The Moving Finger

       Image courtesy:nickyskye.blogspot.com Kamala Das’s short story “Letter from Radha” from the collection of stories Sandal Trees is a prose poem on the Radha--Krishna love. Unlike the  Bhakti  poets who celebrate the Radha--Krishna love of the Vrindavan days as an ideal love beyond the norms of traditional courtship and are silent about Krishna’s later desecration of that love, Das, in her story, prefers to interrogate Krishna’s change of heart after he left Vrindavan. She demythifies and demystifies the Radha--Krishna love and shows it to be what it really was—a love that ended abruptly in betrayal and abandonment, a love that left Radha broken-hearted. Das's story shows how cruel a man can be even to the woman he loves.    Krishna,when he becomes a king , man-like, deserts Radha, and she, woman-like, lives like one dead    pining for her beloved for in true love there is no such thing as “getting over it.” Even ...

                                       Photo courtesy:Clip2art.com   Once upon a time there lived in the   garden of a house in London a pair of swallows with their baby swallow. By the time the little swallow learned to fly it was late autumn, the time for the swallows to migrate, to start their long, long journey to a warmer climate. So taking their young one with them they flew away from London city, across France, across the Pyrenees, across Spain, across Morocco, across the Sahara and reached their destination in Africa. When it was time for them to start their return journey the swallow- parents began to talk to the baby swallow about how wonderful it would be in London when they reach the city in the summer, in the sunny month of June. If they are lucky they may find the nest that they abandoned to be in good condition despite t...

The Canadian novelist of Sri Lankan Tamil ancestry, Michael Ondaatje   has won the special one-off Golden Man Booker Prize given to mark the 50 th   anniversary of the United Kingdom’s most prestigious literary award. Ondaatje’s The English Patient , a tale of love and strife during World War II was selected as the best work of fiction from the last fifty years of Booker Prize-winning novels. The 74-year-old author had beaten all the Man Booker Prize's previous 51 winners including the Indians   who were Salman Rushdie     for Midnight's Children (1981);   Arundhati Roy for The God of  Small Things  (1997); Kiran Desai for  The Inheritance of Loss   (2006); and Aravind Adiga for   The White Tiger   (2008). Image courtesy:https.tvtropes.org The Man Booker Foundation had appointed a panel  of five judges and asked each judge to read all the Booker Prize-winning works from a particular decade and choose his/her f...

                     photo courtesy:http://www.nilefm.com   Plogging has become  the latest fitness fad for fitness freaks all over the world. What is meant by plogging? The portmanteau word 'plogging'   comes from a fusion of the  Swedish words plocka upp and jogga which mean picking up and jogging. Ploggers are people who carry trash bags and   pick up garbage  when they go  jogging. Later they throw that garbage into the nearest bin or get rid of it in an eco-friendly manner. Plogging may be an unclean way for you to get fit; but it is a simple and easy way to make  the earth clean.   Littering the earth with non-biodegradable waste like plastic bottles, foam, thermocol, diapers, straws, toffee-packets and wrappers   is a global problem of alarming proportions. It was in 2017 that a simple, yet effective technique to deal with this issue was conceived by Erik ...

     The fourth referendum in Ireland on the abortion issue was conducted on the 25 th of May, 2018. 67% of the Irish voted in favour of abortion and 33%   against it. In1983, after the   third referendum,   the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution Act had made it clear that the right to life of the unborn child was equal to the right to life of the mother. But this amendment will be repealed as   the Irish people have now voted to do away with the constitutional ban on abortion. This indicates that the Irish are   slowly and steadily moving away from the country’s conservative Catholic ethos. The proposed legislation will bring Ireland into line with the majority of European countries that allows termination without asking for specific reasons within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Moreover, as per this proposal, even in an advanced stage of pregnancy, abortion will be allowed in cases of fatal foetal anomaly or if the pregnant woman’s lif...