of July. This is Galicia's national day and a bouncing fiesta at any time, but when it falls on a Sunday it is designated a Holy Year. In the cathedral, the midday mass features the alarming botafumeiro, a chunky incense burner swung in a long arc above the heads of the faithful, gathering seemingly suicidal speed as it dispenses its holy perfumes. This year, 2010, is a Holy Year - the next will not be until 2021 - and things are gearing up. Xacobeo 2010 (www.xacobeo.es) is a full cultural program that includes a high-profile series of concerts scheduled across the region all summer long, from high priests and priestesses of world rock and jazz to homegrown Galician folk music. Celtic heritage predominates in the latter, which features bagpipes and mournful tones suggestive of a tribe with backs to land and a searching gaze into the misty northern seas.

Seafood and Albariño: The walker's reward
Traditionally, after the long slog across the agricultural heartlands of northern Spain with bread, soup and stews all the way, the pilgrim munched local scallops once they arrived in Santiago. Not only is it the symbol of St James - possession of a shell was once proof of having completed the pilgrimage - but Galicia lives and breathes seafood. Boiled octopus, salty barnacles and razor clams: succulent walkers' rewards available in any of Santiago's numerous taverns. Northern European monks spread new architectural ideas along the length of the Camino de Santiago, but hats off too to the order that brought Alsatian grapes to plant on the Galician coast. A happy coincidence, Albariño is one of the world's great seafood wines.

Journey's end
In the Obradoiro square in Santiago, walkers lean against the pillars, blistered feet bared and sunbrowned faces gazing up at the cathedral's majesty. Now at the journey's end some will yearn to do it all over again, but for now they have one major advantage over their medieval forebears: they do not have to turn around and walk back home again.

How to
Numerous websites have route information: www.csj.org.uk is a great starting point. Iberia (www.iberia.com), Spanish trains (www.renfe.es) and buses (www.alsa.es) serve Santiago, as does Ryanair (www.ryanair.com) from London.

Soup kitchen patrons turned Ph.D. candidates marry at St. John's in Newark

2010-08-11T06:55:00.000-07:00

Published: Monday, August 09, 2010, 6:22 AM Updated: Tuesday, August 10, 2010, 7:16 AM Mark Di Ionno/Star-Ledger Columnis

when you extend a hand,
you never know who will grab it.

This is a love story. A success story. A story for those who say there are no good stories in the newspaper. This is a good one. So good, it is too good to be true. But it is.

Manu Sebastian Mannoor and Teena James

Manu and Teena got married Saturday at St. John’s in Newark, surrounded by friends who came up from Princeton, where Manu is working on a Ph.D in medical-related engineering, and Johns Hopkins, where Teena is doing the same.

But some only came up from the church basement, where just hours before they worked the daily soup kitchen line.

"We changed from our work aprons into tuxedos," said Vincent Smith, the parish manager, who gave away the bride.

Those friends had once served Manu and Teena. They fed the couple, gave them clothing, found them housing and embraced them into St. John’s family.

"When they came here, they were so desperate they were boiling the leaves off trees to make tea," Smith said.

That was four years ago. Saturday, Teena James wore an elegant white gown with a simple wine-colored sash and held a bouquet of white roses. Manu Sebastion-Manoor wore a classic three-piece charcoal tuxedo, with a wine tie. The church was filled with people who once fed the couple, then worked beside them to feed others.

"Their American dream was fulfilled by the people at St. John’s," said the Rev. Rijo Johnson, who performed the ring portion of the wedding Mass.

St. John’s is the oldest Catholic Church in Newark, built in 1826 from ship ballast stones by Irish immigrants. In 1967, after the riots, a rectory housekeeper made sandwiches for a few street people. From that simple act, the St. John’s soup kitchen has blossomed to feed between 500 and 700 people a day. All food, clothing and personal care items are donated and distributed by volunteers. There are health and housing referrals, and a special center for women and children.

Manu and Teena showed up on the line in the fall of 2006.

"These are two of the most brilliant people you’ll ever meet," Smith said. "But they didn’t have the street smarts to survive in a city like Newark."

Their story begins in the Indian state of Kerala, where Manu and Teena studied at the Government Engineering College in Thrissur. They fell in love but it was complicated. Caste systems and traditions got in the way.

"In this part of India, marriages are usually arranged," Manu said. "It is very bad to choose your own spouse, especially for the woman."

But love is love, and Manu and Teena were in it. They decided to come to America. Both were accepted into the master’s programs at New Jersey Institute of Technology, which had a "bio-MEMS lab," Manu explained. "This stands for bio micro electro mechanical systems, and this is what we were most interested in."

That, and being together.

The next part of the story is where the street smarts comes in. They came with partial scholarships, a month’s worth of rice and $1,500. The plan was to get jobs right away.

"We didn’t do a good job researching, I admit," Manu said. "We didn’t even know what the weather here was like, so we didn’t have proper clothing."

The basement apartment they found cost $450 a month. Just to move in — one month rent, one month security — left them with $600. And work was not easy to find. By the end of September, their rice and money was gone.

"The night Teena said ‘this is the last cup of rice’ we prayed. But I thought, ‘This is the end. We have to return to India.’ It would have been a disaster. Teena would have been disowned. Worse."

The next day, they walked a different way through town, and saw the line at St. John’s on McCarter Highway, a block from NJPAC. They joined the line.
Patti Sapone/The Star-Ledger
Teena James, left, and her husband, Manu Sebastian Mannoor walk down the aisle after their wedding at St. John's Church in Newark.

Smith saw them, and asked them their story.

"I know our regulars," he said. "When I see new people, I ask what we can do. They stood out, frankly, because we don’t see many Indian couples."

Smith arranged housing for them in exchange for work, and the people at St. John’s rallied around this young couple with so much promise.

And they delivered, as Msgr. Neil Mahoney said during the wedding.

"God brought you to us, and you lifted us with the generosity of your spirit and sensitivity to people," he said. "We know the good you received here will be spread to humanity through your contributions to medical technology. Your gifts will touch so many people."

Mahoney called the wedding a new "chapter in Manu and Teena’s love story." And the moral of the story of this: when you extend a hand, you never know who will grab it.

BBC: Why do we all use Qwerty keyboards?

2010-08-11T04:05:00.000-07:00

11 August 2010 Last updated at 04:41 ET
By Nick Baker
Producer, BBC Radio 4

Look down from the screen on which you are reading this, and wonder. Q-W-E-R-T-Y. How on earth did this pattern of letters get so locked into our language?

It seems so random? Patchily alphabetic, and in places wantonly arbitrary.

Yet it is also the ultimate software - hard-wired into tens of millions of brains and hundreds of millions of fingers around the world.

It is the ultimate user-machine interface - replicated on the keyboards of computers, and some of the most sophisticated PDAs and mobile phones across the world.

Yet it is pretty much unchanged since it was standardised in the 1870s.

"Imagine you're on the maiden flight of that new ultra modern aircraft, the Dreamliner. And you notice it's being towed to the runway by donkeys. Better still, camels," explains comedian Stephen Fry, the presenter of a new series on Radio 4 that kicks off with a look at the origins of Qwerty.

"In exactly the same way, the Qwerty keyboard is an ancient system attached to our most modern devices. And like the metaphorical camel, it was designed by way of a series of compromises."
Typewriter wars

So how did we end up with Qwerty?

In the USA in the post civil war era, standardisation became all. The new world was to be a mechanical one. A .22 bullet had to fit any .22 rifle in the world. A typist had to fit any typewriter.

There was hot competition to create a single typewriter standard.

The style may have evolved, but basic functions have remained the same

The inventor of the Qwerty keyboard was Christopher Sholes, a Milwaukee port official, Wisconsin senator, sometime newspaper editor and a man who tried to invent not "a" typewriting machine, but "the" typewriting machine.

The challenge was mechanical, to devise a system which linked an easily understandable interface with the complicated technology of ink, typebars, levers and springs.

His first attempt was alphabetical, but the typebars clashed due to the key arrangements. So Sholes arranged them in a way to make the machine work. Frequency and combinations of letters had to be considered to prevent key clashes.

The typewriter wars heated with the appearance of typing competitions, where typists would battle it out to achieve the highest word counts.

