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Showing of the flag
I was born after the Second World War in a liberated Netherlands. It had just suffered five years of occupation by Nazi Germany. I remember very well the yearly festivities during my childhood of the 5th of May, the day in 1945 that the country was liberated from its occupiers. When I visited Tibet in 1996,…
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Equestrian statues
Statues of national heroes on horseback, I don’t think much of them. Not of the statues, nor of the heroes. They generally make me yawn with boredom, or at best incite me to ridicule. So when I saw this equestrian statue in Vienna, I felt an urge to search for the right angle to make…
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Kind-hearted nationalism
Swiss alpenhorns are relics of the past. Just like the smoke signals of Red Indians, they once were used to communicate swiftly with inhabitants of nearby valleys and mountain slopes, long before the invention of the telephone. But their main purpose seems to have been for herdsmen to call their free-grazing cattle back to the…
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Ah … Holidays!
Sometimes you receive a picture postcard – although less and less in this digital age – that arouses deep inside you an instant longing to be there; to see the scenery with your own eyes; to take it in with all your senses. That is of course the whole purpose of a postcard, to pull…
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The amiable army
The amiable army What an impressive army of look-alike little figures! That was my first reaction when I bumped into them on the grounds of the Buddhist Hase-dera temple in Kamakura. On closer examination some of their faces show slightly different features. There must be a few different moulds from which the statues are made,…
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Wishful thinking
I wonder if I should reconsider my stand on religion somewhat. In earlier posts of this blog I have spoken – illustrating my point with pictures – of the ‘folklore of faith’, implying that apart from its popular forms, there is also a more serious and fundamental side to religion. The latter would be of…
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Jai Golu Devta …
So what are the requests like, that the worshippers of Goludev ask from him? They write their petitions on paper, which allows us to take a closer look at some of them. “Jai Golu Devta! My name, Priyanshu Gagola! Make me successful in finishing the 12th standard! May I get a government job! May I…
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Goludev the bell lover
I have never been able to really understand the meaning of the word ‘praying’, or maybe I should say ‘the act of praying’. One prays to god – at least according to my catholic upbringing – but since I can’t imagine anything when hearing or reading the word ‘god’, praying to god doesn’t make sense…
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Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari
Popular belief or the folklore of faith is, in general, what religion means to the common man. It is its most widespread manifestation, not only in Catholicism, but in other religions as well. There’s a lot of suffering in the world and people are often subjected to great stress, either self imposed, or by their…
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Treasure-house Venice
One of the nice things of the Italian pavilion at the 2011 Biennale in Venice was the continuity one experienced when stepping out of the exhibition venue into the different nooks and corners of this always enchanting city. Both inside and outside one felt surrounded by the same mixture of folkloric frivolity and renaissance seriousness.…
καιρός remembered
… the right moment, position chosen, shoot …
καιρός remembered 