LORD SHIVA - EMBODIMENT OF GLOBAL-PEACE

NET PLAYTIME - 00:50:41
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DEDICATED, THIS PLAYLIST, ON THIS MAHA-SHIVA-RATRI, THURSDAY, MARCH 06, 2008, TO THE GLOBE.



LISTEN TO AND CHANT ALONG.

BEST OF MAHA-SHIVA-RATRI.

LOVE AND PEACE

Hinduism in Cambodia

The Majestic Angkor Wat.

“No Sultan’, ‘no Mikado, No Viceroy of India could offer his guests a comparable spectacle.”

For more refer to chapter on Greater India: Suvarnabhumi and Sacred Angkor

According to an ancient Sanskrit inscription, Cambodia was born from the water. Being the oldest Indianised state in Southeast Asia, its religion was Hinduism.

Cambodia boasts the largest temple complex in the world, named Ankor, from the Sanskrit meaning "the capital city".

It was built in the ninth century C. E. in honor of the Hindu god Lord Vishnu. The complex extends over an area more than twice the size of Manhattan and took thirty-seven years to complete.

Angkor Wat was dramatically rediscovered in 1860 by the French naturalist and explorer Henri Mouhot, 1826 -1861) a French naturalist and explorer, who exclaimed:

“It is grander than anything left us by Greece or Rome.”

"At the sight of this temple, one feels one's spirit crushed, one's imagination surpassed. One looks, one admires, and, seized with respect, one is silent. For where are the words to praise a work of art that may not have its equal anywhere on the globe? ... What genius this Michalangelo of the East had, that he was capable of concaving such a work.''

(source: Le Tour du Monde 2-1863-299).

He was staggered by his discovery. There was a city so vast and so sophisticated that it must have been built by people with an advanced knowledge of engineering, science, mathematics and art. The young Frenchman soon sent word back to Europe telling of the most beautiful lost city ever to be discovered.

The monumental scale, grandeur and beauty of Angkor justifies its reputation as one of the world’s great creations.

Mouhot wrote:

"What strikes the observer with not less admiration than the grandeur, regularity, and beauty of these majestic buildings, is the immense size and prodigious number of the blocks of stone of which they are constructed. In this temple alone are as many as 1532 columns. What means of transport, what a multitude of workmen, must this have required, seeing that the mountain out of which the stone was hewn is thirty miles distant!...."

(source: Angkor: Heart of an Asian Empire - By Bruno Dagens p. 140 -141).

Greetings:Chinese Lunar New Year

I saw this article on HindustanTimes ePaper, and thought you would find it interesting. You can find it at: 'Article/Photograph'

Here is 'A performer doing a fire-breathing stunt at a fair in China's Chongquing municipality on Friday. Chinese around the world are preparing to welcome the lunar New Year of the Pig on February 18.

My hearty wishes to all my Chinese Friends world over on this eve.

BEST OF FUTURE

HindustanTimes ePaper - Digital replica of Print Edition.

Slate Article: Ghetto Capitalism

jurisprudence
Ghetto Capitalism

Sudhir Venkatesh's new book unravels the mystery of the underground economy.

By Patrick Radden Keefe

Posted Friday, Dec. 8, 2006, at 6:07 AM ET

America's underground economy stubbornly resists reliable study or measurement. Its overall size may be anywhere from 5 percent to 10 percent of America's GDP. Estimates of annual unpaid taxes range from $200 billion to $500 billion. Even the low ballparks are high. So, why do the dynamics remain so mysterious?

One answer is that under-the-table deals are by their nature surreptitious, and whether you're paying an undocumented immigrant to rake your lawn, underreporting the money your restaurant made on a Saturday night, or dealing crack in a schoolyard, you're not likely to expound on those activities to an academic (much less an IRS investigator). It doesn't help that social scientists tend to employ the bluntest of tools. In their best-seller Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner tell the story of a grad student, Sudhir Venkatesh, who entered poor black Chicago neighborhoods armed with a wonky questionnaire while studying urban poverty in the late 1980s. The typical response to questions like, "How do you feel about being poor and black?" was so contemptuous that Venkatesh wondered whether, in addition to the multiple choice answers ranging from a) Very Bad to e) Very Good, he should perhaps have appended f) for Fuck You.

