Silence is an ocean.
Speech is a river.
When the ocean is searching for you,
don’t walk into the river.
Listen to the ocean.

~ Rumi

This amazing selection of pictures will make us realise how important trees are. 🌴

Watch how these hapless animals try to hide from the sun with whatever shade they can get. Sometimes even the narrow rectangular shadow of, believe it or not, an electric pole is heavenly for living beings.

This is also an exhortation to plant more trees

In Indonesia, banana tree trunks are used for growing veggies. They dont need watering as this contains plenty of moisture. After harvesting, the trunk decomposes and enriches the soil.
Pls share this, let our gardeners / farmers too learn this beautiful and amazing way of saving water.

When the soul is naughted and transformed . . . she is so full of peace that though she press her flesh, her nerves, her bones, no other thing comes forth from them than peace.

– Saint Catherine of Genoa

There is a common form of nervousness: soul nervousness. The soul is so identified with the body that it has forgotten its real nature. Soul nervousness can be destroyed only by meditation—by transferring the attention from your nerves to the perception of Infinite Happiness within, transferring your attention from the bundle of bodily sensations to the infinite nature, which is your true Self.

– Paramhansa Yogananda

If you’ve ever found yourself a couch potato in front of the TV after a bad day, mindlessly scooping ice cream out of the container with a spoon, you know that mood and food are linked. If the relationship between food and mood is a verified phenomenon, the correlation between foods you got as an infant and how you will do in life is even more important. As most of the world ready to celebrate yet another Father’s Day, UNICEF has given dads a thumbs up on the key role they can play in the nutrition and well-being of their babies. “Fathers have the power to build their babies’ brains,’ a UNICEF release said ahead of Father’s Day. “There is no time more critical for brain development than the first 1,000 days of a child’s life, and there is a growing body of evidence that fathers hold a huge stake in this process.”

The responsibility, so far, of most childhood campaigns, be it proper nutrition or timely vaccinations has been on the mother.  This approach inadvertently missed on a key component for the all-round development of the child. UNICEF India, in its EarlyMomentsMatter campaign, urges fathers to be equal partners in the healthy development of their babies’ brains, leading to their well-being in adult life. “This year’s focus is on food and nutrition,” said UNICEF’s Chief of Nutrition, Mr. Arjan Waqt at a roundtable with media in Delhi as part of Father’s Day celebrations. “Nutrition is not just filling the stomach. UNICEF India will celebrate the ABCs of good parenting for healthy brain development and highlight the importance of protection, nutrition, and stimulation in the earliest years of life.”

Fathers have an important role at various stages of a child’s life, beginning with conception, to childbirth and followed by post-natal care. According to research, over 80% of a baby’s brain is formed by three years. “Babies need nutrition, protection, and stimulation in the earliest years of life for healthy brain development – particularly from pregnancy to age three,” Raji Nair, a nutrition expert with the organization told this journalist. The effects of malnutrition are not reversible. If the child is undernourished during the first 2 years of life, the consequences can be life-long.

This UN body that works in 190 countries to ameliorate the plight of children, especially the most vulnerable and excluded, will also be building in India a community of dads online and offline who can share their experiences of parenting and exchange tips, officials said at the roundtable.

Sometimes social and cultural beliefs may inhibit a new father to be present with mother and child. UNICEF is using Father’s Day to renew its call to break down such barriers that prevent fathers from spending quality time with their young children. “More than just a second parent or an extra set of hands, fathers are one of the best child development resources we have, and if we are going to give children the best start in life, we all need to fully recognize and utilize this role,” said UNICEF Chief of Early Childhood Development Dr. Pia Britto in a press release.

As part of its tribute to fathers around the globe and part of it ‘Super Dads’ campaign, UNICEF launched a new parenting site to bring together fathers from across the world to share their parenting tips. The site will also give nutrition guide for healthy brain development.

Neuroscientists have proved that children who spend their earliest years of life, particularly their first 1000 days in a nurturing and stimulating environment, have their brains develop at an optimal speed. These neural connections lead to well-adjusted adults later in life. “When fathers bond with their children from the beginning of their lives and play an active role in their development the children will have better psychological health, self-esteem and will become healthier and happier adults,” said Waqt.

UNICEF India’s Super Dad campaign is participative and wherein you can share a video – What does it take to be a super dad/real dad/baapwalibaat and submit via Twitter and Instagram. Primary hashtag: #EarlyMomentsMatter  
Secondary hashtags: #BaapWaliBaat  and #FathersDay.
There is a prize to be won in this contest.

God is not a mute unfeeling Being. He is love itself. If you know how to meditate to make contact with Him, He will respond to your loving demands. You do not have to plead; you can demand as His child. But which of you will spend the necessary time?

Which of you will persist until you become so concentrated that you receive an answer from Him?

Paramhansa Yogananda

I am the boundless ocean. This way and that, The wind, blowing where it will, Drives the ship of the world. But I am not shaken. I am the unbounded deep In whom the waves of all the worlds Naturally rise and fall. But I do not rise or fall.

Ashtavakra Gita 7:1-2

The story of independence of India and the birth of Pakistan is one of the bloodiest sectarian violence, bloodbath, loot, rape and bone-chilling slaughter. It was witness to one of the greatest migrations in human history.

