All posts tagged: rituals

Mother, Man and the Queen: A Short Photographic Tribute to September

“My father worked in the Buckingham Palace mail room for a short while in the 1970s. It was a period when letter bombs were being sent to prominent figures in the UK by the IRA and it was his job to inspect the queen’s mail for any potential explosive devices. The man he worked with, a fellow ammunition technician, himself was a stamp collector. And He couldn’t believe his luck. He, out of hundreds of people was offered a job where envelopes, with exotic stamps stuck…Read more

Homeland

He woke up four inches below the snow like bed. But the day ahead was going to be as treacherous. He felt excited because travelling to rural India gave a smile to his face. Indian villages to a good extent still practice their civilisational old traditions. The air is different, the land for miles is green. But leaving Delhi behind is a lengthy affair. Their is an infrastructure push. Hundreds and thousands of trees that once gave beauty, breath and shade have now given way to expressway and highways and along with it empty, always being constructed high rise buildings. Slowly we start going past it. And we start seeing cow dung cakes kept for sun drying for kilometres. For centuries cow dung cakes known as “upla” in Hindi are used for cooking, cleaning homes and for homa- the fire worship. It’s smoke is known to purify the environment killing small insects and creatures. Many years ago someone said to Nara about India, when he was roaming in the river valleys of Kedar, that India …