Healing Power of Broccoli

Broccoli Scientists have known for some time that broccoli contains many healing compounds, including glucoraphanin, which protect our cells by stimulating a whole array of detoxifying enzymes. They are also anti-inflammatory, antibacterial and anti-fungal. Recent research has demonstrated that young broccoli sprouts (at day 3) contain the most glucoraphanin, (20-50 times more than mature plants,) which are very beneficial. So, if one of your broccoli plants goes to seed, collect the seed, dry it out and add it to the list of seeds you sprout: mung beans, alfalfa and so on.

The Healing power of Celery

The ancient Greeks dedicated celery to Hades, the god of the underworld. They ate it at funerlla meals, strewed it on graves and made it into wreaths for the dead. The British Pharmacopaea records that celery seed is anti-rheumatic, sedative and an urinary antiseptic. It is reccomended for rheumatism, arthritis, gout and inflammation of the urinary tract.

Angela surrounded by Devon moss

This year I had plans to escape the English winter, well-laid, careful, detailed plans, which included flying to Tenerife, catching a boat to the beautiful, green Canary island, La Palma, travelling by bus across the steep hilly island and meeting my friend, Frohmut, who would take me to one of her caves, where I would dwell as a troglodyte, far from the British permagrey skies, tilling her stony soil, weeding her veg patch and pruning her tangerine trees, spending the evenings by a nice fire in her cave, catching up on all the years since we last spent time in this place.

But it was not to be. Spain's decision to ban all Brits scuppered my plans.

So instead I am admiring the beautiful green moss in Devon. 

Healing plants this time of the year are few and far between, but I will go and look for some tomorrow.

 

Journey from Delhi to Goa

I caught the Rajdhani from Delhi to Goa, the best, fastest train, the train that takes precedence over other trains, so never gets late. Imagine my surprise when three prisoners appeared, chained together by their ankles, together with a couple of minders who were looking for seats for the prisoners. I remonstrated loudly:
"I'm not sharing a compartment with them!"
The minders took them away.
Strange, I thought, taking prisoners on the Rajdhani, in an air conditioned carriage!
Later one of the minders came back to my compartment, lay down on the top bunk opposite mine and went to sleep. When he woke up and climbed down he looked at me and began to speak, with difficulty, in English. He was a nice looking, slim young man with a pleasant face, dressed casually in jeans and shirt and he said:
"Those prisoners you saw not in this carriage. In next carriage."
"Are they sharing a compartment with other passengers?" I asked.
"Yes. All three on a top bunk together. Other passengers sitting below and talking to them. One is murderer. Two are diamond thieves. I police officer, taking them to Surat."
"I've never been to Surat. What is at Surat?"
"Rough diamonds. Diamonds cut in Mumbai. Rough diamonds in Surat."
"Where do they come from?"
"Africa."
"So there's a lot of crime in Surat."
"Yes a lot of crime. Big gang stole many diamonds. We catch nine. Police tracking other men in Lucknow, tracking phones. Very dangerous men."
"You live in Surat with your family?"
"No family live in Buj. Buj nice place. I see family once every two weeks. I must stay in Surat six months."
He looked at me wistfully.
"Very lonely Surat. And much tension."

Journey from Murshidabad to Kolkata

Murshidabad is in Bengal, home of music, film, poetry and art. Even on the station platform, as I waited for a local train, we were entertained by a blind musician playing a harmonium and singing traditional Bengali songs. Waiting passengers gathered round, some sitting, some standing, listening with rapt attention as his voice soared above the call of the vendors, station announcements and general traffic. Local trains don't run to specific timetables like the express trains. People hang about, buy cups of chai, unripe guavas, samosas, sit on their luggage or on the platform until suddenly everyone leaps up, ready to rush the doors when the train arrives.

Somehow I managed to squeeze in but not to sit. Luckily at every station people get off and people get on, so I soon found a space on a very hard seat beside a woman who was shaking a baby to try to stop it from crying, unsuccessfully. Vendors of every food imaginable somehow managed to squeeze through the crowded compartment, plus sellers of household goods: clothes pegs, toys, tablecloths, rucksacks, drinks, sticky looking chana (chickpeas) that looked like it was going to be spilled over me but somehow managed not to, blind musicians, assorted beggars, loud clapping Hijras, dressed in brilliant red saris, who go up to the men and demand money aggressively; all of whom get out of the compartment at the next station and a fresh lot of vendors, beggars, musicians etc get in and struggle through.

