Om Namah Shivaya

Om Namah Shivaya

I'll be grateful if you...

Apr 30, 2013

STILL LIFE: Most famous Sun Temple - Konark

KONARK - A Journey ... 
It has been a pleasure to see the amazing temple architecture and sculptures at the most famous Sun Temples of India, known as Konark temple. I am sharing some of my interesting images and as well as my impressions from my visit there.

THE TEMPLE:
Konark Sun Temple is a 13th century Sun Temple (also known as the Black Pagoda). The temple is one of the most renowned temples in India and is a World Heritage Site. Legend has it that the temple was constructed by Samba, the son of Lord Krishna. It is said that Samba was afflicted by leprosy, brought about by his father’s curse on him. After 12 years of penance, he was cured by Surya, the Sun God, in whose honor he built the magnificent Konark Sun Temple. (Text curtsy Wikipedia).
To know more details about the temple, please click here... 

Amazing Konark Temple...

... inspired by amazing and sensuous sculptures all around Konark Temple walls...
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Love is echo of
Temple bells; To hear sound of
Silence; Eternal wait
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The magnificent entrance to the Konark Temple
 
  The early morning view of the Konark Temple from one of the sides.

A World Heritage Site


  Sensuous and expressive...

Amazing sensuality, nowhere else seen in the world

The Stone panel and the temple architecture is iconic...

The morning sunrise on the way to 
Konark Temple

A Tribal Woman - bathing in the beach near the temple

I wanted to end this visual story of a visit to Konark Temple with the smile of this beautiful tribal woman at the sea beach ..
I hope you all have enjoyed this journey through images...

__
Shashi
नमः शिवाय
Om Namah Shivaya

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STILL LIFE - JAGESHWAR

Apr 24, 2013

HAIKU TEA : Session III - Drifting Apart

FINAL LINKED VERSE - SESSION III
HaikuTea - April 2013 (15 Collaborators)
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WHAT ARE HAIKU TEA SESSIONS?

If you write, love collaborative writing, enthusiast of poetry and enjoy writing short verse like Haiku, Tanka, Renga, Renshi etc, then Haiku Tea sessions are for you... (Click here to join in for the Session III) Some weeks back I have had created a group on Google Plus for Haiku enthusiasts and through a suggestion of one of the friends, I started Linked Verse Sessions known as 'HaikuTea' on the lines of traditional Japanese style of public collaboration of writing poetry, where were quite popular in ancient Japan and China. These HaikuTea session at the group is getting to be quite popular in the group and the result - The Final Verse of 19 poets linked verse is for you to judge about the excellent quality of work these session produce... each one with their color and hue, paint the canvass of the emotions, feelings and thoughts in brilliant shades... Loved it.

The poets who are linked in these sessions are through invites only. If you are interested to be invited, please leave a comment on this link, (Click Here) with your concurrence AFTER READING THE RULES OF COLLABORATION.... 

The HaikuTea Session IV starts on 29th April.

The previous two session was wonderful and will be published in various blogs, forums by the members as well as will be printed as a collection by end of the year...

Now the final collection of verses by the 15 amazing poets is given below and their name's and links provided next to their lines...




DRIFTING TOGETHER

Drifting apart life, 
Memories float under bridge
Where riverbanks meet?                         +Shashi S 
Balanced reveries across 
Sunset Nirvāṇa.                                      +Berteena Gaines 
Are you awake or dreaming?
Only Buddha knows                                +Harley King 
Where the ashes of past lives
Drift, to their karma.                                +Gabri Rigotti  
they rise in treaty with gods
who never answered                               +Joe Nicholas  

Torn faith fleeting, feelings frayed.
Expectations spent.                                +jamer nicholls 
pockets empty, homeward trudge
red-sun silhouettes                                 +Carolyn St.Charles 
For love-dreaming lovers, dark!
Come to their dreaming                        +craig volney 
Promise of eternity
Wrapped in each other                          +John Belchamber 
Moments become memories
Frozen in the seconds                           +Tammy Wright

Sad smile, hiding a secret
Love lost in the flow                                +Francis JA 
Gone.  All Gone.  Supremely Gone
To the other side                                    +Jim Williams 
i follow hope, feet fearful -
the slack line trembles                           +Naomi Madelin 
Contemplation, Line pulls taut
Decision made...walk                            +A. M. Frasier 
Back to spiritual life,
Together again                                    +Steve Yagyagan 


To participate in this next collaborative poetry @ HaikuTea, please read the simple rules below… 