Not surprisingly, type would clash and stick. So Sholes, it is alleged, re-jigged the letters on his machine in order to keep speeds down.

In 1873, Qwerty was adopted by Remington, famous for its arms and sewing machines as well as its typewriters, and it became adopted as the basis not only for English but the majority of European languages as well.
'Creative obstruction'

But did Sholes really doctor the configuration of letters to slow the typist. Would an inventor really hobble his own brainchild?

If so, argues Fry, then the Qwerty keyboard and its inventor could be accused of "conspiracy to pervert the course of language and to limit the speed of creativity and language input, endangering billions with repetitive strain injury".
Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote

A good stenographer will beat a Qwerty keyboard hands down”
Mary Sorene
Stenographer

Qwerty can be seen, he argues, as "a deliberate spanner in the works of language, metaphorically and technologically".

Qwerty is "not ergonomic" agrees Professor Koichi Yasuoka, of Kyoto University, a world expert on the development of the keyboard.

But he sees evidence of the practicality of Qwerty in a world of mechanical typewriters. "T and H is the most frequently used letter pair in English," he explains. "In fact in Sholes's typewriter, the typebar of T and H are located on opposite sides."

The separation of these letters was made in the interests of speed he believes. Users could type T-H without crashing keys, whereas the proximity of E and R he argues is inefficient. In other words there is no evidence of deliberate slowing down.

"Ergonomics were not a characteristic of mid-19th century design," he concludes.
Speed of speech

Of course, there are other ways of typing.

In the early 1930s, time and motion expert August Dvorak denounced Qwerty, producing a raft of empirical evidence highlighting its inefficiencies.

Stenographers beat Qwerty typists hands down

As an alternative, he produced an ergonomically designed keyboard which could have spelt the end of Qwerty. Dvorak users reported faster, more accurate typing and reduced keyboard clashes. But it was too late.

Just as AC beat DC current, the audio cassette beat Super 8 and VHS beat Betamax, Qwerty won the format war.

Typewriters with the familiar layout were already powering offices around the world. With Qwerty came standardisation and compatibility. And, although there may be more efficient keyboards, these offer only marginal improvements.

If users are truly looking for speed and accuracy, they could consider stenotypes used by stenographers in courtrooms. These machines have 22 keys and are capable of typing at the speed of speech, around 180 words per minute, or three words every second.

"A good stenographer will beat a Qwerty keyboard hands down," explains stenographer Mary Sorene. "Because we are stroking [typing] in syllables, we can write much faster."

But stenography is a steep learning curve and more difficult to learn than Qwerty.

Easier - and potentially quicker - would be to dispense with the keyboard all together.

Already advanced speech recognition systems can be found in smartphones and most modern computer operating systems. Could they replace Qwerty?

Not according to Dan Dixon of the Digital Cultures Research Centre at the University of the West of England.

"Human computer interface research has shown recently that people actually like to think and type not think and speak. When people are given the option to speak they have a much harder time organising their thoughts," he adds.

So the real block turns out to be turning our thoughts into words in the first place. For all its faults Qwerty, it seems, is here to stay.

Stephen Fry puts the Qwerty keyboard in the dock in the first episode of a new series of Fry's English Delight on Wednesday, 11 August, 2010 at 0900 BST and 2130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Or listen afterwards on BBC iPlayer.

How will you type the new Indian Rupee symbol?

2010-07-15T03:54:00.000-07:00

welcome to the new rupee symbol.
It is an expert mix of " R" Devanagari and English scripts.
Mr. Udaya kumar congrats!!!

coming back....

2010-07-13T17:24:00.000-07:00

thinking of coming back to blogger...but there are many images my mind clings on to....

the change that the world cup 2010 brought in...

2010-07-12T12:40:00.000-07:00

vacation post

2010-04-26T08:46:00.000-07:00

Vis au soleil, nage dans la mer, bois l'air sauvage … (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Gospel according to Eyjafjallajokull

2010-04-21T05:33:00.000-07:00

Yeah... i am grounded.
BBC tells over 95,000 flights are canceled!
Apart from going mad at my travel agent,
i found some lessons to learn and things to do:

Step.1: Listen to Bob Marley song 'Three Little Birds'

"Don't worry about a thing,
'Cause every little thing gonna be all right."

here is the ConnieTalbot cover:

Step.2: learn to pronounce the name of the volcano

Eyjafjallajokull (ay-yah-FYAH-lah-yer-kuhl)
it may take a few days...
so by then airports should be on business normal. :)

Step.3: learn the Mario Garcia lesson:

This is not a tragedy, this is a mere inconvenience.

here is a selection from his text: ( read full text here)

Learn from every experience, my wise Mom has always told me. So, I am learning from this one too.

Like thousands of travellers around the globe, I, too, am grounded. In Paris. When I arrived here over a week ago for work with France Football, my luggage was labeled CDG, as in Charles de Gaulle, but somehow the letters may have been LBO, as in Limbo, which is where I find myself.

Ok, I know that I can’t get any sympathy from any family or friends when I tell them you are stuck in Paris. I grant you, it could be much worse, and that there are many places I can imagine where this ordeal would have been more difficult to endure. The lessons, however, are many. Limbo is not a nice destination, believe me.

Lesson 1: Learn to deal with serendipity, always a favorite word of mine, except that in this case serendipity translates into “the surprise of the minute”. My super efficient assistant, Toni Lewis, my wonderful travel agent, Jim Hobbs, and my Lufthansa HON Circle concierge, are all giving it their best, but they can’t go against the volcano, which decides on its own when to spew more ash and misery over the continent. I receive a different possible itinerary every two hours. I get excited one minute, deflated the next. My next stop should be beautiful Oslo, Norway, where I do presentations end of the week. I am still hoping, but, today Tuesday, my flights via Lufthansa were cancelled already, then my next itinerary on KLM, via Amsterdam, also cancelled, as Paris’ airports remain closed. Serendipity, in this case, is a giant board up somewhere where the word CANCELLED repeated several times.

Lesson 2: Airline high level status means NOTHING when mother nature calls! Of course, my Lufthansa support system calls, encourages me and provides changes of possible connections, but I can tell in the voices of the concierges talking to me that they have little hope any of this will come to pass. I now hold on to TWO possible Tuesday itinerary, one late tonight via Scandinavian Airlines. But, don’t count on it.

Lesson 3: Bonding in times of uncertainty Nothing new here, but as I sit for breakfast or happy hour at the fifth floor Club of the Intercontineal Le GRand Paris, my home for heaven knows how many days (and more to come?), I feel the support of all the other stranded passengers there: Brazilians, Brits, Argentines, Saudis, Chinese. Everyone first extends their stay at the Interconti by ONE more day (a ritual), then we sit and compare notes. The tourists who had enough of Paris (how can that be?), the businessmen and women on their iPhones, losing their patience, and trying to conduct transactions the best way possible; the occasional child whose spring break got extended (they are happy).

Lesson 4: Make the best of the circumstance. I learned long ago the difference between problems and circumstances. Problems you can solve, circumstances, you, well, adapt and take in stride. This is a circumstance. So, I am learning to deal with an unstructured free day. Can you imagine that? Someone who wakes up to a very hour by hour day most of the time, and suddenly, you face the next 24 hours with no specific meetings, workshops, presentations.

Lesson #5: Don’t try to pronounce the name of this volcano: Eyjafjallajokull. As one CNN reporter put it:“ This is like saying a word with a bunch of marbles in your mouth.“ In my case, I resort fo Spanish to try to say it. If I say “ayquelocura” very quickly (it means roughly, oh, what madness), then the resulting sound reminds me of what this volcano’s name should probably be.

Step.4: Now call again your travel agency..good luck!

Even-though, i am not so lucky enough to have my tickets soon again,
i wish you all out there "Good Luck".

Volcano Watch: how i met Joseph Turner paintings.

2010-04-15T11:58:00.001-07:00

If everything had gone as planned,

i should have been on board flying home.

Now with volcanic dust from Eyjafjallajokull, everything got a turn so surprising.

and i have Joseph Turner painting on my screen...

India and Quebec: will the elephant skate?

2010-03-01T06:10:00.000-08:00

Quebec's economic astrolabe is pointed towards India, say south-India to be exact. This is a cultural-route with sheer economic interests.

