Ding dong the witch is DEAD ... Subh Holi.

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As we speak, Hindus all over the world are igniting bonfires and thus commemorating the death of the witch Holika.

To understand this, let us go back in time. The following story knows quite a few variations, but hey this is India with 1.2 billion people and a religion that is considered to be the oldest in the world. So in a colourful time as Holi one should allow for an equally colourful array of stories regarding the story of witch Holika.

Once upon a time there was the brutal King Hiranyakashyapa. He wanted to be revered as a God himself and establish his own supremacy everywhere. However, his own son, Prahalad refused and continued to pray to Lord Vishnu instead.

Out of frustration and anger, the demon king then decided to kill his son. Despite all his efforts, Prahalad remained safe by the blessings of Lord Vishnu. Finally, the Hiranyakashyapa called in the help of his cruel sister Holika. Legend has it that Holika was blessed with a drape which protected her from burning into fire. As per the plan made by the brother and sister, the demon princess Holika sat with young Prahalad in a huge bowl of fire wearing the drape over her body.

But this time, due to heavy wind the drape came over young Prahalad, saving him from burning and as a result Holika was burnt in fire and thus died on the spot.

This incident thus re-established the faith of people in the ultimate divine power and is thus celebrated as the day of eternal love, devotion, blessings and the victory of Good over Evil.
Holi is also the time of vibrant Love, such as the one between Lord Krishna and Radha.

Picture credits: press agency Reuters

Shiva Art

Oh no ...

... not another career switch... , but hey this is what happens when Pakistani-Indian Shahzad Ali Khan leaves his instruments unattended during the radio programme Oba Live: me having a go at the tabla.

And now some real music, not the noise I was supposedly making. The next track is from Rumanian David Deejay. Sexy Thing or Somebody told you how much I love you. Enjoy.



Photography: Shiva art by me,God's photographer.
Tabla photo: Abdellah Dami and his inseparable i-Phone.

Awesome Dance Tracks

If ever I should decide on career switch number ... ;-)




Ameerah: Sound of missing you ... TLF iovj



And do crank up the volume!!! OMG, it is almost 03.00 in the morning and while most sensible Dutch people are probably sleeping like a baby, yours truly is still wide awake. Should be living in Bombay where Sunday 21st February is already well under way.

Anna Grace: Love keeps calling / Let the feelings go

Which religion is true?

An age-old question leaving a trail of blood throughout the history of mankind.

The question also lies at the heart of the famous German play by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Nathan the Wise (1779). Nathan - himself Jewish - tries to bridge the gap between Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Then sultan Saladin asks him which religion is true?

In answer to this question Nathan tells the story of the magical heirloom ring handed down from God to mankind. Whoever wears the ring has the love of God.

At some point the ring ends up in the hands of a father who has three sons whom he loves equally. So, he promises the ring to each of them. Looking for a way to keep his promise, he has two replicas made, which are indistinguishable from the original, and on his deathbed he gives a ring to each of them.

The brothers quarrel over who owns the real ring. A wise judge admonishes them telling them it is impossible to tell, the original one supposedly having been lost at some point in the past. Yet this is a magical ring and in order to find out which of the sons has the real ring, it is up to them to live in such a way that their ring's powers are proven true.

In other words, the brothers should live a life that is pleasant in the eyes of God and mankind (rather than expecting the ring's miraculous powers to do the trick).

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing did not include Hinduism in Nathan the Wise. Not that it matters, for the ring parabel would still hold its ground. Religion is about God and God has many names and faces.

Judaism; seven divine names, such as: Yod-Hei-Vav-Hei, Elohim, El Shaddai and Adonai.

Christianity: Emmanual, Alpha, Carpenter, Everlasting Father

Islam; the 99 names of God, e.g. al Aziz, al Malik, al Gaffur, An Nur, Al Rashid.

All those divine names usually represent virtuous qualities. And believe it or not, Hinduism is not that different. Hindus, too, glorify and praise the thousands of qualities of the One God in his thousands of manifestations (avatars). Thus Lord Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu, symbolises Love. Lord Rama, another avatar of Vishnu, stands for Virtue. Hanuman is all about Power and the Goddess Saraswati represents Wisdom.The Bhagavad Geeta (Song of the Lord) has many verses that cleary mention the Oneness of God. The same book acknowledges others paths of worship, for instance through images of clay, stone copper, bronze, gold, silver, glass deities.