RULES OF PARTICIPATION
1) This is invite only effort, so you need to get invited. So leave a comment below to be invited.
2) You will have to have a Google Plus account and have to be a member of the Group Haiku at Google Plus
3) Once you are invited, you will be given a chronicle order, on the basis of your joining. You will have to write your linked verse, after a particular member which will be listed out on the HaikuTea page at the group.
4) At your turn you will have to write within 24 hours your own linked verse.
5) The linked verse have to have the first line as the last line of the previous linked verse and rest of the two lines you will have to create on your own.
6) You will have to follow the short form of poetry, preferably in the 5-7-5 Syllable format.
7) If, for any reason, you are not able to write your own verse within 24 hours, the next person in the order will be free to write his / her own verse, within 24 hours… and so on.
8) Each HaikuTea linked verses will go on till every member of the group has finished writing one of his/her own or if the linked verse has gone beyond 100 linked verses or a particular time limit which will be decided by the moderator of the HaikuTea.
9) The compilation of the individual verses will be done at the end by a person nominated by the moderator and/or the members.
10) Final decision on this collaboration is with the moderator.
PLEASE NOTE: You agree, by participating for this collaborative poetry HaikuTea Sessions, to be published in various blogs by the members (with due credit to each individual participating) as well as a final collection to be printed by end of the year. Look forward to your joining in the team…. Please click here to join HaikuTea....
Let me know if you have any questions.

To participate in the ongoing Session IV at Haiku Tea, please click here...

__
Shashi
नमः शिवाय
Om Namah Shivaya

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HaikuTea Session II Final Verse

Apr 22, 2013

STILL LIFE: Revenge Of Mother Earth - Earth Day

Wake up call on Earth Day
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Famously Ex Vice President and Noble Laureate Al Gore started a debate on sustainability some years back and the need to have more forest cover and limit green house gases actively, so that the Next Gen can actually live... But slowly the deluge of media hype around it died down to a trickle and now we hear about it some times, on special day like today - Known as Earth Day


Revenge Of Mother Earth @ Worli, Mumbai
I have been interested in the sustainability project for decades and started using bicycle to go to office on week ends (Yes, most professional Indians go to office on Saturday and some times on Sundays unlike other counterparts across the globe)... but the things are still not changing the way it should i.e. actively. So here is one little step to create an awareness about it and pledge to be more Green Conscious in times to come...

To begin with we have a beautiful planet earth...


Planet Earth (IMG Curtsy Internet - FreeExtras)
But we are striving very hard, collectively of course, to become like our nearest heavenly body ASAP...


Moon @ 2013
Recently I have been to some beautiful place in Himalaya... like Jageshwar...

Jageshwar @ 2012
And I believe that's the way, our planet should look like ...

But then I have also visited Shimla (The most beautiful Hill resort, so much preferred by British Rulers that they made it into Summer Capital of India) last year and was shocked to see beautiful green Himalayan peak tops changed into coarse dirty roof tops...


Shimla @ 2012
...and the progress of modernity is moving along on slow but steady road roller ride... The forests are denuded without any remorse and if some trees are left, they are left 'raped and deflowered' like this one on the another hill side of Shimla...


Shimla @ 2012
But I think Mother Earth will not take it lying down...Sooner or later, she will rise up and engulf all that is plaguing her beautiful face... 


Mumbai @ 2012
And there are still some amazing warriors left, who do make the difference in their own small or big way... 


The Man who made a forest in Assam India

Jadav Payeng is an environmental activist and forestry worker from Jorhat, Assam, India. He upgraded a chapori of the river Brahmaputra to a reserve forest with a total area of the forest is about 1000 hectares. To know more about him, click here...



Well all is not lost, because even businessmen in their day to day life of making money, like Felix Denis, want to do something for the Planet Earth. Over the last ten years, he has established a young forest of native deciduous trees, covering one thousand acres with approximately 600,000 saplings planted to date. Click here to know more about him...

Hope on this Earth Day, today, we think about the place where we live in and do something to sustain and secure Earth for the Next Generation... 


__
Shashi
नमः शिवाय
Om Namah Shivaya


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STILL LIFE - JAGESHWAR

Apr 13, 2013

'What's The Fuss' about Google Plus?

I have had joined Google Plus actively almost a year ago and believe me, I had a hard time from the beginning to understand and master it.  But then I happen to come across an amazing book, that Guy Kawasaki wrote about Google Plus for the 'Rest of Us' in his book "What The Plus" and I was hooked on. It's more fun than any social media I have been involved with (3 Years on FB and Twitter (@VerseEveryDay) with more than 7K followers, blogging with 225K hits). 