While Indian media is almost silent about this, Quebec's french newspapers are spending a lot of ink analyzing this new adventure.

Yes sir...after the dragon, the elephant comes...

we are not disputing the decision, but the plan of occupation. This will be long and complex game, as both partners do not adore the same idols. The idols of these two civilizations are different and a reconciliation is possibility, which may demand all its time and patience.

Language is a French-Canadian idol symbolized with social-identity and culture. It is the sacrum sanctum of French-heart. The candid "Maîtres chez nous" Jean-lesage dream transformed Quebec, shifting its priorities, daring many dreams, replacing gods...and the silent revolution begins.... la Révolution tranquille est en marche…. New gods were born. The search for new identify is still active. It was Níkos Kazantzákis who wrote: ' no mater where you touch a Jew, there will a wound.' This is same with Quebec, it is a bleeding history.

Indian heart has its own idols and its own wounds. In the multilingual emerging India, language is a possibility and never associated with repression. Quebec has it's problems in understanding this tolerance and India will be surprised to hear the heart of Quebec. The elephant will say ; "Mujhey samajh mein nahi aataa" ( i just don't understand you).

Paysage linguistique difficile à décoder, vu du Québec. «Ils sont sans angoisse face à l'anglais, les Indiens, ils n'ont pas notre schizophrénie du minoritaire devant le bilinguisme», dit l'écrivaine québécoise Yolande Villemaire....

http://www.ledevoir.com/international/actualites-internationales/283581/le-tout-a-l-anglais-en-inde

now the question remains...will the elephant skate?

I have my own reasons for a response positive.

But beyond that, I see many more questions....

....................................................................................................................

Maîtres chez nous: http://archives.radio-canada.ca/c_est_arrive_le/10/22/

"Polyphony and Contradictions Are Considered Indispensable in India"

2010-03-01T06:07:00.000-08:00

Interview with Anant Kumar
this is a brilliant analysis....
well as he himself evaluates: one does not have to share all his views to say he is brilliant.
http://www.qantara.de/webcom/show_article.php/_c-310/_nr-726/i.html.

photonaturalist: the steve Berardi way

2010-02-28T06:28:00.000-08:00

“Computer Science is not about computers in the same way that biology is not about microscopes and petri dishes.” Hal Abelson

Nature photography is not about the camera, it’s about a naturalist trying to capture light into a box.( Steve Berardi )

http://photonaturalist.net/dont-be-a-photographer-be-a-photo-naturalist/

anticipation...the great Alfred Eisenstaedt moment

2010-02-27T08:18:00.000-08:00

i dream one such moment in front of my lense....

SLOW DANCE: David L. Weatherford

2010-02-20T07:47:00.000-08:00

SLOW DANCE: David L. Weatherford

Have you ever watched kids on a merry-go-round,
or listened to rain slapping the ground?

Ever followed a butterfly's erratic flight,
or gazed at the sun fading into the night?

You better slow down, don't dance so fast,
time is short, the music won't last.

Do you run through each day on the fly,
when you ask "How are you?", do you hear the reply?

When the day is done, do you lie in your bed,
with the next hundred chores running through your head?

You better slow down, don't dance so fast,
time is short, the music won't last.

Ever told your child, we'll do it tomorrow,
and in your haste, not see his sorrow?

Ever lost touch, let a friendship die,
'cause you never had time to call and say hi?

You better slow down, don't dance so fast,
time is short, the music won't last.

When you run so fast to get somewhere,
you miss half the fun of getting there.

When you worry and hurry through your day,
it's like an unopened gift thrown away.

Life isn't a race, so take it slower,
hear the music before your song is over.

http://www.davidlweatherford.com/slowdance.html

Thank you David for your kind comment.
i had been bit 'away' from blogging these days.
now i attach your video on to this post.

www.davidflatau.co.uk

Two "leavens": Have A Happy Lenten Journey 2010

2010-02-16T06:06:00.000-08:00

Mark 8:14-21.

They had forgotten to bring bread, and they had only one loaf with them in the boat.He enjoined them, "Watch out, guard against the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod."

Only one loaf: It happens just after the multiplication of the bread. Now, the miracle is over, the only ONE LOAF that remains is JESUS himself.

The leaven of the Pharisees: In the context of the BREAD, Jesus warns us about the leaven of the pharisees: it can be the religious fundamentalism, religious intolerance, or sheer selfishness covered up by tricky religiousness.

The leaven of Herod: yeh..it seems to the eternal tempation of Power & authority.

the leaven of the Pharisees + the leaven of Herod = hypocrisy 'sans pareil'

To find our how it manipulates/ operates, do not search Google, lets search our hearts!

Have A Happy Lenten Journey....

le mur tombé, les églises se vident...(http://presencemag.qc.ca)

2010-02-16T06:00:00.000-08:00

http://www.protestinfo.ch/200911085215/apres-la-lrevolution-protestanter-les-allemands-ont-tourne-le-dos-a-leglise

Après la «révolution protestante», les Allemands ont tourné le dos à l’Eglise

Chute du Mur • Lieux de ralliement de la contestation en 1989, les églises protestantes ont été désertées après la réunification. Une grande déception pour les pasteurs engagés.

Par Tania Buri

Les images de l'automne 1989 sont encore vivantes: des centaines de milliers de personnes s’étaient rassemblées dans et aux abords des églises protestantes à Leipzig, Dresde et Berlin. Après avoir participé aux «Prières pour la paix», les manifestants étaient descendus en masse dans les rues. Face à un tel élan, il est difficile de comprendre que les églises allemandes aient pu ensuite se vider, alors que d'autres pays ont vu, après la fin du communisme, le retour des religions.

En 1989, les églises de toute la République démocratique d'Allemagne (RDA) étaient devenues le point de ralliement des jeunes et groupements désireux de réformer ou renverser le régime. Des pasteurs ont ensuite fait partie du premier gouvernement élu après la chute du Mur, avant la réunification qui interviendra onze mois plus tard. Les espoirs soulevés étaient immenses.
Hospitalité des pasteurs

«Ce qui s’est passé pendant la période qui a précédé la chute du Mur n'a pas directement à voir avec la foi religieuse», explique le professeur Heinz Wismann, qui a dirigé l'Institut protestant de recherche interdisciplinaire de Heidelberg. «Les églises étaient les lieux de rassemblement. Les pasteurs offraient simplement leur hospitalité à ceux qui voulaient discuter. Ce qui fait que les foules, qui se sont trouvées à ce moment-là à l'intérieur des églises, n'étaient pas nécessairement des croyants.»

Les opposants se sont rassemblés dans les églises, mais la plupart sans aucun lien avec la foi, renchérit Solange Wydmusch, sociologue des religions à Berlin. S’ils se sont rapprochés des églises, c’est qu’elles offraient l'un des seuls lieux de liberté de parole. Ce sont d'ailleurs dans les églises que les critiques contre la Stasi, la police secrète, ont commencé, affirme-t-elle.

Si les pasteurs et les groupes de contestation travaillaient depuis des années à formuler des propositions pour transformer la RDA, pratiquement personne ne s'attendait ni à une chute du Mur aussi rapide, ni à une imposition du système occidental aussi unilatérale. Les utopies de ces groupes ont été rapidement balayées.
«Paradoxe profond»

«Après la chute du Mur, énormément de pasteurs croyaient avoir une sorte de mission, qui leur aurait permis de se substituer au Parti communiste», poursuit M. Wismann. «Nombre d'entre eux ont été déçus, parce que leur rêve d'un monde meilleur, qui devait prendre le relais de l'utopie communiste qui s'était transformée en dictature, a été brutalement anéanti.»

