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THE SEA OF PARAKRAMA, ANCIENT RESERVOIR , SRI LANKA HOLIDAYS
"Not one drop of water must flow into the ocean without serving the purposes of man" King Parakrambahu the great (1164-1196 AD), the builder of rainwater reservoir "Sea of Parakrama"
KITULGALA WHITE WATER RAFTING, BIRDING, SRI LANKA HOLIDAYS
The season for Whitewater rafting at Kitulgala is the period of April to November. During this period southwestern monsoon of Sri Lanka gently increase the water level of River Kelani Ganga.
PINNAWELA ELEPHANT ORPHANAGE, SRI LANKA HOLIDAYS
Twice a day elephants here, after the meals, are driven across the road to May Oya river for a leisurely bath. And you will be watching their antics from the comfort of river bank
Monday, July 18, 2011
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Karla and Shantaram at Goa
Posted by bunpeiris on 10:00 PM
Karla and Shantaram at Goa is a gleaning from Gregory David Roberts’s Shantaram
‘I love you , Karla,’ I said when we were alone again. ‘I loved you the first second I saw you. I think I’ve loved you for so long as there’s been love in the world. I love your voice. I love your face. I love your hands. I love everything you do, and I love the way your mind works, and the things you say. And even though it’s all true, all that, I don’t really understand it, and I can’t explain it-to you or to myself. I just love you. I just love you with all my heart. You do what God should do; you give me a reason to live. You give me reason to love the world.’
She kissed me, and our bodies settled together on the yielding sand. She clasped her hand in mine, and with our arms outstretched above our heads we made love while he praying moon seduced he sea, luring the waves crash and crumble on the charmed, unfailing shore.
And for a week, then, we played at being tourists in Goa. We visited all the beaches on the coast of the Arabian Sea, from Chapora to Cape Rama. We slept for two nights on the white gold wonder of Colva Beach. We inspected all the churches in the Old Goa settlement. The Festival of Francis Xavier, held on the anniversary of the saint’s death, every year, bound us in immense crowds of happy, hysterical pilgrims. The streets were thronged with people on their Sunday-best clothes. Merchants and street-stall operators came from all over the territory. Processions of the blind, the lame, and he afflicted, hoping for a miracle, rambled toward the basilica of the saints. Xavier, a Spanish monk, was one of the seven original Jesuits in the order founded by his friend Ignatius Loyola. Xavier died in 1552. He was just forty-six years old, but his spectacular proselytizing missions to India, and what was then called the Far East, established his enduring legend. After numerous burials and disinterments, the much-exhumed body of St. Francis was finally installed in the Basilica in the Bom Jesus, in Goa, in the early seventeenth century. Still remarkably-some would say miraculously-well preserved, the body was exposed to public view once in every ten years. While seemingly immune to decay, the saint’s body has suffered various amputations and subtractions over the centuries. A Portuguese woman had bitten off one of the saint’s toes, in the sixteenth century, in the hope of keeping it as a relic. Parts of the right hand had been sent to religious centers, as had chunks of the holy intestines.
Karla and I offered outrageously extravagant bribes to the caretakers of the basilica, laughing all the while, but they steadfastly refused to allow us a peak at the venerable corpse.
Following extract is copied from Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie
True believers, those nightmarish dreamers, grabbed at the corpse of Ayatollah Khomeini, as once other true believers in another place, in India whose name she bore, had bitten off chunks of the cadaver of St. Francis Xavier. One piece ended up in Macao, another in Rome. She wanted shadows, chiaroscuro, nuance. She wanted to see below the meniscus of the blinding brightness, to push through the hymen of the brightness, into the bloody hidden truth. What was not hidden, what was overt, was not true.
Following is from My Sri Lanka Holidays by bunpeiris.
The most venerated sacred relic of Theravada Buddhism is enshrined at the Holy Temple of the Tooth at Kandy, the medieval cultural capital and the gateway to the Central Highlands of Sri Lanka. It is the sacred Tooth relic of Gauthama Buddha, the exposition of which is bound to cause great rain in view of the tremendous atmospheric disturbance caused by the congregation of millions of gods at the location thereon to pay homage to the master who ceased to exist. Those gods are superior beings living in great splendor and grandeur in other planets of the universe who had lent hear to the doctrine of the Gauthama Buddha prior to his final extinction in 543 BC.