Learned amazing stuff from the book and honed my skills on the Google + and this is an attempt to share with you all some great tools to move over to Google Plus. Over to Guy Kawasaki and his thoughts from the book…

About the Author
Guy Kawasaki is the author of eleven books, including Enchantment, Reality Check, The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way. He is also the co-founder of Alltop and a founding partner at Garage Technology Ventures. Previously, he was the chief evangelist of Apple. Kawasaki has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA, as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.

Currently, he is also an advisor to Motorola.

THOUGHTS FROM THE BOOK: WHAT THE PLUS BY GUY KAWASAKI
Click here to buy...
Preface
The year 1987 was the last time I wrote a book about a product (The Macintosh Way). After using Google+ for a few months, I felt the need to write another prod­uct-oriented book. This book explains “what the plus” makes Google+ as special as Macintosh. My goals are to help you to derive as much joy and value from Google+ as I do and that we can make Google+ tip.
My prediction is that Google+ will not only tip, but it will exceed Facebook and Twitter.

Why I Love Google+

More than 1,000,000 people follow me on Twitter, and 250,000 people subscribe to my Facebook account, so I’m not a newbie to social media. Like many people, I need another social-media service like I need more e-mail or my dog to throw up on my carpet.

I spend two hours a day on Google+ because it’s enjoyable and good for my brand as a writer, speaker, and start up -company adviser. Or, more truthfully, Google+ is so enjoyable that I rationalize that it’s good for my brand.

Do you want to enhance and expand the number of people who share your passions and interact with them via posts and comments? If you do, focus on Google+. If you don’t, stick with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn until Google+ reaches critical mass. If you just want to have fun posting pictures of cool stuff, use Pinterest.

How to Get Started
There are a plethora of ways to find cool people who share your sensibilities and passions on Google+. You may not know these people or have even heard of them before, but they (and you) will make Google+ interesting. Spend a few minutes finding people, and you’ll reap hours of enjoyment in return.

How to Master Circles and Streams
Circles are one of the most important Google+ concepts because they enable you to segment your relationships on the service. This means you can fine-tune the stream of content that you consume as well as determine what content people receive from you. Tweaking your circles is a good investment to optimize your Google+ experience.

How to Make an Enchanting Profile
Your profile photo is usually the first thing people see about you, and people being people, they’ll make an instant judgment. You may think these tips about profile photo are “duh-isms,” but I see crappy profile photos every day.
Show your face.
Your Google+ profile is your résumé, a sales pitch, and a window into your soul. Many people don’t even add a profile photo or fill out the information. It’s one of the primary ways that people will judge you on Google+, so spend an hour or two to make it enchanting.

How to Comment
Now that you've found interesting people to follow, created an enchanting profile, and honed your trustworthiness, the next step is to make a dent in the Google+ universe by posting comments. This will enable you to:
Provide positive feedback to the author of a post.
Help the author and readers of posts.
Express a difference of opinion with the author and other commenters.
Interact with influencers, authorities, and leaders who probably wouldn’t answer your e-mail if you wrote them one.
Increase the value of the post with additional information and insights.
Position yourself as an interesting and credible person worth circling.
Find new people to circle.
One-word comments are OK, but you’ve got a lot of space so why not let it rip and show more emotion?

As a guest, you should show a high level of civility and class and behave in the following ways:
Create value.
Stay on topic.
Show some class. Refrain from profanity and the big three “isms”: racism, sexism, and ageism.
Limit arguments to three rounds. The best (and worst) interactions often occur between commenters. It’s enchanting to watch strangers develop relationships and take posts in deeper and serendipitous (albeit related) directions. That’s the good news. The bad news is that commenters sometimes get into knock-down fights and post mean-spirited comments that they would never utter in person.
How to Share Posts
Be brief.
Edit. Hallelujah! On Google+ you can edit a post after you’ve shared it—unlike Facebook and Twitter.
Provide a link to the source.
Use the active voice. “Apple announced a new iPhone today” is more powerful than “A new iPhone was announced by Apple today.” Brevity and the active voice are two sides of the same coin.
Include a photo, photo album, or video. Every post should contain some “eye candy.”
Organize with bulleted and numbered lists. If you’re going longer than four paragraphs, use a bulleted or numbered list
Stylize your text. Google+ enables you to do a tiny amount of styl­izing if you put certain characters on both sides of your text. They are bold (asterisk on each side: *your text*), italics (underscore on each side: _your text_), and strikethrough (hyphen on each side: -your text-).
Add a hashtag.
Post regularly. Share a post at least once a day.
Give credit.
Share when your audience is awake
Repeat your posts. My tweets are repeated four times, eight hours apart.