Selon le professeur, les pasteurs ont été très rapidement perçus – et de façon très paradoxale – comme «des anciens du système», alors qu'ils avaient favorisé les mouvements de contestation: «N'étant pas du tout intéressés à la société de consommation occidentale, ils se sont trouvés très vite isolés une fois le Mur ouvert et la parité du Mark offerte, alors que la population se ruait à l’Ouest pour consommer. C’est qu’en développant dans leurs sermons et interventions publiques l'idée qu'ils se faisaient d'un pays conforme à leurs convictions religieuses, ils rappelaient trop le prêche communiste: là est le paradoxe profond.»
«Folie consumériste»

Hildegarde Ruggenstein, une pasteure de RDA, a vécu cette déception. Elle était engagée dans les mouvements de contestation à Potsdam, une ville située à quelques kilomètres de Berlin.
«J'ai été très choquée par la folie consumériste qui a suivi le 9 novembre. Deux jours après, un bus à deux étages couvert de publicités, que je n'avais vues qu'à la télévision jusque-là, se trouvait déjà devant notre maison. Pareil débarquement faisait mal à voir. C'était comme une manifestation non-politique, alors que nous avions organisé tant de manifestations politiques jusque-là», raconte la pasteur.

Et d’ajouter: «Les gens qui s'étaient engagés jusqu'à la chute du Mur se sont mis à courir comme des ivrognes à Berlin-Ouest. Ils rentraient le soir les bras chargés de sacs remplis de provisions achetées chez Aldi ou dans d'autres supermarchés. En un nuit, ils avaient perdu toute conscience politique.»

http://www.protestinfo.ch/200911085215/apres-la-lrevolution-protestanter-les-allemands-ont-tourne-le-dos-a-leglise

God and Wall Street: Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams

2010-01-31T16:41:00.000-08:00

God and Wall Street By Rowan Williams | NEWSWEEK
Published Jan 29, 2010
From the magazine issue dated Feb 8, 2010

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, at Canterbury Cathedral

It is quite striking that, in the Gospel parables, Jesus more than once uses economics as a framework for his stories: the parable of the talents, the dishonest steward—even, we might say, the vignette of the lost coin. Like our coexistence with the earth, like familial bonds, like the tensions of public political life, economic relationships help us see our humanity in the context of God's actions. Money is a metaphor; our monetary dealings shed light on aspects of our human condition that, rightly understood, tell us something about how we might relate to God.

Recently I went to New York City to participate in a conference at Trinity Wall Street. It was called "Building an Ethical Economy: Theology and the Marketplace." In my view, the contribution of theology to economic decision making is not only about raising questions concerning the common good—questions that deal with how this or that policy grants or withholds liberty for the most disadvantaged. Obviously, these are important issues. But we need to look with great care as well at what our economic practices are assuming and promoting about human motivation and integrity.

In our culture, we have become used to an attitude in which economic motivations, relationships, and conventions are fundamental: the language of seller and customer has wormed its way into practically all areas of our social life, even education and health care. The implication is that the most basic interaction between one human being and another is the carefully calibrated exchange of material resources.

But we must hang on to the idea that not everything reduces to one standard of value. Treat economic exchanges as the only "real" thing that people do, and you face the same problems confronted by the evolutionary biologist (for whom the only question is how organisms compete and survive) or the Freudian fundamentalist (for whom the only issue is how we resolve the tensions of infantile sexuality). Traditional religious ethics—traditional ethics of any kind, in fact—do not require you to ignore the hidden forces that may be at work in any particular setting. Being human is learning how to ask critical questions of your own habits and compulsions, and it's learning how to adjust them against a model of human behavior—an idealized truth about the purpose of our humanity.

It is possible to see the various balancing acts we engage in—the calculations of self-interest and security, the resolution of buried tensions—as a means to finding our way to a life that manifests something, a life that doesn't just solve problems of survival and profit. Our job as human beings is to imagine ourselves—using all the raw materials that science, psychoanalysis, and economics provide us—in the hope that the images we discover and shape will have resonance and harmony with the rhythms of what Christians, and others, call the will and purpose of Almighty God.

Williams is the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury.

© 2010

Christian Bobin : « Croire rend la vie plus difficile »

2010-01-29T06:35:00.000-08:00

J'ai touvé cet entretien avec Christian Bobin ici.

La croyance en Dieu ne rend-elle pas plus fort ?
Pour moi, Dieu a partie liée avec le plus faible de cette vie : la petite enfance, les mourants… Et il se présente dans tout ce qui nous sort de la convention sociale : ruptures, douleurs, joies. Là où " c’est joli " d’en parler, je ne crois pas qu’il y ait Dieu. Le Dieu auquel croient – entre autres – les Américains, celui qu’ils ont mis sur le dollar, propose, selon moi, une manière d’être " cruellement optimiste ". C’est le petit Dieu mauvais du narcissisme, le Dieu magique de la toute puissance imaginaire, celui du nouveau-né qui pense que sa mère est une partie bienfaisante de lui et se met donc à hurler dès que cette partie s’éloigne ou ne répond pas à ses vœux. Je ne crois pas à ce Dieu-là, qui est comme un prolongement monstrueux de la personne. Celui auquel je crois est tout le contraire. Il est de l’ordre de la lézarde, du passage et du manque.

http://www.psychologies.com/Culture/Philosophie-et-spiritualite/Pratiques-spirituelles/Articles-et-Dossiers/Croire-aide-t-il-a-vivre/Entretien-avec-Christian-Bobin-Croire-rend-la-vie-plus-difficile/7

winning moment

2010-01-26T16:02:00.001-08:00

WENDAKE COURSE DE TRAINEAUX À CHIENS

2010-01-24T16:52:00.000-08:00

Fait-il Noël? : l'abbé Jacques Yvon Côté

2010-01-02T07:55:00.000-08:00

Fait-il Noël?

Fait-il Noël dans le cœur du monde?
Fait-il Noël dans le cœur des malades,
des vieillards, des orphelins, des veuves?
Fait-il Noël dans le cœur des chômeurs,
des déshérités, des abandonnés, des prisonniers?
Fait-il Noël dans le cœur des torturés,
des exilés, des réfugiés des handicapés, des mal-aimés?

Noël, c'est un sourire à la personne souffrante.
C'est une main tendue à celle qui tombe.
C'est une bourse ouverte à celle qui crève.
Noël, c'est quand tu partages ton toit avec les sans-logis.
C'est quand tu offres ta table à l'affamé.
C'est quand tu donnes ton manteau au pauvre.
Noël, c'est une larme essuyée aux yeux d'un enfant.
C'est ta main dans la main de l'aveugle égaré.
C'est un baiser à la vieille du foyer.

Il fait Noël chaque fois que la contrainte
se transforme en liberté;
que le pouvoir se fait service;
que l'arrogance devient humilité.
Chaque fois que la tendresse accompagne l'amour;
que la douceur colore le dévouement, le bénévolat;
que l'amabilité tient la main du service;
que la paix remplace la guerre;
que la gratuité, le don détrônent la rentabilité.

Tu fais Noël...
Si tu ouvres tes yeux pour contempler.
tes mains pour donner.
Ton cœur pour aimer.
Si tu partages avec les plus pauvres que toi.
Si tu donnes ton temps à plus occupé que toi.
Suit tu donnes ton sourire à plus triste que toi.

Aujourd'hui, ce soir, Noël...
Donne ton parton que tu retiens.
Sème la joie autour de toi.
Soulage une misère que tu connais.
N'hésite pas.
Enfin, lève les yeux sur quelqu'un que tu as décidé de ne plus voir.

Oui, j'ai fait le rêve d'un Noël tout blanc,
celui de la vérité, de la pureté de mon regard...
J'ai fait le rêve d'un Noël tout coloré
de mom "moi" ouvert à mes proches,
famille, enfants, à mes voisins.
J'ai fait le rêve d'un Noël tout partagé.

Le Noël d'un Dieu vivant qui n'a désormais que mon regard,
mes yeux, ma bouche, mes mains, mes pieds,
dans la marche vers un monde nouveau depuis le premier Noël.
Emmanuel Dieu avec nous.
Emmanuel en nous!

-----
(Merci au journal "Le Soleil" de l'avoir publiée.)
http://www.cyberpresse.ca/le-soleil/actualites/les-regions/200912/27/01-934366-une-homelie-poeme-de-noel-acclamee.php
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fait-il Noël dans le coeur du monde?

Fait-il Noël dans le coeur
des malades,
des vieillards,
des orphelins,
des veuves?
Fait-il Noël dans le coeur
des chômeurs,
des déshérités, des abandonnés,
des prisonniers?
Fait-il Noël dans le coeur
des torturés, des exilés,
des réfugiés, des handicapés, des mal-aimés?