Eventually, Venkatesh jettisoned the survey and adopted a less orthodox methodology. He calls it "hanging out." He spent years in a 10-square-block neighborhood on Chicago's South Side observing the clandestine work of gangbangers and mechanics, prostitutes and pastors. The result, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, suggests that in some American neighborhoods, the underground economy is a source not just of sustenance but of order, and that while shady transactions may be illegal, they adhere to a distinctive and sophisticated set of laws.

Off the Books differs from most studies of underground economies in both scope and perspective. Venkatesh goes micro. His statistics are based on tiny areas: Only two of the 21 families on one residential block are traditional nuclear families; only 10 percent of the shop owners along one commercial strip have good credit. Eschewing the objective distance often prized in the social sciences, he gains the trust of the people he is hanging out with, sometimes by mediating their disputes. (He's a little sheepish about this, saying he remains "not entirely comfortable" with his involvement.)

On that one residential block, Venkatesh focuses on three women: Bird, a prostitute; Eunice, an office cleaner who sells home-cooked meals on the side; and Marlene, a nanny who is president of the block's neighborhood association. (All the names in the book are pseudonyms.) The women share tart observations about their respective livelihoods: Bird thinks gangsters should "let the pimps show them how to run a business." Through them, we come to meet a diverse cast of locals, "nearly all linked together," Venkatesh writes, "in a vast, often invisible web that girded their neighborhood. This web was the underground economy."

Licit and illicit economies tend to be entwined, and in a closely knit urban neighborhood, this mutual dependence means that public-minded civilians and hardened criminals are regularly forced to negotiate. In the spring of 2000, an entrepreneurial gang leader, Big Cat, was elevating the criminal activity in a local park. Marlene and a preacher, Pastor Wilkins, arranged a tense summit with the kingpin in a church basement. Venkatesh talked his way into the room and watched as Big Cat agreed to stop peddling drugs in the park during after-school hours. For this concession, Pastor Wilkins promised to persuade a nearby store owner to allow Big Cat's gang to deal in his parking lot, and Marlene agreed to ask the cops to leave the dealers unmolested in their new location.

"I can't figure out who's crazier," Big Cat chuckles, once the deal is struck. "Me, or you niggers."

The people in Off the Books are struggling, and their many informal transactions represent a kind of adaptive strategy —and often an indigenous social safety net. Private property is a luxury in the neighborhood, so for $300 a pop, a restaurant doubles as a gambling hall on the weekends; prostitutes use the back room of the dollar store; the currency exchange sells fake Social Security cards obtained by a local pastor. All of this gives new meaning to the urban planning notion of "mixed use."

Similarly, neighborhood residents get around bad credit by borrowing what money they need within the community. Debts aren't always repaid with money. Venkatesh charts the degree to which promises and payments in kind substitute for cash. Small businesses give homeless people a place to sleep in exchange for food because it's cheaper than paying a night watchman; a prostitute and a grocer transact business without ever opening their wallets. Leroy, a mechanic, eventually gets rid of his cash register, because "his customers seemed unable to pay with our nation's legal tender."

In his efforts to demonstrate that this shadow economy is anything but the desperate Hobbesian scramble an outsider might assume, Venkatesh can at times sound like Jane Jacobs extolling the civic merits of Manhattan's West Village. "Beneath the closed storefronts, burned-out buildings, potholed boulevards, and empty lots, there is an intricate, fertile web of exchange, tied together by people with tremendous human capital and craftsmanship," he writes. In this view, even Big Cat is a "stakeholder" in the neighborhood, with an interest in seeing norms adhered to and order preserved. "It's not a crack house," as an old Onion headline had it. "It's a crack home."

But these very bonds of mutual dependence that hold the neighborhood together can breed severe dysfunction and seriously compromise pillars of the licit establishment. Eunice, who sells soul food for a living, pays a teacher $20 a week to let her grandchildren out of school to make deliveries. Cops take bribes and enforce justice selectively.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Venkatesh's account is the role of neighborhood ministers. Clergy resolve disputes, but they don't do it for free. Numerous ministers accept "contributions" from gangs and drug dealers for their services. They take other forms of payment, as well; Bird, the prostitute, has serviced "most of the preachers in this community." Other ministers have been known to hide guns, drugs, and stolen property for a fee. Nannies rely on preachers for referrals to families but must pay a 10 percent commission. The residents are unshocked by all of this. They conclude that it would be impossible to navigate the community without making certain allowances. "We are poor people. And so are our ministers," one congregant says. "We need [a minister] to be our leader, not perfect or without sin."