The Tao of Responses
Have fun. By responding to comments, you can transcend “pushing” and “broadcasting” and engage in an actual two-way conversation.
Clean the pool. Deleting and reporting are a kind of response too.
Respond fast. You should respond within two hours of posting because few people read and comment on posts that are much older than that
Think Twitter, not War and Peace. Resist the temptation to answer comments on a point-by-point basis. Just synthesize the gist of the comment and respond to either the major point or the point you want to respond to. If someone asks five questions, this doesn’t mean you need to write five answers.
Consider the total audience.
Stay positive
Ignore orifices. You can pretend you never saw a disagreeable comment. There’s so much action on Google+ that people are never sure if you’ve seen their comment. Plus, ignoring a comment may irk the orifice more than if you responded in an argumentative way.
Agree to disagree.
Smoke ’em. On the other hand, you’ll find instances where a comment is so outrageously racist, misogynist, or biased that the right thing to do is bury the person. This rarely happens—again, I get about two hundred comments per day, and I tell people off about once a month.
Remember that your posts are your swimming pool. You can do anything that you want. If you don’t like profanity, delete. If you don’t like bigotry, delete. If you don’t like sexism, delete. The goal is building and maintaining an enchanting presence—not exemplifying free speech.

How to Hang Out and How to Chat
Google+ hangouts blow away what you can do on Facebook and Twitter. It’s one of those “enabling technologies” that people can use to “let a hundred flowers blossom.” If you’re feeling like a Google+ evangelist, you could use hangouts as a kind of Trojan Horse by telling your friends to just use hangouts and to stick with Facebook and Twitter for everything else. Soon you’ll be seeing a lot more of them on Google+.

How to Get More Followers
There are two kinds of people on social networks: those who want more followers and those who are lying. (Social-media “experts” hate when I say this because they don’t have many followers.) Let’s be honest: gaining more followers is the acid test of social media because it shows whether you are interesting, intelligent, and cool.

Ways to Attract More Followers
Perfect your profile.
Share good shiitake. Life is simple: share good stuff, people will spread the word, and you’ll get more followers.
Share in public.
Add the Google+ badge to your website and blog.
Compile a thematic circle.
Help people.
Make meaningful comments.
Respond to comments in your posts. Respond to 100 percent of the comments that require answers.
+Mention others. Always use a +mention when referring to anyone else on Google+
Give credit.
Invite people to join.
Participate in hangouts. On February 10, 2012, approximately 100 Google+ members met up in person in New York City. Most of them didn’t know one another six months earlier. Hangouts brought them together—the event was even called NYC HIRL (Hangouts In Real Life). Try hanging out to make new friends and add followers.
Help Google+. If I were not on the Google+ list of suggested people to follow, I would not have nearly the number of followers that I do. To get on this list, you have to be a huge celebrity or a big help to Google+—or both. I can’t help you become a celebrity, but I can explain how to help Google+: deliver new members, content, and street cred. If you do this, you might get on the list too. That’s the only reason I’m on this list.

While I don’t advocate an obsession with the number of people who follow you on Google+, it is a useful indicator of the quality of your participation. Generally, the more followers you have, the more rich and rewarding your Google+ experience, so try a few of the methods I’ve explained in this chapter.

___________
Hope you will find this post interesting and will switch over to Google Plus more actively to bring about more social media klout to your online presence.
__
Shashi
नमः शिवाय
Om Namah Shivaya


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The Art of Start -Guy Kawasaki

Apr 12, 2013

How To Write A Book? - A Serious Guide for Aspiring Authors


How to write novels and books…
I have read Milan Kundera’s (Czech Republic's most recognized living writer, who has lived in exile in France since 1975, who has been nominated numerous time for Noble Prize) most famous book ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ almost two decades ago. And then recently I came across his two other books ‘Testament Betrayed’ and ‘TheArt of Novel’, which I have been reading last week. Interestingly, both the books were kind of a powerful DIY of ‘Novel Writing’ which gave me an idea to create a kind of Guide for “Writing novels” for the aspiring authors based on his selected thoughts from both the books.
Milan Kundera
Image Curtsy http://www.larepubblicadellelettere.it

I hope this will help and inspire serious writers and aspiring authors to reflect on their art of writing and help in creating a master piece.