Noël...
c'est un sourire à la personne souffrante,
c'est une main tendue à celle qui tombe,
c'est une bourse ouverte à celle qui crève...
Noël...
c'est quand tu partages ton toit avec le sans-logis,
c'est quand tu offres ta table à l'affamé,
c'est quand tu donnes ton manteau au pauvre...
Noël...
c'est une larme essuyée aux yeux d'un enfant,
c'est ta main dans la main de l'aveugle égaré,
c'est ton baiser à la vieille du foyer...

Il fait Noël dans le coeur des gens
chaque fois
que la contrainte se transforme en liberté,
que le pouvoir se fait service,
que l'arrogance devient humilité...
chaque fois
que la tendresse accompagne l'amour,
que la douceur colore le dévouement,
que l'amabilité tient la main du service...
chaque fois
que la paix remplace la guerre,
que la gratuité détrône la rentabilité,
que la joie l'emporte sur la tristesse...

Tu fais Noël
si tu ouvres
tes yeux pour contempler,
tes mains pour donner,
ton coeur pour aimer...
si tu partages
ton pain avec plus pauvre que toi,
ton temps avec plus occupé que toi,
ton sourire avec plus triste que toi... si tu peux
donner ton pardon,
semer la joie,
soulager une misère...

Je rêve d'un Noël tout blanc!
d'un Noël tout joyeux!
d'un Noël tout partagé!

visitez le site magnifique du Père Beaulac ....
http://public.ntic.qc.ca/jbeaulac/index.htm

http://my.opera.com/Prayerman/blog/show.dml/5810981

Jesus is the reason for this season: Happy Christmas!!!

2009-12-23T12:55:00.000-08:00

Thulasiraj Ravilla: How low-cost eye care can be world-class

2009-12-17T17:33:00.000-08:00

I have always wondered how they do it....
everyone travels to ARAVIND for eye surgery....
here they tells how... a TED video

Now it is the turn of the son...

2009-12-13T19:26:00.000-08:00

Last re-post was a TED-talk by sashi tharoor.
now, a re-post from his son, Ishaan Tharoor, from time.com.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1947392,00.html

How to Rule India: Break It Into Even More Pieces?

In mid-October 1952, an acolyte of Mahatma Gandhi named Potti Sriramulu invoked the tactics of his teacher and went on a hunger strike. The nation of India — at the time just five years old — was still finding shape after centuries of division and colonial rule, with many of its diverse regions clamoring for greater political recognition. Sriramulu's fast came on behalf of tens of millions who, like him, spoke Telugu, a prominent south Indian language, and wanted their own state within the country.

Yet his protest went unheeded for weeks by New Delhi and, 58 days after it began, Sriramulu died, a sacrifice that triggered widespread rioting and eventually forced the government into forming the Telugu-speaking state of Andhra Pradesh in 1953, as well as other new states organized on linguistic lines. No small irony then, that, almost 60 years later, another hunger strike threatens to dismember the state Sriramulu first won and revive a fierce debate about the nature of the federal Indian nation-state.

Late Wednesday, the Indian government announced it would approve the carving out of a separate state known as Telangana from Andhra Pradesh. The movement for Telangana secession is virtually as old as the Indian republic itself, but it gained traction this month after its main political leader, K. Chandrashekar Rao, commenced a week-long fast. Rao's deteriorating health as well as coordinated protests — some violent — across the 10 districts of Andhra Pradhesh's 23 that comprise Telangana, including the influential hi-tech capital of Hyderabad, seemed to force New Delhi's hand. But it could open a whole series of controversies for the Indian government as many other regional movements have now stepped up their own demands for statehood.

Though Telugu-speaking as well, Telangana had once been part of a separate kingdom ruled from Hyderabad, which recognized British suzerainty during the colonial period but was not administratively part of British India. It was subsumed into the territory of Andhra Pradesh only in 1956, after a further dismemberment of the once-independent Hyderabad kingdom. Though the city of Hyderabad was made the capital of the united Andhra Pradesh state, calls for greater autonomy have lingered, with many in Telangana complaining of marginalization at the hands of the coastal Andhra population.

But if New Delhi imagined it would calm tensions with its nod toward accepting a new state, the move backfired. Dozens of local legislators in Andhra Pradesh have resigned their posts and strikes by those opposing Telangana's secession have paralyzed much of the state. Trains have been blocked, businesses shut down. According to news reports on Saturday, two activists in favor of a "United Andhra" took their lives in protest of the state's splitting. The turmoil has also plunged Hyderabad, a booming, cosmopolitan I.T. hub, into panic as politicians and business leaders fret over the costs of the current instability. "This will be a total flop as investors will flee," says Amruthraj Padmanabhundi, a 27-year-old I.T. professional in Hyderabad. "I am very worried [about] my prospects slipping."

The prospect of Telangana's creation has buoyed similar causes elsewhere as calls for secession echo in nearly a dozen states in India. A four-day strike is under way among the picturesque hills and tea estates of Darjeeling, in northern West Bengal, with protesters intensifying demands for a new state of Gorkhaland that would better address the needs of the area's ethnic Nepalese population. More than 100 activists have begun what they call a "fast-unto-death." On the other side of the country, in the vast desert state of Rajasthan, a caravan of some 5,000 demonstrators and 500 camels paraded into the capital of Jaipur on Friday, agitating for the formation of Maru Pradesh, a state that would be carved out of some of Rajasthan's poorest districts. "Rajasthan is huge. It is not easy to keep track of all the villages, of the development or the lack of it," says Jaiveer Godara, the leading voice of the movement. "The person who lives in the last village of Maru Pradesh has to wait for three days to get supply of water from outside... [And] there are no roads that lead to his village."

At the root of this looming crisis lies the still unresolved question of how the world's largest democracy ought best to govern itself. Independent India was at first a patchwork of former British provinces and princely states threaded together into a federal republic. Some of its states remain huge and unwieldy — for example, the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, with its estimated 190 million people, would be virtually tied with Brazil as the fifth most populous country on earth but it would also possess 8% of the world's population under the global poverty line. With a country of India's size and diversity — as well as poverty — there is logic in having smaller states. "It will in fact strengthen [governance] through economic and administrative convenience," says Delhi-based political analyst Paranjoy Guha Thakurta. "India can survive and prosper by breaking up."

The Indian government last fashioned new states in 2000, when three largely remote and impoverished regions were elevated in status. At least two of them — Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand — have shown marked progress since their inception. Small states like Kerala in the south and Haryana in the north, both with populations under 30 million, boast some of India's highest development indicators. Backers of further decentralization even point to the original, idealistic Gandhian vision for India — of a republic brought together not by a strong central government, but an "ocean" of egalitarian and self-sufficient villages.

Of course, that sort of utopianism has little place in the current hurlyburly of Indian politics. Experts worry that new states may simply mean more jockeying for power and expanded bureaucracy in a country already notorious for its spools of red tape as well as its perpetual political horse-trading. "Ultimately, fragmentation is not a substitute for good governance," says C.V. Madhukar, director of PRS Legislative Research, a Delhi non-profit which advises the government.

Hoping to dampen a few of calls for new and smaller states ignited by the Andhra controversy, New Delhi has dialed back its support for Telangana, insisting that the matter now find a resolution through a vote in the Andhra Pradesh legislature. Given the current tumult, it's unclear when or how such a motion may go through. The political party headed by Rao, the Telangana separatist leader, was trounced both in recent state and national polls. His hunger strike — now ended — and the disturbances organized around it were likely an act of desperation of a movement shorn off much of its real political capital. "Having the government buckle to this kind moral blackmail is not a healthy way to go about things," says Madhukar. "There shouldn't be this sword of Damocles hanging over peoples' heads." A young India may have come of age through such dramatic acts of Gandhian sacrifice, but a more mature nation needs more measured habits.

With reporting by Nilanjana Bhowmick/New Delhi

Shashi Tharoor: Why nations should pursue "soft" power

2009-12-12T15:58:00.001-08:00

Fratello Metallo(Metal Friar)

2009-11-22T10:00:00.000-08:00

Italy's heavy metal monk retires from the limelight

Reuters November 13, 2009

Italian Friar Cesare Bonizzi, also known as Fratello Metallo(Metal Friar), is quitting his heavy metal music career, saying the devil had made him too much of a celebrity for his own good.
Photograph by: Alessandro Garofalo, Reuters

MILAN - Italy's "Brother Metal," a 63-year-old monk who became famous for singing in a heavy metal band — habit and all — is hanging up his microphone, saying the devil made him too much of a celebrity for his own good.