On the midnight of August 15, 1947, India’s first prime minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru addressed the nation with powerful lines “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom……..” Unfortunately, she also awoke to untold deaths and massacre, abductions, fear and displacement. The partition of Punjab remains by far the bloodiest part of Indian history, the dirtiest and scariest of all, tagging along as it did with the joy of freedom.

The division of British India into India and Pakistan led to the dislocation of between twelve and sixteen million people, a million violent deaths, and the abduction and rape of seventy-five thousand women, many of whom were then disfigured or dismembered. Families were divided, properties lost and homes destroyed. It left both countries with deep psychological and political scars.
Though the struggle for the independence of India had taken place over decades, the British authorities’ decision to grant sovereignty and ultimately to divide the country was hurried through in a matter of months. Interestingly, the person who was behind India’s partition had never seen the country. A new boundary had to be urgently drawn up and the man chosen for the task had never been east of Paris. British barrister, Sir John Radcliffe arrived in India on July 8th, with Partition only 36 days away.
Radcliff was commissioned to equitably divide 4,50,000 km sq of territory with 88 million people. With no complete information about the geography of India, he divided the two nations on the basis of maps, castes and religions.

“When they partitioned, there were probably no two countries on Earth as alike as India and Pakistan,” said Nisid Hajari, the author of “Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition.” But after partition was announced, the subcontinent descended quickly into riots and bloodshed. Hindus and Sikhs fled Pakistan, a country that would be Muslim-controlled. Muslims in modern-day India fled in the opposite direction.

Punjab and Bengal, the two provinces that were divided, were the most affected but so were other parts of the country. Mixed populations comprising of Hindus, Muslim, Sikh, Christian etc were more the norm than not in rural and urban India.
Government documents accessed by researchers provide blood-curdling details of what happened during partition, as well as alphabetical lists of the names of women who were abducted. Witnesses have said that trains crossing the new border were filled with corpses from either side. People were “cut down like carrots and radishes,” an expression often used in many Indian family stories. On the other side, they would become refugees — penniless, homeless strangers in a strange land.
Hundreds of thousands of Indians have remained trapped in their private pain, carrying the trauma of homes and families lost. The generation that witnessed the gory division, migration and the bloodbath is dwindling and those who remain are a treasure trove of that part of history that continues to define geo-political reality of the subcontinent even today.

Silence has been a way of coping that enabled the people to survive and carry on with the business of life. Many of my interviews began with people questioning the need to rake up the past. However, these are the stories of some of those who survived.

KASHMIR 1947

While some people and institutions lately have woken up to chronicle the accounts of witnesses from Punjab, there still remains an unwritten and less-discussed part of history – a parallel drama of blood and rape enacted in another state of India.
In August 1947, when India became independent, all 565 princely states had to decide whether to join the Dominion of India or Pakistan.
The princely state of Jammu and Kashmir had not decided which side to join by August 1947. Pakistan believed that J&K should belong to their side since it housed a large number of Muslims. Maharaja Hari Singh, the ruler of Jammu and Kashmir, could not decide which country to join. While he was a Hindu, his population consisted of a Muslim majority. “He therefore did nothing,” wrote Victoria Schofield, author of Kashmir in Conflict.
In the meantime, Kashmir faced invasion from Pashtun tribesmen belonging to Pakistani territory in October, 1947. Hari Singh wrote to Mountbatten, requesting intervention. Hari Singh mentioned that massive, loot, rape and destruction of life were taking place in Kashmir. Failing to maintain the law and order situation, the ruler asked for military assistance from India. “Afridis, soldiers in plain clothes, and desperadoes with modern weapons have been allowed to infilter into the State…” wrote Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, Hari Singh in a letter to Lord Mountbatten, Governor General of India, on Oct 26, 1947. “The number of women who have been kidnapped and raped makes my heart bleed,” he said.

KASHMIR 1989

Many Kashmiri Pandits who lived through and survived the bestial tribal attack and the concomitant rape and arson of 1947, relived the trauma once again in their life-time when they were driven out of their homes in 1989. The threats had been coming in for a long time, but the night of January 19, 1990, is said to have seen a demented assault of a different level. For the Kashmiri Pandits the sense of being uprooted was felt very strongly as there was a complete change in ecology and loss of status, property, and prestige. Even 28 years later, Kashmiri Pandits shiver remembering the night that forced them into exodus.
Survivors, both, of 1947 bloodbath– from Punjab and Kashmir, and the 1990 mass exodus, have moved on with their lives often to achieve greater glories. Yet it remains a story of great human pain and hardship – both at the emotional and physical level. It is also an amazing tale of supreme endurance and triumph of human spirit. Most of these people I have spoken to have not had the western luxury of going in for a therapy to get over their life-altering experiences. If they carried the wounds of a tumultuous childhood they hid them well. All the people I talked to, spoke of their past with an unbelievable level of detachment. It has left me awe-struck at the resilience of human spirit.

Some of Africa’s oldest and biggest baobab trees have abruptly died, wholly or in part, in the past decade, according to researchers.

The trees, aged between 1,100 and 2,500 years and in some cases as wide as a bus is long, may have fallen victim to climate change, the team speculated.

Read More..

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/11/giant-african-baobab-trees-die-suddenly-after-thousands-of-years