Category: differently observed

Stories

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Mysore Storytellers Network (MSN)

Making space to share creativity.

find MSN on Facebook or here or instagram

Their latest event on 11th July focussed on the monsoon . The event was wonderfully entertaining with participants from throughout India and a rich mix of contributions from storytellers, musicians, lyricists, singers, poets and polemicists.

For what it’s worth here’s my contribution.

I have much experience of rain in the ‘land of grey” as I’m from one of the rainiest parts of England, and even though I moved to live in Mysore I still have little experience of the extremes of the monsoon phenomenon. Life is so easy in so many ways in Mysore

This is unapologetically raising broad challenging questions

…

I can feel it at the end of our noses

It’s no poem

A serious story the message is not hidden.

It’s a wake up late at night.

…

I’ve moved to Mysore in India, its my first time out on my Enfield 

I’m new to this.

I wonder why are all the two wheelers stopping under the bridges, or the flyovers or the riders finding shelter at the shops?

Because I’m new to this 

but realise why, as the rain falls

It is the monsoon, I’ll know better next time.

Did you feel a spot of rain?

We got our brollies out and opened them just in time

We knew it was the monsoon.

We had torrential rain for weeks

…..

The rains have broken the roads

no one expected the monsoon

the construction site sand has run away after a heavy shower

and escaped down the road blocking the drains

no one expected the monsoon

water seeps into the tarmac cracks and pushes them open

no one expected the monsoon

…..

fires devastated the forests in Australia and California

we didn’t expect that

the heatwave killed people in USA and Canada

we didn’t expect that either

..

Had anyone expected that

or does no one care

We stumble through life being uncertain about what will happen and 

how to deal with the challenges we face.

its part of life and how we learn

we hear whispers,

our gut sends messages

its in the papers, 

the UN discusses

but do we listen and if we do

can we act?

We knew all about the monsoon, the fires, the heatwave, the pandemic, wave one two and three, so why didn’t we act?

Were we Breathing Lethargy Air? 

or

Following the submissive path? Who knows?

Check them out nd join in, as there’s all sorts of different events like celebrating art.

Snakes and termites

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On our MYcycle tour of srirangapatnam guests are intrigued by the termite hills converted into desirable ac accommodation.

There’s always signs of Pooja around the main hill we pass near the site of the fourth war of mysore.

This column from the ‘Star of Mysore’ explains more

MARIA POPOVA’s brain pickings

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Whom We Love and Who We Are: José Ortega y Gasset on Love, Attention, and the Invisible Architecture of Our Being

How our loves reveal who we are, an illustrated serenade to aliveness and seeing the world with newborn eyes, and a great forgotten love story

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” the great French philosopher Simone Weil wrote shortly before her untimely death. An epoch after her, Mary Oliver eulogized the love of her life with the observation that “attention without feeling… is only a report.” Looking back on centuries of love poems by people of genius who dared to love beyond the cultural narrows of their time, the poet J.D. McClatchy observed that “love is the quality of attention we pay to things.”

Because our attention shapes our entire experience of the world — this, after all, is the foundation of all Eastern traditions of mindfulness, which train the attention in order to anneal our quality of presence — the objects of our attention end up, in a subtle but profound way, shaping who we are. 

Because there is hardly a condition of consciousness that focuses the attention more sharply and totally upon its object than love, what and whom we love is the ultimate revelation of what and who we are. 

That is what the great Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset(May 9, 1883–October 18, 1955) explores in a series of essays originally written for the Madrid newspaper El Sol and posthumously published in English as On Love: Aspects of a Single Theme (public library) — a singular culmination of Ortega’s philosophic investigation of Western culture’s blind spots, biases, and touching self-delusions about love, that is, about who and what we are.

Coppafeel

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Coppafeel

Manjula and I discovered this charity, that Kris set up, at WOMAD music festival, feeling one’s breast and checking for lumps wasn’t something she’d ever heard about.

To be truthful I was to discover that basic knowledge about healthy lifestyles and prevention was and is quite limited especially amongst the poorer communities.

I’ve just recalled a great example of this from one of Manjula’s tales l’ll include it in our story due out next year.

The sticker, all those years later is still at our front door for visitors to read.

New books

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In Manjula’s library.

Just arrived.

Having just read the amazing true story about Jeremy the snail by Maria Popova (her of the wonderful brain pickings) I now feel so terribly guilty for the snails I used to throw over the garden wall.

In my poor defence, in Hebden Bridge in north England where I still have a house, they would munch away at my plants. It’s quite cool and damp so ideal for them and their friends the slugs!

Here’s selections from Neil Gaiman’s book. Some lovely little messages.

He’s becoming one of our favourite authors.

English humour

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check out Marina Hyde

Here’s her latest

Featuring a famous actress with a lot to share

I’m one of those that can bore for hours on neoliberalism

Ah, there it is: wellness. “Wellness” is part of a class of words unified by the fact that only the most dreadful bores on Earth know what they mean. See also “neoliberalism”. Celebrity Cruises itself adds that the fitness kits will enhance “self-care and collective wellbeing”, with Gwyneth’s role expected to focus on “wellness programming” and something called the “Women in Wellness initiative”.

Even more at Manjula’s library

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I recently discovered that Stardust, one of my favourite films is written by an author I’ve only just discovered: Neil Gaiman. I know, I know, I’m behind the times.

Here’s the author’s original outline for the book.

Well now I’ve read the book and strongly recommend both.

With superb images by Charles Vegg

Outcast

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Yesterday at a village Temple close to here one group of people had to sit outside and were not allowed to enter or fully participate in the puja.

Why?

Here’s a clue

The people were from what’s called a scheduled caste and who were the superior one’s allowed inside?

This is 2021.

What a mess

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That’s been with us for a thousand years.

I’m from the U.K./Britain/England/the North/Yorkshire… We often joke about the north/south divide, I mention how the British pronounce words oddly, sometimes (?) to hide their French origin, I’ll explain how my accent and the words I use enables others to place me geographically and allocate the class I was born into and then of course there’s Brexit.

The U.K. becomes more the disunited kingdom by the day, has a rich pedigree and mongrel history. There’s the rub, the divisions we recognise are far more ingrained than we realise and have been established over a thousand years.

The divisions we see, the power games and the ascendancy of certain groups, represented by ‘The Tories’ now seems to be breaking it apart.

I recommend this book . It reveals, in surprising ways, how the established patterns of behaviour are difficult to break, we continue to adapt our national house, following the foundations and seem unable to create any real and lasting change.