SUMMER TIME’S FLOWERING TREES BLOOMING OVER PREMATURELY IN SPRING TIME…. Mango trees in bloom and fruit in March, African Tulips, Labanums, Queens flower can be seen in full bloom currently around Panaji.
DON’T know if you notice such thing or not my dears but I do! This year it was not yet March and the mango trees were in profuse bloom and some already showing baby mangoes. Now in mid-April it is still spring time with spring time festivities in the air – but the flowering trees of summer are already abloom full steam ahead as if it is May- June summer time festival of flowering trees in Panaji. Although where I stay in a rental currently in which the fancy air-conditioners don’t work (I dare not complain to the landlady in case she tells me to pack up and leave!) it’s steaming hot especially at night when I close windows so that mossies don’t come in…it’s an unusually hard summer with even the shiny tiles underfoot warm and sticky.
What to do! I feel oven hot inside and outside although I always prefer to be outside forever. My early morning ride out to the Panaji market offers picturesque scenes of blooming over laburnums, African tulip trees, queen’s flower tree, rain trees — I stopped before a rare to see Sita’s ashoka tree bending down graciously in bunches of orange-red spiky flowers. Trees are my prayer shrines, what would we do for inspiration to live if there were no trees offering us coolness, oxygen, water, beauty, flowers, fruit, home to so many creatures of the wild…best inspiration to stay alive somehow?
And to think we don’t even know how to look after our trees in public, except that if they are public mango trees you may see the migrant children raiding them for green mangoes, likewise with the odd tamarind or guava or wax apples tree! Why not? What other fun can urban kids have on the streets of capital city Panaji which is currently witnessing such an upheaval of roadworks, mindboggling scenes with hillocks of sand, rubble and water pipe bursts here, there. Mind you all these road works are to impress VVIP and VIP heads of state and delegates of the G20 meets beginning in Panaji five-star venues come Monday, April 17, 2023!
In India we don’t think there is the slightest need to impress citizens first. It is more important to impress visiting bureaucrats and heads of state. Such ironic times we are living in.
BOOKS, FILMS, FRIENDS
I’M returning to my old pass-time of education and pleasure reading books in hand anew and with the Punjabi community being wished a happy Baisakhi by the government — I thought I would read up something about the Sikh community. Apart from the fact that these days I’m re-reading Khushwant Singh and Vinod Mehta, both from the Punjab which was before pre-Partition. Both write without hyperbole and flowery deception and have their finger on the pulse of life and living, and I always say some kind of non-fiction is vastly amusing and educative than tomes of mind-twisting verbose literature.
If you want to understand the Sikh community you cannot not read Khushwant Singh. Apart from being the famous editor of the erstwhile “The Illustrated Weekly of India,” he was the country’s much-loved and reviled prolific columnist, and also a serious student of Sikhism – check him out for his award-winning bestseller “Train to Pakistan” (1955), “I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale” (1959), short-story collection “A Bride for the Sahib” (1967) and such non-fiction reads as “Good People, Bad People” (1977).
As far back as 1966 his two-volume “History of the Sikhs” was published and has gone into several editions, as most of his books have. The Sikh history volumes are considered the most authoritative writing on the subject. Other books to get you your hands on are “Sex, Scotch & Scholarship” and “Need for a New Religion in India and Other Essays” – I haven’t read all the KS books although for some reason I want to read them in a hurry now before I’m also gone with the wind!
Khushwant Singh has a ring of truth about his writings which may be agreeable or disagreeable depending on our various ways of thinking…I mean, life is so mostly full of hypocrisy, lies, cheating and stealing and afterwards the clever cover-ups to present saintly facades, if you know what I mean. His writing is saying it as it is and there’s no beating about the bush, his stories of real life encounters very often poignant to read. At the moment I have his “Women & Men in My Life” in hand wherein he offers close-up insight into the life and times of his various famous and not-so famous friends, who counted for something in his life good, bad or ugly.
I would say Khushwant Singh’s life was one very well worth living! Since I’d met him fleetingly a couple of while I was a minor journalist in Mumbai that was Bombay in the 1970s/80s/90s when 30 long years just flew by…he still lives in my mind vividly (along with a few more), he is one my most “unputdownable” Indian authors. Half-the-time I don’t understand today’s young generation of writers, what they are writing about, mostly extravagant kitch prose mundane and badly imagined, often with shades of Mills & Boons novels of Victorian times or worse! I’m generalizing here, okay.
I’d rather re-read Charles Dickens, George Orwell, D H Lawrence, Gerald Durrell, H E Bates all over again…and a few more. Or Khushwant Singh, Vinod Mehta, Behram Contractor in his Busybee persona! Books, films and friends – these we must have to make life worth living, or forget it.
THE VACCINE STORY
MOVING on to something else. The story of government mandated vaccines have become such a vile bone of contention in the US of A that we in India would do well to take a call on it and view paediatrician Lawrence Palevsky (MD) award-winning documentary “The Greater Good.” You will learn what all goes into a vaccine from mercury to aluminium, formaldehyde, antibiotics, preservatives like polys and perhaps understand why the vaccine debate is hotly debated by mothers, doctors, and concerned groups. The documentary puts together stories of families whose lives have been changed by the excessive vaccines given to children in the USA to compromise their budding immune system.
This quote courtesy Chris Shaw, PhD, neuroscientific research specialist: “Recently we’ve been looking at aluminium, which is common to many vaccines. It’s used as an adjuvant. That means `helper.’ Without the aluminium , the vaccine basically does not provide any long-term protection ad so my research has looked at injectable aluminium and how it might impact the nervous system.
“The difference between injectable aluminium versus dietary aluminium is that aluminium that you eat is excreted fairly rapidly. Injectable aluminium, however, is meant to stick around and that’s precisely why it is there in the first place. That’s what an adjuvant does. So we simply did the really simple experiment of taking the same stuff out of the vaccine, the aluminium hydroxide, and injecting it into mice, into the muscles to see what would happen if we tried to mimic the vaccine schedule.
“We were quite surprised to see how rapidly the behavioural symptoms emerged. They showed not only behavioural deficits and motor function, but they ultimately showed cognitive deficits as well. And once we sacrificed the animals and started looking inside their brains and spinal cords, we found massive damage to motor neurons, and so we may be creating the conditions for Parkinsons’ disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease. Maybe not immediately, but maybe 20, 30, 40 years down the road.”
Go read up some more. Don’t let anyone pump your children with vaccines or for that matter even your seniors and yourself included. There’s other ways to safeguard and boost your immune system naturally without doing business with a government’s mandatory nonsense. Catch up with “The Greater Good” documentary if you can. The filmmakers explore the issue of vaccines with regard to parenting, modern medicine and individual rights versus governmental mandates.
ON that note it’s avjo, selamat datang, poiteverem, au revoir, arrivedecci, hasta la vista and vachun yeta here for now. Be sure to drop in at the two-day mega fabulous Cashew Festival happening at the Parade grounds down Campal promenade on Saturday evening, it’s organized by the Goa Forest Development Corporation, with Poriem MLA Divya Rane, GFDC chairperson, taking a special interest in it. She would like to revive cashew orchards in Goa as also get more people around the world to take a shine to Goa’s very own cashew liquor of feni or fenny which has already acquired GI certification thanks to the Vaz brothers, namely Hanzel and Mac. Actually, feni cocktails are all the rage now, go drink a few on the rocks at the upcoming caju festival!
–Mme Butterfly