Dalada Sirita, a Buddhist treatise advises the exposition of Sacred Relic of Buddha in Kandy Esala Perahera pageant during a drawn out drought. The validity of the advise was authenticated in the year 1829 following a long drawn out drought in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in the British Colonial era. The uncommon phenomenon of heavy rain and resulting flood was recorded by then British colonial governor Sir Edward Barnes among the many others.
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‘I love you , Karla,’ I said when we were alone again. ‘I loved you the first second I saw you. I think I’ve loved you for so long as there’s been love in the world. I love your voice. I love your face. I love your hands. I love everything you do, and I love the way your mind works, and the things you say. And even though it’s all true, all that, I don’t really understand it, and I can’t explain it-to you or to myself. I just love you. I just love you with all my heart. You do what God should do; you give me a reason to live. You give me reason to love the world.’
She kissed me, and our bodies settled together on the yielding sand. She clasped her hand in mine, and with our arms outstretched above our heads we made love while he praying moon seduced he sea, luring the waves crash and crumble on the charmed, unfailing shore.
And for a week, then, we played at being tourists in Goa. We visited all the beaches on the coast of the Arabian Sea, from Chapora to Cape Rama. We slept for two nights on the white gold wonder of Colva Beach. We inspected all the churches in the Old Goa settlement. The Festival of Francis Xavier, held on the anniversary of the saint’s death, every year, bound us in immense crowds of happy, hysterical pilgrims. The streets were thronged with people on their Sunday-best clothes. Merchants and street-stall operators came from all over the territory. Processions of the blind, the lame, and he afflicted, hoping for a miracle, rambled toward the basilica of the saints. Xavier, a Spanish monk, was one of the seven original Jesuits in the order founded by his friend Ignatius Loyola. Xavier died in 1552. He was just forty-six years old, but his spectacular proselytizing missions to India, and what was then called the Far East, established his enduring legend. After numerous burials and disinterments, the much-exhumed body of St. Francis was finally installed in the Basilica in the Bom Jesus, in Goa, in the early seventeenth century. Still remarkably-some would say miraculously-well preserved, the body was exposed to public view once in every ten years. While seemingly immune to decay, the saint’s body has suffered various amputations and subtractions over the centuries. A Portuguese woman had bitten off one of the saint’s toes, in the sixteenth century, in the hope of keeping it as a relic. Parts of the right hand had been sent to religious centers, as had chunks of the holy intestines.
Karla and I offered outrageously extravagant bribes to the caretakers of the basilica, laughing all the while, but they steadfastly refused to allow us a peak at the venerable corpse.
Following extract is copied from Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie
True believers, those nightmarish dreamers, grabbed at the corpse of Ayatollah Khomeini, as once other true believers in another place, in India whose name she bore, had bitten off chunks of the cadaver of St. Francis Xavier. One piece ended up in Macao, another in Rome. She wanted shadows, chiaroscuro, nuance. She wanted to see below the meniscus of the blinding brightness, to push through the hymen of the brightness, into the bloody hidden truth. What was not hidden, what was overt, was not true.
Following is from My Sri Lanka Holidays by bunpeiris.
The most venerated sacred relic of Theravada Buddhism is enshrined at the Holy Temple of the Tooth at Kandy, the medieval cultural capital and the gateway to the Central Highlands of Sri Lanka. It is the sacred Tooth relic of Gauthama Buddha, the exposition of which is bound to cause great rain in view of the tremendous atmospheric disturbance caused by the congregation of millions of gods at the location thereon to pay homage to the master who ceased to exist. Those gods are superior beings living in great splendor and grandeur in other planets of the universe who had lent hear to the doctrine of the Gauthama Buddha prior to his final extinction in 543 BC.
Dalada Sirita, a Buddhist treatise advises the exposition of Sacred Relic of Buddha in Kandy Esala Perahera pageant during a drawn out drought. The validity of the advise was authenticated in the year 1829 following a long drawn out drought in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in the British Colonial era. The uncommon phenomenon of heavy rain and resulting flood was recorded by then British colonial governor Sir Edward Barnes among the many others.
