Revealing the Face of Another: Teaching Religion in a Pluralistic World
By David M. Freedholm
The largest threat to religious diversity today is the intolerance and hatred for others that stems from a lack of genuine understanding of and empathy towards religious traditions other than our own. This can be seen all too clearly in the violence that we are witness to in the world right now. How do we promote the genuine, empathetic understanding of religious paths that differ from ours? This can only happen if all of us take seriously the responsibility of fairly and sympathetically portraying the religious beliefs and traditions of others. We must ask ourselves - how do we reveal the face of another?
How do we attain an understanding that transcends the intellect and enters deeply and truly into the true nature of another? The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh suggests that right interreligious understanding begins with oneself. As he says, "Our capacity to make peace with another person and with the world depends very much on our capacity to make peace with ourselves." When we have looked deeply into ourselves to understand the conflicting elements inside ourselves and their causes, we can begin to achieve peace of mind and spirit. MORE
Childhood Memories
By Vinod Sangwan
Peeling off layers
of years over ancient times
I reached down to the core of a strange innocence
Wrapped as a jewel in childhood memories, thence
I picked up my pen to paint that picture in rhymes.
I thought of sparrow's
chirruping in autumn noon,
Of cuckoo's warble in the month of June,
Spring evenings spent by swinging on swings,
Cool eastern wind that first monsoon rain brings,
Sand blowing with wind over undulating sand moulds,
Rainbow rising from behind lead-colored clouds,
Cold clear dews drenching early morn,
Scarlet sky before the sun is born,
First chilly wind of winter that flew
Over corn fields rippled in golden hue,
Clouds of dust floating behind cattle in herds,
Rustic evenings announced by home-returning birds.
I remembered my
utter distress the day she wasn't in school,
Later finding her catching fire-flies in plastic bag near the pool,
Her silly giggle showing hollows of missing milk-teeth,
Her treasure of shinning stones and water-melon seeds,
Of our curling in the rim of worn-out motor-tire,
Then rolling it down from highest mould in the field of brier,
Our stealing eggs from pigeon's nests on rust-eaten ceiling fans,
And stealing mangoes from neighbor’s trees by jumping over fence,
Grandma's endless ancient tales crowded with ghosts,
Then dreaming them behind the gloomy lamp-post,
And further down the infamous corner of the street,
Our making sand-palaces where two rushing waters used to meet.
I thought of a
serene moment's silent acquiesce,
But that moment speaks only when my tongue is hush,
Of many more such things I thought
And in earliest childhood images I sought
For words to write a poem but all in vain
Because words betray me over and over again.
The more I thought more I felt groping in the mist
For that innocence but I ended up with empty fist.
Those things are
best to be kept unsaid
Because no word, no metaphor can do them justice.
Ancient innocence of lost lore is long since dead
And to dig the graves of sleeping memories I don't wish.
ISRO
Commemorates 40th Anniversary of
First Sounding Rocket Launch
It was on November 21,1963, that a Nike-Apache rocket roared into the skies over Thumba that heralded the beginning of the Indian space programme. In the four decades since then, more than 3000 sounding rockets have been flown for various scientific experiments. More important is that India has taken significant strides in other areas of space technology as well bringing several benefits to the nation.
The Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram, which grew around the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station, commemorated the 40 th anniversary of the first sounding rocket launch on November 21, 2003. Mr G Madhavan Nair, Chairman, ISRO inaugurated the celebration. Several eminent space personalities, who were associated with the Indian space programme in its early stages of evolution, shared their reminiscences. There was a re-enacting of the first sounding rocket launch with the flight of a RH-200 rocket in the afternoon.
Addressing the gathering over telephone from New Delhi, the President of India, Dr A P J Abdul Kalam, urged the scientists to see how space technology could be used to realise the vision of making India a developed country by 2020.
Forty years in the life of a human being marks the attainment of optimal mental and physical capacity and emotional maturity. Socially, by the time one is forty, one is accepted as a respectable member of the community and looked upon to provide leadership. The birth and growth of ISRO in the past forty years is analogous to this. MORE