If Venkatesh sometimes marvels at the ingenuity of the people he writes about, he does not overlook the essentially tragic nature of the story he is telling. The depredations of daily life mean that for many residents, what Venkatesh calls the "perceptual horizon" does not extend beyond the neighborhood. Sadder still, it doesn't reach beyond the struggles of the day to day. Bird, Eunice, and Marlene each envision a leisurely future of comfortable retirement. But none is clear on precisely when and how that future will come to pass. In the meantime, they hustle to get by, and the hustle means relying on one another. "You have to do things shady," one local businessman tells Venkatesh. "Well, maybe not shady like committing a crime, but shady like you depend on each other."

Patrick Radden Keefe, a fellow at the Century Foundation, is the author of Chatter, which is just out in paperback.

Illustration by Robert Neubecker.

Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

My initial comments:

A book review of an inside-story of American Economy.

Note the INDIAN connection and the author's power of sense in smelling, be it a rat, or a pork !

Do you smell any; since "BEAUTY lies in the eyes of the BEHOLDER" !!

BEST OF FUTURE.

=gazebo=

Tomorrow's 'Dawn' : Peaceful-World-Order: Do Aspiritations Boost !

It has been my constant edeavour to look out for news/views worth-sharing with my 'Blogger-Brethrens'. This is one such article by Samar Dahmash Jarrah from the Middle East Times, that is posted here, with my comments.

'The Tryst Of The Providence', is what everyone must understand at this confusing but crucial hour of 'Time', that we all are finding stranded at, a puzzling cross-road,bewildered definitely !

This is an important article that must reverberate loud and clear in the sky, the 'Canopy', under which we all, irrespective of religion, creed and caste are nurtured with all the cares and resources, that the 'Mother-Nature' provides, for a peaceful co-existence with Universal Brotherhood !!

The sooner the changes , the better will it be, for our most adored 'gen-next'.

BEST OF FUTURE !!!

N.B:= [Samar Dahmash Jarrah is an American Arab Muslim woman writer who lives in Florida, USA. She is the author of the book : Arab Voices Speak to American Hearts, published in May 2005 by Olive Branch books.]

For more great articles, visit us at http://www.metimes.com

Copyright (c) 2006 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.

TIME

This Blogsite is created, this day, when The PEARL HARVOUR is commemorated with Pride and Honour. And as the first of my 'Conscience-Baby' goes out seeking the Nurture and Care of the 'Blogosphere' community of the Globe, I am but, 'OBLIVIOUS' in my Utopia !

TIME is as always the preacher,teaching us lessons for the 'new-born' of the future. History is TIME of the past.This moment of TIME shall nurture that 'new-born', instill in her all the 'Disciplines' that shall ensure that she is born 'Free'.

"The power to observe law rigidly is the basis of freedom;therefore in most disciplines the soul has to endure and fulfil the law in its lower members before it can rise to the perfect freedom of its divine being.Those disciplines which begin with freedom are only for the mighty ones who are naturally free or in former lives have founded their freedom."
=Sri Aurobindo= (M.C.W., Vol. 10, p. 257)

However; insanity still is unaware that it's present rule over freedom is all but a temporary phenomenon; only transitory.The 'mighty ones' may seem a few but remember they are the 'blessed ones' and part of the 'Devine Being' hence are 'invincible'.

Sanity shall and will conquer over the insanity. TRUTH SHALL PREVAIL AND MAN SHALL BE BORN FREE and without being in chains. Insanes will remain but remain everywhere in chains and cast away from the soceity.

Let not 'the evil' over-power our mind.Let's not fight against and lament over our failure in lost battles against the present rule.

Let us all pursue that 'our souls can achieve the height of that, perfect freedom' of "Divine Being".

TIME is SUPREME.

"Wait; Watch and Pray" for that TIME; waiting for it's DIVINE BIRTH !!!

=Cool Links=

The University Of Tomorrow

Sri Aurobindo Society