The white-bearded Cesare Bonizzi, a Capuchin who recorded CDs for a punk label and was the lead singer for the band Fratello Metallo (Metal Brother), said the devil was up to his usual mischief.

"The devil has separated me from my managers, risked making me break up with my band colleagues and also risked making me break up with my fellow monks. He lifted me up to the point where I become a celebrity and now I want to kill him," the monk said in his farewell video.

The video shows one of the monk's band members shaving off Bonizzi's long mane of white hair as a sign of his turning a new leaf on life.

For years Bonizzi performed at concerts wearing his traditional Franciscan brown robe, sandals and white rope around his waist.

His second heavy metal CD was called "Mysteries," and was inspired by a group of southern Italian women who sang about the Virgin Mary.

Bonizzi, who fell in love with heavy metal when he attended a Metallica concert some 15 years ago, says fame had put him on the wrong path. But he still thinks heavy metal can be a means to spread the gospel message of pace and love.

"I think that metal is the strength of music itself. Metal is a brother," he said in the video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgTkWc9aLPo ( Reuters video)

India is morphing into a global R&D hub, but can it ever take on Silicon Valley?

2009-11-16T19:09:00.000-08:00

by Vivek Wadhwa

When Americans think of the Indian technology sector, they still perceive a nation of call center workers and low-level computer programmers administering databases and updating websites. But while the West was sleeping, Indian IT morphed into a giant R&D machine. Indian companies that started out doing call center and low-level IT work have climbed the value chain to become outsourced providers of critical R&D in sophisticated areas such as semiconductor design, aerospace, automotive, network equipment and medical devices.

This is happening as multi-nationals set up their own R&D operations in India and partner with local shops. Both the Palm Pre smart phone and the Amazon Kindle, two of the hottest consumer electronics devices on the market, have key components designed in India. Intel designed its six-core Xeon processor in India. IBM has over 100,000 employees in India. A large number of these are building Big Blue’s most sophisticated software products. Cisco is developing cutting edge networking technologies for futuristic “intelligent cities” in Bangalore. Adobe, Cadence, Oracle, Microsoft and most of the large software companies are developing mainstream products in India.

Equally important are the arrival of Indian multi-nationals who are tackling global markets, such as Tata with its dirt cheap Nano car that the company is now positioning for a European market entry and Reva, which recently announced it was planning to build an electric car factory in New York state to address the U.S. market for electric vehicles.

What has been missing to date in India, however, is early stage venture activity and the type of grass-roots entrepreneurism that is the hallmark of American capitalism and Silicon Valley. In that respect China is way ahead of India with many startups taking advantage of huge government incentives and reeling in talented native Chinese returnees to serve as CEOs and CTOs. Note that Kaifu Lee, formerly Google’s top guy in China, was able to launch a $100 million startup incubator focusing entirely on the mobile sector — and he was flooded with business plans within days of opening his doors in the Middle Kingdom.

On my recent trip to India I started to see new signs of life in tech entrepreneurship. Many of the startups that Sarah Lacy and I met were really smart and hungry. Some were even doing things better than their Silicon Valley counterparts. Not all of these startups are developing breakthrough technologies but many of them are solving problems that U.S. companies have thus far failed to solve and doing it with fewer resources.

One of the most interesting companies I met is in the mundane business of developing offset printer ink. Their ink is made from vegetable oil and is entirely bio-degradable. The offset printing industry consumes 1 million tons of petroleum products and emits 500,000 tons of volatile organic compounds every year. An IIT-Delhi incubated startup called EnNatura developed a printing ink which emits no volatile compounds and is washable. And the overall cost of their solution will be significantly less than all present compounds when produced at scale. I can see a company like this growing into a billion dollar global business.

Another interesting company was LiveMedia. This is an out-of-home advertising company that has 4,500 screens in 2,200 destinations with a total reach of 50 million people. Of course, you can find exactly these sorts of TV screens in thousands of places across the U.S. Unfortunately, it has been very hard to make real money selling advertising on these networks. LiveMedia appears to have cracked that by creating specialized content that is more engaging and interactive than a box droning CNN or the Disney Channel. LiveMedia content includes games, quizzes, horoscopes, a few short animations, and other content that is both cheap to produce and easy to play along with or understand. LiveMedia has also perfected context-relevant advertising spots keyed to the crowds at the screen location.

LiveMedia is in the process of building out a partnership with Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs India that would give the network even more interactive capabilities. Bell Labs has developed a content management and routing system, dubbed Mango, that makes it much easier and efficient to deliver high-bandwidth, high-quality video and interactive content over existing networks. In the developing world, everyone wants a TiVO-like capability to share, store and manage content. But existing GPRS or EDGE-based cell networks are not up to snuff. And the broadband infrastructure still lags behind that of the most developed telecom networks in places like Japan, Korea and Scandanavia. A product like Mango is tailor-made for VC investment to get it out of the lab and into a spin-off company.

This is partly why so many U.S. venture capital shops have opened up branches in India. In fact, the two lead investors in LiveMedia are both U.S. venture capitalists including the respected Valley firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. But India lags in home-grown venture capital activity. As I have previously discussed, VCs follow the innovation. So the lack of native VC in India is notable in that it implies a critical mass of activity remains lacking, as well.

For example, in the first nine months of 2008, total early stage VC investments in India totaled $678 million, according to the Global India Venture Capital Association. In the U.S. over that same period early stage investments tallied $5.2 billion according to the U.S. National Venture Capital Association – and that number is not entirely reflective of the real situation. The economic downturn hit the U.S. much harder than the Subcontinent and VC activity in the U.S. fell faster and harder. Regardless, a 10-fold difference between early stage venture activity clearly illustrates the capital is not there yet.

So when will there be enough innovative startups to support an explosion in venture capital? I’d argue, sooner than you realize. During my week in India I spoke to close to 100 startups. A few of them had products or prototypes that would easily compete in Silicon Valley. Some of the leading lights of the legacy Indian IT giants are also moving quickly into VC. Infosys founder Narayan Murthy recently sold millions of dollars of shares in the company in order to launch a venture capital fund targeting investments in India.

The dynamics of entrepreneurship are the same in India as in America. Company founders usually come from the ranks of experienced business executives and are middle-aged. They get tired of working for others and want to make an impact and build wealth before they get too old. Given that there are now hundreds of thousands of R&D workers in India who are gaining valuable experience and are getting old, it is simply a matter of time before they begin to hatch their entrepreneurial plans. After all, their colleagues who migrated to the U.S. now start nearly one in six of Silicon Valley’s tech firms.

I’ll bet that in 5 years, if you stacked up a TechCrunch 50 of Indian start ups versus a comparable number of U.S. startups, it would be a pretty even match. That’s pretty amazing considering the relatively short length of time that the Indian startup scene has existed. And it’s a good lesson for America that the barriers to starting a company are lower than ever before—and some ambitious engineer in India will eat your lunch if you don’t get your prototype built and perfected ASAP.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/14/india-rd-hub-silicon-valley/

Canada and India: why should the worlds meet?

2009-11-14T05:26:00.000-08:00

With Canadian primeminister stephen Harper soon visiting India, i was googling to find some more info on it.
Here is an article by Haroon Siddiqui in www.thestar.com ( http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/724584)
.....................................................................................................................................
Tips for Harper's trip to India
Ottawa has been far too slow to recognize its dynamic economy and geopolitical clout

If I were Stephen Harper and going on my first visit to India – landing in Mumbai Sunday to meet business leaders, then New Delhi to confer with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and others – I'd do the following:

Ignore the Canadian media's portrayal of India as orientalist exotica and the epicentre of some of the world's worst problems.

India is also an economic and geopolitical giant, in some respects more important than China. Besides democracy and English, it boasts a population that's much younger than China's.

Its $1 trillion economy equals Canada's, and is growing at 6.7 per cent this year, compared with the stagnant economies of the West.