We bow. We worship. We do this in churches, temples, mosques, synagogues. We read holy scriptures. We rever Mary, Joseph, Jesus, Shiva, Vishnu, Laxmi, Shiva Linga, images of imam Ali, Husain, even the prophet Muhammad. And let us not forget what is inside the Kaaba: an ancient sacred black stone. Ring a bell?

Shiva-ji

In His most hypnotic form: the Dancing Shiva.

God in colour

Dilruba

My latest discovery: Azam Ali and her mindblowing track Dilruba, here mixed by Junkie XL. The track contains Hindi, Urdu and Farsi words. Not surprising given the fact that Azam was born in Teheran and raised in India. This year she will be doing the soundtrack for the film Prince of Persia.

Coup Verdonk

Rita Verdonk komt bij de kapper. De kapper vraagt: 'Hetzelfde als de vorige keer?'
Rita antwoordt: ''Nee, doe maar iets wilders ...'

Shivatri, Shivaji, Shiv Bhagwan

Two days ago, it was HIS day, the one who listens to a thousand and one names. For me, simply Shiva. Should have written about this on Friday, but I was desperately trying to get things right for the one who catapulted me into Hindu action in the first place. Who? That is for me to know and for you to wonder. Om Namah Shivah. iovj

Lebanon: never a dull moment

Some of you may know that yours truly chairs the Dutch - Arab Friendship Association (Amsterdam chapter). We organise all kinds of activities, from a cooking workshop to lectures and films on all things related to the Arab world.

A couple of weeks ago, we had a very renown speaker. None other than the lebanese writer and journalist Melhem Riashy, the anchorman of Arab News Network and not linked to any political party in Lebanon.

Riashy is a busy bee, not only is he senior advisor to Elias Murr, the Lebanese Defense minister, in between he teaches Strategic Communication at the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik and he has published numerous books.

Riashy gave an on stage interview to Dutch journalist Arthur Blok regarding the socio political situation in Lebanon. His presence drew quite an audience, even including the Lebanese Ambassador to the Netherlands.

Fair is foul and foul is fair (Macbeth)

Thick fog. Three crooked witches blessed with equally crooked noses fill the auditorium with their eerie voices. And out comes one of the most famous quotes from Will's Macbeth:

First Witch

When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

Second Witch
When the hurly burly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.

Third Witch
That will be ere the set of sun.

Why dedicate a post to this famous opening scene? Well, I saw the play last Wednesday at Het Baken, a secondary school in the Dutch city of Almere, where I teach English - or at least try to. The actors? Fourteen, fifteen and sixteen-year-old gifted students in kilts, whose mother tongue is Dutch, while they performed the play in near perfect English! A tremendous feat, I dare say, and one that deserved a much higher turnout. Yet this being Holland, let's blame the weather.

Nonetheless, I hope this will herald a new annual tradition at Het Baken: performing a classic like Macbeth in a foreign language.

Below, some pictures I took with my brand new Nikon D5000 (still practising...). The last pic has my esteemed colleague Teresa on it, who not only teaches English, but also directed this play.

In honour of Navratri

An awesome bhajan Aayi Navratri - Maiya Ka Jagrata - sung by Anuradha Paudwal. And do switch off the music player first.

Nine Holy Nights

This morning I hardly knew how to write it, let alone pronounce it, but all that changed after receiving a text message from a very special friend in Surinam, South America. Her words: Subh Navratri.

Ah, you decided to stick around. Well, good for you, because this short post is all it takes to quickly brief you about the Nine Holy Nights. For that is what Navratri literally means in Sanskrit, Nava meaning Nine and Ratri meaning nights.

These nine nights are filled with worship and a vegetarian diet. Some even forego on food and drink as well, or abstain from using salt. That is sofar as the stomach is concerned. Back to the worship itself. During these nine nights the nine manifestations of Durga are worshipped. Durga is considered to be an embodiment of the creative feminine force (Shakti) and the fiercer, demon-fighting form of Lord Shiva's wife, Goddess Parvati.

Now why worship Durga during those nine nights? What did she do to deserve these nights of worship in honour of her? Well, my dears, she saved the world, by slaying an asura, a demon, called Mahishasura. He had unleashed a reign of terror on earth, heaven and the worlds below. None of the gods could defeat him, so Durga was created instead. Thus, she has come to represent the motherhood of God. Durga is the warrior aspect of the Divine Mother.

It is said that when Mahishasura met her, he seriously underestimated her, thinking "How can a woman kill me - Mahishasura the one who has defeated the god trinity". However, Durga gave a roar of laughter which caused earthquake on the earth and this woke Mahishasura up to her powers.