ON WRITING BOOKS

What is a Novel?
 “A book is product of a self, other than the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices. The writer’s true self is manifested in his books alone” - Proust

And Milan Kundera (MK) says in the Book - The book of Laughter and Forgetting, through one of his character, Banaka, “You know the novel is fruit of human illusion. The illusion of the power to understand others. But what do we know of one another? …all anyone can do is give a report on oneself… anything else is a lie”

“…every one dreams of writing a book to tell about his unique and inimitable self,… no one listens to any one else, everyone writes, and each of them writes the way rock is danced to: alone, for himself, focused on himself yet making the same motions as all the others”.

Click here to read more...
But somehow I tend to agree more with MK’s thought from his book ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ that the novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become. As MK says that a novel is often nothing but a long quest for some elusive definitions, which for some reason I believe is what an aspiring author is searching for, if not an established writer. 

According to a well known metaphor, the novelist demolishes the house of his life and uses its bricks to construct another house: that of his novel. And the aspiring author has this junoon (Passion) to do that over and over again, through each one of their attempts to share their dream house. Though, as MK relates in Testament Betrayed, “…every one dreams of writing a book to tell about his unique and inimitable self,… no one listens to anyone else, everyone writes, and each of them writes the way rock (music) is danced to: alone, for himself, focused on himself yet making the same motions as all the others”

How To Write A Novel?
MK advises that the composition (the architectural organization of work) should not be seen as some pre-existent matrix, loaned to an author for him to fill out with invention; the composition should itself be an invention, an invention that engages all the author’s originality. The novel “Life Is Elsewhere” was begun with this working hypothesis, a definition I (MK) set down in my notebook: “The poet is a young man whose mother leads him to display himself to a world he cannot enter.”

Click here to read more..
(Nowadays) novel is too much weighed down by technique”, by the conventions that do the author’s work for him: present a character, describe a milieu, bring the action into a historical situation, fill time in the character’s lives with superfluous episodes; each shift of scene calls for new exposition, description, explanation. MK’s own imperative is “Janacekian”: to rid the novel of the automatism of novelistic technique, of novelistic verbalism; to make it dense.

‘Making a character “alive” means: getting to the bottom of his existential problem. Which in turn means: getting to the bottom of some situation, some motifs, even some words that shape him. Nothing more’. And MK goes on to share a valuable technique of Kafka, for aspiring authors...

“Because apprehending the real world is part of the definition of the novel: but how to both apprehend it and at the same time engage in an enchanting game of fantasy? How be rigorous in analyzing the world and at the same time be irresponsibly free at playful reveries. How to bring these two incompatible purposes together? Kafka managed to solve this enormous puzzle. He cut a breach in the wall of plausibility (Not in order to escape the real world – the way romantics did, but to apprehend it better); the breach through which many others followed him, each in his own way: Fellini, Marquez, Fuentes, Rushdie…  and other, others”

Theme – The Wisdom of the Novel
According to MK, “A theme is an existential inquiry. And increasingly I realize that such an inquiry is, finally, the examination of certain words, theme-words. Which leads me to emphasize: A novel is based primarily on certain fundamental words… In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the row (words) goes: Forgetting, Laughter, Angels, Litost, Border. Over the course of the novel, those five principal words are analyzed, studies, defined, redefined and thus transformed into categories of existence. The pillars of The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Weight, Lightness, soul, body, the grand march, shit, kitsch, compassion, vertigo, strength, weakness”.

Click here to read more..
“When Tolstoy sketched the first Draft of Anna Karenina, Anna was a most unsympathetic woman, and her tragic end was entirely deserved and justified. The final version of the novel is very different, but I (MK) do not think his moral ideas changed in the meantime; I would say, rather, that in the course of writing, he was listening to another voice that that of his personal moral conviction. He was listening to what I would like to call the wisdom of the novel. Every true novelist listens for that supra-personal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.

And in the End…
Milan Kundera (MK) gives some great tips on creating a master piece…

All great works (precisely because they are great) contain something un-achieved.

When you reach the end of a book you should still find it possible to remember the beginning. Otherwise the novel loses shape; its “architectonic clarity” is clouded.

Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.

And the best thought … that I personally loved reading…
Every novel, like it or not, offers some answer to the question: What is human existence, and wherein does poetry lie?

Hope you have liked this Guide to Writing Novel... leave a comment, if you like, so that I can share more of my books and Help Guides... 
__
Shashi
नमः शिवाय
Om Namah Shivaya


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Understanding Haiku - A Beginner's Guide          The English Teacher - R K Narayan
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