India is spending as much as Canada, more than $1 billion, on development projects in Afghanistan.

India's army is the fourth largest in the world. Its navy rules the Indian Ocean. Its capacity to build satellites, missiles, fighter jets, etc. exceeds ours.

India is a serious global player.

Understand also that Ottawa has been painfully slow to recognize this reality.

The U.S. has been wooing India for years. Bill Clinton's 1999 visit was one of the best foreign policy charm offensives I've ever seen. George W. Bush followed with a realpolitik gift of a civilian nuclear deal, setting aside American anger over India turning nuclear and balking at the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Russia and France have since negotiated their own accords, wanting to tap the $100 billion bonanza of Indian nuclear energy needs.

Ottawa could have taken a principled stance and refused to sell uranium (as has Australia). Or it could have stopped acting peeved and opened some doors for our (largely Ontario-based) nuclear sector.

It did neither and has been plodding along, despite Harper's initial enthusiasm. Unless he has something dramatic to say, a photo-op on the nuclear file will only draw yawns in Delhi.

Know that while bilateral trade jumped to $4.6 billion in 2008, rising by a fifth over 2007, India's trade with the U.S. and China rose proportionately more (each now in the $45 billion range).

Believe it or not, India is investing more in Canada than we are there ($1.02 billion vs. $800 million). Indian conglomerates have taken over Canadian firms in the forestry, steel and pharmaceutical sectors, and are using Canada as a gateway to the U.S.

Remember that there are 100,000 Indian students in the U.S., 80,000 in Australia, 30,000 in the U.K. but only 4,000 in Canada.

This even though our universities are top-notch, cost less and provide a welcoming environment (unlike Australia, where Indian students have faced racist incidents). Plus Ottawa is offering foreign students the opportunity to eventually apply for immigrant status (eminently sensible, given that they're likely to integrate more easily).

"My assumption is that Canada does not sell itself aggressively in India," says S.M. Gavai, India's high commissioner in Ottawa.

Not just that. The provinces compete with each other in India. And they and the feds don't coordinate their actions.

"Canada has lagged hopelessly behind in the higher education field," writes David Malone, our former high commissioner to India (2006-08), one of our most successful envoys there. His article, Building Stronger Ties Between India and Canada: Better Late Than Never, posted on the Asia Pacific Foundation website, is very much worth reading.

Resist partisanship and promote the visits to India of Dalton McGuinty (Dec. 6-11, his second) and Jean Charest (in February).

Some Ontario universities – York, McMaster, Toronto, Waterloo and Windsor, in particular – have been working hard to forge links in India. They could use a prime ministerial push.

So could the 25 clean energy companies going with McGuinty.

Don't lecture the Indians on the environment. They, like the Chinese, balk at binding limits on carbon emissions.

India will not be deprived of economic uplift, especially by those who have been polluting for a century or more.

To the counter-argument that global warming cannot be reduced without India's and China's help, India says: If that's the case, subsidize our conversion to green technologies. What's our response?

It is what many Indian scientists themselves are saying: India cannot reach its economic goals amid environmental degradation: deforestation, sinking water tables, rising salinity, drying rivers and lakes.

Joint projects are the way to go.

Don't let Prime Minister Singh's modesty, mild manner and soft voice lull you into forgetting that he is one of the world's foremost economists, who also happens to hold power. Ditto his economic adviser, Montek Singh Ahluwalia (who was in Toronto in April, for an energy conference).

Don't even try to play in their economic league. Cultivate them instead on what interests them – India's role in the G20, which Canada is hosting next June in Huntsville, and for which Ahluwalia is India's designated envoy.

Prevail on Prime Minister Singh to also visit Montreal to receive his honourary doctorate from McGill.

Treat him as the historic figure he is. He was the architect of India's economic turnaround in the 1990s as finance minister. With his innate decency and honesty, he has as prime minister single-handedly broken the decades-long grip of corrupt and parochial regional leaders, and restored a national vision, thereby positioning India for yet another giant leap forward.

http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/724584

Haroon Siddiqui is the Star's editorial page editor emeritus. His column appears Thursday and Sunday.

Non-violence and Gandhi

2009-10-22T19:11:00.000-07:00

In American Chronicle, i found a well written article on
INDIA´S CONCEPT OF NON-VIOLENCE AND GANDHI by Dr. Ravindra Kumar

He writes:

'' ...........................................................
.............................................................
The four common points which we find in the context of non-violence in the four chief philosophies established and developed in India that played vital roles in making India great by strengthening the Indian Way are as follows:

1. Within the domain of non-violence are all living beings;

2. In spite of being eternal, natural and the first human value, it is a subject of practice according to the demands of time and space;

3. It is an active value; it has nothing to do with cowardice as it is an ornament of the brave; and

4. It is not a subject to be practiced occasionally; in theory and in practice it is all-timely
...........................................................
.........................................................

( you can find the full article here)

Why wasn’t Gandhi bestowed with Nobel Prize?

2009-10-11T05:46:00.000-07:00

With all the Obama nobel news, Gandhi is back in news.
I was asked, why Gandi did not win any Nobel, while his fans did.?
I vaguely replied Gandhi was too big and far above the Nobel.
In fact, i was never got interested in such a question ever before, except now.
today i saw this article in THE HINDU on this issue.
It gives some historical insight in to this question often asked but less discussed.
have a great read.

http://beta.thehindu.com/news/national/article32222.ece?homepage=true

Many ardent fans of Mahatma Gandhi have won the Nobel Peace Prize with the latest being US President Barack Obama, but why was not the ‘Apostle of Peace’ bestowed with the honour despite being nominated five times?

Though he was shortlisted thrice, the selection committees had given different reasons why Gandhi was not conferred the honour, like “he was too much of an Indian nationalist” and that he was “frequently a Christ, but then, suddenly an ordinary politician“.

One of the committees was also of the view that he was “no real politician or proponent of international law, not primarily a humanitarian relief worker and not an organiser of international peace Congress“.

Gandhi, who showed the world that anything can be achieved through ‘Satyagrah’ (passive resistance) and non-violence, was nominated for the award in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947 and finally a few days before he was martyred in January 1948.

When Gandhi was first nominated in 1937, the selection committee’s adviser Prof Jacob Worm-Muller was critical about him. “He is undoubtedly a good, noble and ascetic person -- a prominent man who is deservedly honoured and loved by masses.

“There are sharp turns in his policies which can hardly be satisfactorily explained by his followers...He is a freedom fighter and a dictator, an idealist and a nationalist. He is frequently a Christ, but then, suddenly an ordinary politician,” he had commented, according to the Nobel Foundation.

Worm-Muller also referred to Gandhi’s critics in the international peace movement and maintained that he was not “consistently pacifist” and that he should have known that some of his non-violent campaigns towards the British would degenerate into violence and terror.

He was referring to Non-Cooperation movement in 1920-1921 when a crowd in Chauri Chaura attacked a police station, killed many of the policemen and then set fire to the police station.

Worm-Muller was also of the view that Gandhi was too much of an Indian nationalist. “One might say that it is significant that his well-known struggle in South Africa was on behalf of the Indians only, and not of the blacks whose living conditions were even worse,” he said in his report to the selection panel.

Though Gandhi was nominated for the Prize in 1938 and 1939, he made it to the shortlist for the second time only in 1947 after India gained independence. Freedom fighters Govind Vallab Pant and B G Kher were among those who nominated him.

The then Nobel Committee Advisor Jens Arup Seip’s report was not as critical as that of Worm-Muller but panel chairman Gunnar Jahn wrote in his diary: “While it is true that he (Gandhi) is the greatest personality among the nominees -- plenty of good things could be said about him -- we should remember that he is not only an apostle for peace; he is first and foremost a patriot.

“Moreover, we have to bear in mind that Gandhi is not naive. He is an excellent jurist and a lawyer,” Jahn said.

http://beta.thehindu.com/news/national/article32222.ece?homepage=true

image URL: http://beta.thehindu.com/multimedia/dynamic/00007/IN11_MAHATMA_GANDHI_7553f.jpg

Winning the Prize, Losing the Peace : http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/09/AR2009100903650.html

psaumes du temps présent: Alina Reyes

2009-10-10T15:51:00.000-07:00

Je passais mon chemin près de toi sans te voir,

croyant que tu ne me voyais pas.