The terrible Mahishasura rampaged against her, changing forms many times, from buffalo to elephant, lion, man and so on. When at one point Mahishasura had half emerged into his buffalo form again, he got paralyzed by the extreme light emitting from the goddess's body. The goddess then resounded with laughter before cutting Mahishasura's head down with her Khorgo. Thus Durga slayed Mahishasura.

As for Shiva-dear, in mainstream Hindu religion, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva represent the three primary aspects of the divine, and are collectively known as the Trimurti. Brahma is the creator, Vishnu is the maintainer or preserver, and Shiva is the destroyer or transformer.

Subh Navratri.

Ray Neiman. Ray who?

Call it pidgin. Call it Patois. Call Ray a new-born star

Once you've figured out the main features of the Xperia for which I heavily advertised one blog entry ago - and should really be getting paid for - do you get yourself a Bose headphone, plug it in the cell phone, surf to youtube and look for music by Ray Neiman.

Ray who? Ray Neiman, a rising star in the French music scene. His music, a perfect blend of reggae, dancehall, pop, rock, r&b and zoukh, all jazzed up with local spices, is bound to turn every wall flower into a too-hot-to-trot dance miracle.

I bet you did not know, however, that Neiman's history started some 25 years ago in Surinam, in a settlement very near to the Marowijne river. He comes from a big family (ten children and a father who was hardly in sight). Remarkably enough, he considers his first family to be the Amer Indians and regrets never having learned their language.

Soon Surinam proved too small for his ambitions, so he decided to move to the Netherland. Yet after a while he became restless again and moved on to France and the UK.

At the same time slowly but surely his musical identity has begun to take shape. He features on a remix of Shy' m's super hit Femme de Couleur and is doing gigs in France, Belgium, the UK and Switzerland, winning many awards on the way.

And don't you for one moment think Neiman has forgotten about his Surinamese heritage, as his songs breathe the spirit of the Aucan language. Okay, teacher Sharida delves into Wikipedia: Aucans are descendents of Maroons, runaway slaves in the West Indies, Central America, South Ameria and North America who formed independent settlements together.

Now, you should know that slaves frequently escaped within the first generation of their arrival from Africa and often preserved their African languages and much of their culture and religion. The jungles offered food, shelter, and isolation for the escaped slaves. Maroons survived by growing vegetables and hunting. Individual groups of Maroons often allied themselves with the local indigenous tribes and occasionally assimilated into these populations.Maroon/Marokon settlements often possessed a clannish, outsider identity. The language that they spoke has various names, but one such Maroon Creole language, in Surinam, is the Aucan language, Neiman's language.

In the years to follow, many of the vernacular forms of English, and Dutch for that matter, spoken in the Caribbean changed into different, broken languages, also referred to as pidgin languages or Patois. Jamaican Patois for instance is comprised words from the native languages of the many races within the Caribbean including Latin, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Amerindian, and English along with several African dialects. Some islands have creole dialects influenced by their linguistic diversity; French, Spanish, Latin, Hindi, Arabic, Hebrew, German, Dutch, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and others. Often these Patois are popularly considered "bastardizations" of English, "broken English", or slang.

Of course, you are now dying to listening to a few of his songs. Check out the songs Viens, Fais Moi Danser and Shake it. And try and discover how many different languages are incorporated in the songs. Neiman has a hyves page and can be found on MySpace.

Mister Ray Neiman's songs are a classic example of the cultural and linguistic richness of his background. Call it Patois. Call it Creole. Call it anything you like. I prefer to call it musical magic.

Photo credits
- First two photos from Neiman's Hyves and MySpace, as is most of the textual info on Neiman.
- Maroon photo from Ted Hill, Suriname River in 1955. Wikipedia

The Xperia Experiment

Surprise. Surprise. No matter how many sheep I tried to count, it is now half past three in the morning and the fact of the matter is that yours truly can't sleep. Insomnia. So, why toss and turn, while you could have a go at the brand new Sony Ericsson Xperia X1. It is such a sleek and sophisticated device with amazing features. It is equipped with a gigantic 3.0-inch LCD Touchscreen and comes preloaded with Microsoft Applications including Words, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Internet Explorer, and Mobile Media Player Mobile, allowing insomniacs like me to work and relax at anywhere anytime.




And it's ultra fast because of its 3G data connectivity support. There is also this built-in 3.2-megapixel digital camera, and a GPS navigation system (so no Tom Tom for me).

Yet in IMHO, one of the most alluring features is undoubtedly the QWERTY keyboard, having an arc slider design. Eat your heart out.

