Category: India
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WC-Monitor
WC-Monitor Once, one fine morning in our house in Orchha, I went to the toilet. To my surprise I found it occupied by an unexpected visitor who clearly wasn’t used to our western toilet habits. Not knowing if he (or she) was kindhearted or dangerous I kept my distance and patiently waited for my turn.…
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Jaunty stride
Jaunty stride They love rummaging around our garden at the crack of dawn, at times even some five or six of them. They are doing well in the forests, the bushes, (and our garden), the Kalij pheasants, that is,as long as they manage to escape the jaws of the pine marten, the fox and the…
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Fellow villagers
Fellow villagers Two Kumaoni women attending the wedding of a girl in the village. Lives lived in the lap of nature and culture in the foothills of the Himalaya. Photo of the week: Wedding guests, Maat village, Almora, Kumaon, Uttarakhand India 2020
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Folding child
Folding child Neatly folded up,mouth above the plate.Nothing spilled. Photo of the week: Mayoli Organic farm, Mayoli, Uttarakhand, India 2021
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Surya
Surya A stream of men, women and childrenmeanders between the Surya temple shrines.A thousand years, day after day, ever different,always the same, as the sun that comes and goes.Aeons … a millennium … today. Photo of the week: Surya (Sun) temple, 9th cent. AD, Katarmal, Uttarakhand, India 2021
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Uttarayani Fair
Uttarayani Fair When Surya (Sun) enters the Capricorn zodiac (14 January) it’s time for the festival of Makar Sankranti, in Uttarakhand also known as Uttarayan. That’s the time when the town of Bageshwar, at the confluence of the Saryu and Gomati Rivers, really comes to life. The biggest mela (fair) of the year in the…
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A rare sight
A rare sight I saw him one day on the wall of our house.A butterfly? So big and strange?A search operation taught me: not a butterfly but a moth.A moth? So big and strange? And so beautiful?Yes, it is the Actias selene, the Indian Luna moth.A rare sight. Never saw one again. Photo of the…
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Tibetan reverie
Tibetan reverie A mountain caught in a puddle desiring to be up in the clouds. A land and its people dreaming of self-determination. Photo of the week: Hunder, Ladakh (Little Tibet), India 2019
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Lavishly adorned
Lavishly adorned After having met the school children of last week’s post one would not have imagined their mothers and grandmothers to look like this. But in the villages of the Brokpa (or Drokpa or Dards) along the Indus River in Ladakh just before it flows into Pakistan, these elaborately dressed up women are not…
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Comparing eyes
Comparing eyes It’s festival day. All school children have got new pencils. Even though we are in Dah, a remote Ladakhi village at the end of the road before the Pakistan border, we immediately recognize the inquisitive glance with which the one girl looks at the pencils of the other. Are hers bigger, more beautiful,…
καιρός remembered 