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Bollywood
Posted by bunpeiris on 8:02 PM
Bollywood
Hindi movies aren’t to everyone’s taste. Some foreigners I’d dealt with had told me that they loathed the kaleidoscopic turmoil of musical numbers, bursting stochastically between weeping mothers, sighing infatuations, and brawling villains. I understood what they meant, but I didn’t agree with them. A year before, Johnny Cigar had told me that in former lives I must’ve been at least six different Indian personalities. I’d taken it as a high complement, but it wasn’t until I saw my first Bollywood movie shoot that I knew at last, and exactly, what he’d meant. I loved the singing, the dancing, and the music with the whole of my heart from the very first instant.
Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
“Once a friend of mine wanted me to write the home page article on Bollywood movies for his website: www.bollywoodmoviesz.com. I wrote with all my heart and the friend of mine recognizing the passion of mine decided to leave my pen name bunpeiris at the end of the Home page article. bunpeiris
Hindi movies aren’t to everyone’s taste. Some foreigners I’d dealt with had told me that they loathed the kaleidoscopic turmoil of musical numbers, bursting stochastically between weeping mothers, sighing infatuations, and brawling villains. I understood what they meant, but I didn’t agree with them. A year before, Johnny Cigar had told me that in former lives I must’ve been at least six different Indian personalities. I’d taken it as a high complement, but it wasn’t until I saw my first Bollywood movie shoot that I knew at last, and exactly, what he’d meant. I loved the singing, the dancing, and the music with the whole of my heart from the very first instant.
Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
“Once a friend of mine wanted me to write the home page article on Bollywood movies for his website: www.bollywoodmoviesz.com. I wrote with all my heart and the friend of mine recognizing the passion of mine decided to leave my pen name bunpeiris at the end of the Home page article. bunpeiris
Black Bombay: the Travel Racket
Posted by bunpeiris on 6:33 PM
Black Bombay: the Travel Racket
Following is a gleaning from Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts.
Pop star Madonna and her husband Guy Ritchie, wearing a cap, visit Mumbai’s Ambedkarnagar slums on Tuesday. Author Gregory David Roberts, (behind Madonna) who spent a long time in the slums, showed them around.
The travel racket, he explained, was an especially lucrative part of the currency trade. It involved large numbers of people from the millions of Indians who worked in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Muscat, Bahrain, Kuwait, and elsewhere throughout the Arab Gulf. The Indian workers, employed on contracts for three, six, or twelve months as domestics, cleaners, and laborers, were usually paid in foreign currency.
Most of the workers tried to exchange their wages on the black market as soon as they got back to India, in order to gain a few extra rupees. Khader’s mafia council offered the employers and the workers a short-cut. When they sold their foreign currencies in bulk to Khaderbhai, the Arab employers received a slightly more favorable rate, allowing them to pay their workers in rupees, at the black-market rate, in India. That left then with a surplus of rupees, and gave them a net profit from paying their workers.
For many Gulf State employers, the temptation to such currency crime was irresistible. They too, had caches of undeclared, un-taxed money under their opulent beds, Syndicates developed to organize the payment of India guest workers in rupees when they returned to India.
The workers were happy because they got the black-market rate but didn’t have to negotiate with hard-nosed black market dealers personally.
The bosses were happy because they made profits from payment through their syndicates.
The black marketers were happy because a steady stream of dollars, Deutschmarks, riyals, and dirhams flowed into the river of demand created by Indian business travelers.
Only the government missed out, and no-one in the thousands upon thousands of people involved in the trade shamed himself beyond endurance on that account.
‘I.. this whole business was once something of a specialty with me…, Khaled said, when that long first lesson finally ended. His voice trailed off, and I couldn’t be certain whether he was reminiscing or simply reluctant to talk further. I waited.
‘When I was studying, in New York,’ he went on at last,’ I was working on a thesis..Well, I wrote a thesis, on un-organized trade in the ancient world. It’s an area that my mother was researching, before the ’67 war. When I was a kid, she got me interested in the black markets of Assyria, Akkad, and Sumer, and how they related to trade routes, and taxes, and the empires that built up around them. When I started it myself, I called it Black Babylon.’
‘It’s catchy title.’