That said, you practically need a Ph.D to get them all to work for you instead of against you. I finally managed to access the Internet without much ado. All's well that ends well, as the Great Bard once said. ;-)

Existential pain

For those who think the following is going to be completely beyond them, stop reading right now. For all others who can do without no brainers, do continue. Checked my email and Facebook inboxes an hour ago and was surprised to see two messages about scorned love. The email had grief written all over it. The Facebook comment was cynical to the bone.

This only goes to show that pain has many faces and is just as much part of life, as is for instance, breathing. Therefore, some call this pain existential in nature. And we all deal with it in our own ways, whether you are a famous Dutch playwrite or a student about to enter university.

My dear student, you are the one who studied Greek or Latin, I forgot which one. So, know your classics, for languages considered dead might not prove so dead after all . . . Try not to be afraid of the future, because the future might actually bring wisdom and renewed happiness.

"And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God." - Aeschylus

So who the hell are you?

You can be a William Shakespeare. Or perhaps you are a Wolfgang Mozart. Oh you may prefer to model yourself after Rembrandt van Rijn.

Perhaps you are none of the above, but rather a disoverer and admirer of all those beautiful treasures called art.

According to a silly Facebook test I did recently, I was a Christobal Columbus, because of a daring and adventurous streak I seemingly possess. Columbus wanted to explore the corners of the world. Or did he, as there is a 'slight' difference between discovering and taking over, and not just in maritime or military terms for that matter ... How about the field of love? Are you the Disoverer or the Conquerer?

This is where Ethics enters the scene and why reinvent a brilliant train of thought if some chap already said it before? So here goes:

'Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.' - Albert Schweitzer

There is no particular need to immediately sail out and discover the world. Start by exploring and expanding the corners of your own mind. Academic studies will broaden your mind only so far. But poetry, or poetic prose or prosaic verse ... aahh my dears, poetry will allow your soul to switch back and forth from being a hedonistic pleasure dome to a temple of grief and sensing, breathing, living all the motions in between.

'We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.' - from the 1989 motion picture Dead Poets' Society

And on this brilliant bombshell, I bid thee farewell. Or to rephrase this: later mate.


picture credits
London: Anthony Blond, 1968 (English translation), Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, Ltd., 1990 (Spanish version)

What came first:

human beings or human rights?

And a very good morning to you, too. Were you there yesterday, in the pretty Dutch town of Middelburg in Zeeland, to commemorate the abolishment of slavery (1st July 1863)? While listening to all the stories and watching all the visible reminders of this past, another story came to mind, the story told in a poem by Kenneth Patchen (1911 – 1972).


‘Nice Day for a Lynching’

The bloodhounds look like sad old judges
In a strange court. They point their noses
At the Negro jerking in the tight noose;
His feet spread crow-like above these
Honorable men who laugh as he chokes.

I don’t know this black man.

I don’t know these white men.

But I know that one of my hands
Is black, and one white. I know that
One part of me is being strangled,
While another part horribly laughs.

Until it changes,
I shall be forever killing; and be killed.

Photo credit: NAACP announcement that a man was lynched yesterday

Monday morning . The sunlight forced itself through my curtains, melting away the dreams I did not wish to dream, making way for a new day of doing things I might never have done before, making way for ... new dreams.

John Frederick Nims' Love Poem

Came a across this 'forgotten' extraordinary love poem from the American poet John Frederick Nims (1913 - 1999). Usually such poems mention the good qualities of your other half, your better self. Not with Nims who starts off this poem by telling the reader that the woman he loves is no good at all. The second stanza explains why: she is an expert in much more important things in life. She helps people that are not helped by others. Nims is not trying to change her. In fact, he is willing to change himself.

'Love Poem'

My clumsiest dear, whose hands shipwreck vases,
At whose quick touch all glasses chip and ring,
Whose palms are bulls in china, burs in linen,
And have no cunning with any soft thing

Except all ill-at-ease fidgeting people:
The refugee uncertain at the door
You make at home; deftly you steady
The drunk clambering on his undulant floor.

Unpredictable dear, the taxi drivers' terror,
Shrinking from far headlights pale as a dime
Yet leaping before apopleptic streetcars—
Misfit in any space. And never on time.

A wrench in clocks and the solar system. Only
With words and people and love you move at ease;
In traffic of wit expertly manoeuver
And keep us, all devotion, at your knees.

Forgetting your coffee spreading on our flannel,
Your lipstick grinning on our coat,
So gaily in love's unbreakable heaven
Our souls on glory of spilt bourbon float.

Be with me, darling, early and late. Smash glasses
I will study wry music for your sake.
For should your hands drop white and empty
All the toys of the world would break.