Ô mon Aimé, vite, embrasse-moi... (page: 20)

je vis en toi, je vis par toi, je meurs de vie. (page: 43)

Je t'aime, pour ce que tu me fais et me fais faire. (Page:42)

La vie, l'amour, la mort (Félix Leclerc)

2009-10-10T15:46:00.000-07:00

C'est beau la vie,
comme un nœud dans le bois
C'est bon la vie,
bue au creux de ta main
Fragile aussi,
même celle du roi
C'est dur la vie,
vous me comprenez bien.

C'est beau l'amour,
tu l'as écrit sur moi
C'est bon l'amour
quand tes mains le déploient
C'est lourd l'amour
accroché à nos reins
C'est court l'amour
et ça ne comprend rien.

C'est fou la mort,
plus méchant que le vent
C'est sourd la mort,
comme un mort sur un banc
C'est noir la mort
et ça passe en riant
C'est grand la mort,
c'est plein de vie dedans.
(Félix Leclerc)

Chandrayaan-I: the reason why India should re-invent the wheel.

2009-09-27T15:44:00.000-07:00

"It is not a question of whether we can afford it, it's whether we can afford to ignore it."
( Dr K. Kasturirangan, chairperson,Indian Space Research Organization)

Chandrayaan-1 ( launched last October), the Indian lunar mission became a part of history in late august-2008, when its communication system shut down.
Criticism was abundant.
They said,the Indian space program is like re-inventing the wheel.
Questions were posed one upon another, even without waiting for any answers.
This week (2009/09/25) when NASA declared about the Chandrayaan's finding of water on Lunar surface, it really made History and hand-signed it.

It was indeed a brilliant question: Do we need to re-invent the wheel?
It seems to me it has to be so,if we need to advance further on.
It is an inspiration and an ambition.

If a $80 million program can serve as a dream and inspiration for the Indian generations and to mark a leap in the human scientific knowledge....
how we can afford to ignore it?

image: India's Chandrayaan-1. (EPA)

“Selling God”: The Age of Persuasion

2009-09-26T19:33:00.000-07:00

Pls find the link to one of my never-miss radio broadcasts on CBC Radio.The Age of Persuasion

This week Terry O’Reilly marches you boldly where the angels of marketing fear to tread: he looks at the delicate, always-controversial relationship between faith and advertising. He’ll look into the controversy surrounding recent bus ads, which read “There Probably Is No God. So Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life.” And he’ll explain why not all people of faith embrace the marketing tactics popular in some of today’s churches.

http://www.cbc.ca/ageofpersuasion/2009/08/season_3_episode_10_selling_go.html

it is curious...

2009-09-26T07:03:00.000-07:00

it is curious that people who taught others for many long years,
never learned themselves the basic lessons of living.
Then, it tempts to ask ' what the hell did you teach and did you learn?'

Sometimes, they even risk becoming small people,
in their own small world with an even more smaller heart.

Indeed, learning and teaching are two different things.
Blessed are you those who lean by teaching.

Psaumes du temps présent ( modernday psalms)

2009-09-23T17:39:00.000-07:00

It has been quite a long blog-break.
Now, let me come back home.

I found a beautiful book.
It is a collection of poems.

Psaumes du temps présent by Alina Reyes

Mais Dieu évolue comme sa créature
Dans le temps, hors du temps, il lui faut
Faire des sauts, préciser son être.

I would do a free translation of these lines in this way

But God too evolves like his creature
in the TIME, out of the TIME,
he has to make certain leaps,
he has to precise his being.

Needless to say, i am not so happy with this translation.
However it gives a glimpse of the original French lines.

It's interesting that God also evolves....

Journey of discovery: Istvan Perczel (the Syrian Christians in India.)

2009-06-19T04:43:00.000-07:00

I read this interesting article from The Hindu, one of India's leading national daily, on the Syrian Christians in India.

journey of discovery

SARASWATHY NAGARAJAN

Hungarian professor Istvan Perczel’s research throws light on the Syrian Christians in India.
I found a few texts... that have liturgical practices that precede the Synod of Udayamperoor.

Chronicling the past: Istvan Perczel.

Istvan Perczel’s nearly 10-year stay and work in this antique land of ours promises to throw new light on the Syrian Christians in India. A book of poems by a 17th century priest called Kadavil Chandy Kathanar is just one of the many gems unearthed by this Hungarian professor.

Eventually he plans to write on the travails and travels of Mar Simeon, a Persian Metropolitan who came to India in 1701.

Story of a bishop

“This is the story of a bishop who came from Diyarbakir, through Jerusalem, Rome, Spain and Lisbon to India, in order to be the shepherd of his people here. But he was caught and sent back on a ship, from where he escaped and landed in Surat in Gujarat, where he was again held in confinement. Later, he managed to come to Kerala at a time when the Vatican was trying to appoint bishops in India independent of the Portuguese King. So Mar Simeon was escorted to Alangad, where he consecrated the first bishop of Verapoly. However, he was subsequently interned in Pondicherry.

“Although he was unable to cater to the spiritual needs of his people, his work was continued by another East Syrian Metropolitan called Mar Gabriel,” recounts Dr. Perczel. It was the treasure of documents in Syriac, the ancient language that used to be the language of worship of the early Christians in Kerala that brought Dr. Perczel to India.

“In fact, the indigenous Christians in Kerala are called Suriyaani Christians on account of their association with Syriac. I wanted to see if there were documents that would show some kind of intellectual discussions with Hinduism during the Middle Ages. That turned out to be a disappointment but I stumbled upon many a treasure that has made my journey worthwhile,” says Dr. Perczel.

His missionary zeal to go back in time to travel with the early Syrian Christians motivated him to become a research associate of The Oriental Institute of Tubingen University, which has funded his work. Most of the documents (on liturgical, theological, philosophical and historical matters) were found in seminaries, churches and in private collections. For instance, he found the book of poems written in Syriac by Kadavavil Chandy Kathanar and innumerable historical letters at St. Joseph’s CMI monastery at Mannanam.

“Although we knew about the existence of one poem, I stumbled upon this collection during my work in Mannanam. Chandy, who called himself Alexander the Indian, was an erudite doctor of Syriac, who was trained in Chennamangalam by the Jesuits and was also familiar with local Christian hymns and worship. In his original poetry, written in Syriac, he combines the European humanist culture learned from the Jesuits with the traditions of the Indian Syrian Church. In the Chaldean Syrian Collection in Thrissur (in the custody of Mar Aprem Metropolitan) is preserved what is perhaps the oldest copy of the most important collection of East Syrian Church law. This book has been digitised and published.

“I feel that it is the personal copy of Mar Abraham, the last Persian Metropolitan who administered the Malabar Church before the Portuguese took over.”

According to him, it is wrong to say that Indians have no sense of history. He says that priests and church administrators used to document almost everything and copies were made of even letters to various important personalities of that time.

“We can read about people, events, decisions, laws and canons. There are many Malayalam texts written in Syriac script. I can read them, but my knowledge of Malayalam is not enough to understand them. So I am reading these together with Dr. George Kurukkoor, a specialist of old Malayalam,” he explains.

According to Dr. Perczel, his study of the Syriac documents points out that the Portuguese missionaries may not have entirely succeeded in their attempt to destroy the Syriac religious writings at the Synod of Udayamperoor in 1599 AD.

Discovery of texts

“I found a few texts, forgotten or hidden, that have liturgical practices that precede the Synod of Udayamperoor. In Thrissur, for example, there is an East Syriac breviary copied in 1585, which shows liturgical practices that were already not in use in the Persian Church,” muses the scholar.

In addition to finding the missing pieces in a historical jigsaw puzzle that covers centuries and continents, Dr. Perczel has also been digitalising the documents that are spread over Kerala in places like Thrissur, Pampakuda, Ernakulam, Kottayam and Thiruvananthapuram. The digitised documents are being archived and preserved at Hill Museum and Manuscripts Library in Minnesota, in the United States.

How to Filet a Fish Like a Pro: youtube teaches everything....

2009-06-17T16:33:00.000-07:00

If you ever wanted to learn how to slice onion or fish...
go to youtube..its e-learing....hahhah