He fired a glance at me to reassure himself that I wasn’t mocking him.
‘I mean it,’ I said quickly, wanting to put him at ease because I was beginning to like him. ‘I think it’s a good topic for a thesis, and it’s a very catchy title. I think you should go ahead and finish it.’
He smiled again.
‘Well, Lin, life has lot of surprises, and, as my uncle in New York used to say, most of them ain’t happy ones for a working stiff. Now I’m working for a black market, instead of working on one. Now, it’s Black Bombay.
Shantaram. A literary masterpiece… it has the grit and pace of a thriller. Daily Telegraph
Gregory David Roberts was born in Melbourne in 1952, After surviving the events dealt with Shantaram, he was captured in Germany in 1990 and eventually extradited to Australia. On completing his prison sentence, he established a small multi-media company and is now a full time writer. He lives in Melbourne
"Once, while I was in Mumbai, a friend(Malathi Kembhavi) of a friend of mine (Anita Lewis) took trouble to take me to her favourite bookshop in Bombay. Shantaram is one of the dozen of books she encouraged me to buy." bunpeiris
Following is a gleaning from Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts.
The travel racket, he explained, was an especially lucrative part of the currency trade. It involved large numbers of people from the millions of Indians who worked in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Muscat, Bahrain, Kuwait, and elsewhere throughout the Arab Gulf. The Indian workers, employed on contracts for three, six, or twelve months as domestics, cleaners, and laborers, were usually paid in foreign currency.
Most of the workers tried to exchange their wages on the black market as soon as they got back to India, in order to gain a few extra rupees. Khader’s mafia council offered the employers and the workers a short-cut. When they sold their foreign currencies in bulk to Khaderbhai, the Arab employers received a slightly more favorable rate, allowing them to pay their workers in rupees, at the black-market rate, in India. That left then with a surplus of rupees, and gave them a net profit from paying their workers.
For many Gulf State employers, the temptation to such currency crime was irresistible. They too, had caches of undeclared, un-taxed money under their opulent beds, Syndicates developed to organize the payment of India guest workers in rupees when they returned to India.
The workers were happy because they got the black-market rate but didn’t have to negotiate with hard-nosed black market dealers personally.
The bosses were happy because they made profits from payment through their syndicates.
The black marketers were happy because a steady stream of dollars, Deutschmarks, riyals, and dirhams flowed into the river of demand created by Indian business travelers.
Only the government missed out, and no-one in the thousands upon thousands of people involved in the trade shamed himself beyond endurance on that account.
‘I.. this whole business was once something of a specialty with me…, Khaled said, when that long first lesson finally ended. His voice trailed off, and I couldn’t be certain whether he was reminiscing or simply reluctant to talk further. I waited.
‘When I was studying, in New York,’ he went on at last,’ I was working on a thesis..Well, I wrote a thesis, on un-organized trade in the ancient world. It’s an area that my mother was researching, before the ’67 war. When I was a kid, she got me interested in the black markets of Assyria, Akkad, and Sumer, and how they related to trade routes, and taxes, and the empires that built up around them. When I started it myself, I called it Black Babylon.’
‘It’s catchy title.’
He fired a glance at me to reassure himself that I wasn’t mocking him.
‘I mean it,’ I said quickly, wanting to put him at ease because I was beginning to like him. ‘I think it’s a good topic for a thesis, and it’s a very catchy title. I think you should go ahead and finish it.’
He smiled again.
‘Well, Lin, life has lot of surprises, and, as my uncle in New York used to say, most of them ain’t happy ones for a working stiff. Now I’m working for a black market, instead of working on one. Now, it’s Black Bombay.
Shantaram. A literary masterpiece… it has the grit and pace of a thriller. Daily Telegraph
Gregory David Roberts was born in Melbourne in 1952, After surviving the events dealt with Shantaram, he was captured in Germany in 1990 and eventually extradited to Australia. On completing his prison sentence, he established a small multi-media company and is now a full time writer. He lives in Melbourne
"Once, while I was in Mumbai, a friend(Malathi Kembhavi) of a friend of mine (Anita Lewis) took trouble to take me to her favourite bookshop in Bombay. Shantaram is one of the dozen of books she encouraged me to buy." bunpeiris
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