I could hardly hear him crying above the calls of the vendors, beggars, musicians, but noticed that the baby's mother and grandmother were taking it in turns to shake the baby, who continued to cry pitifully, his sweat-streaked hair clinging to his forehead as he writhed in their arms. At the next station they took the wailing infant off the train. On the other side of me were a young couple who'd been married a year, didn't speak a word of English but smiled sweetly and indicated that they wanted to look at my photos. So we looked at photos on my mobile phone. He indicated that his mobile was out of battery. I found a lead and plugged it into my power bank.

At the next station a vendor of dubious looking herbal remedies got on and stood like an orator giving a speech about his wonderful products. A man spent a few rupees on one of his remedies. After about three hours the train stopped, people left their handkerchiefs to mark their seats and got off to buy the better station food, as opposed to the food they'd been eating from the vendors on the train. Presumably there was a toilet somewhere and this was an opportunity to use it since there were no toilets on the train. But I had no idea where to look and anyway was afraid of not finding my way back to my seat and my luggage, so didn't dare venture far. I decided not to drink so that I would last the six hour journey.

When the train started again a very feisty Hijra came into our compartment, clapping loudly as usual, going up to the young men, pushing them roughly, probably taunting them (of course I couldn't understand her Bengali) and demanding money. She came right up to me and looked me in the eyes, tossed her head and held out her hand. My neighbour indicated that I'd better give her some money, so I handed over another ten rupee note. I'd been handing out ten rupee notes, of which I had a huge pile, throughout the journey. A curd (yogurt) seller got on at the next station, with two buckets filled with miniature clay pots of curd. A pan seller arrived, with a marvellous array of different coloured powders, then a man selling pins, toothpicks and combs, who hung his wares from the roof, rattled off his spiel, then unhitched his wares, moved on and hung them up again.

Eventually the vendors began to thin out, a general somnolence began to take over, as all who were fortunate enough to have a seat began dozing off, on each other's shoulders. By now enough people were sitting for me to see out of the window, where the growing rice was clothing the countryside in brilliant green, between fruit trees, banana plantations, saal forests and villages with little houses.

A group of young women went through the carriage singing a Bollywood song at the tops of their voices. A fake gold chain seller held forth loudly, competing with the singers in his attempts to persuade someone to buy one of his chains.

Just as we were leaving DumDum station, someone said that there was a metro station there. Too late for me to get out of the train, I continued on to Sealdah, where a kind man said to me,
"Get off here, cross over to that train there. It's going back to DumDum. Stand by the door and make sure you get off there!"

And so I was able to get the metro all the way into central Kolkata from DumDum station.

Itkhori

The Hindu priest is telling visitors that this is an ancient lingam, but clearly it is Buddhist

According to Sir Edwin Arnold, in 'The Light of Asia,' Buddha came to Itkhori before his long walk to Bodhgaya where he was enlightened, and according to local legend, it was here at Itkhori that his aunt Prajapati Gautami lost him and screamed "iti koi" (iti = here koi = lost). Hence the derivation of the name Itkhori.

During the Gupta Period a ruler built a large Buddhist temple here. Later the temple became a Hindu temple and at some point it may even have become a Jain temple. But unlike many such temples in Cambodia, Laos and Thailand, which have remained as testimony to their changing religious affiliations, with a mixture of Buddhist and Hindu iconography, this temple was destroyed. Few people knew about it until sometime in the twentieth century, when farmers began to unearth stone sculptures with their ploughs and this came to the attention of Bulu Imam and his sons, who persuaded the villagers to keep the sculptures in a safe place.

Gradually over time a large quantity of stone sculptures and pieces of the architecture of the temple came to light and were stored in an old school. Eventually money was found for a makeshift 'museum' for them. The museum is kept locked but we were taken there by a caretaker who unlocked the doors, switched on the lights and ushered us in to a dusty room where Hindu, Jain and Buddhist sculptures and pieces of the old temple were stacked on top of each other in untidy rows with an occasional label in Hindi.

An application was made for Unesco status and funding was allocated, then suddenly the whole site was covered with concrete, obliterating the rest of the remnants of the ancient temple and a huge Hindu temple was built on the site. Had the site been carefully preserved it is possible that sufficient pieces of the old temple could have been unearthed to re-construct it, more or less as it originally was, as they did in Bodhgaya. But now it is too late. Sad remnants of the ancient temple still line the outer perimeters of the new temples.  And Hindu worshippers worship a Buddhist Tara statue, mistaking her for Kali, in one of the Hindu temples.

The chief Minister has announced that he will build an enormous new Buddhist temple at Itkhori, which will go some way towards recognising it as a Buddhist site, but the temple will not include any of the old stone architecture. Large colour pictures of the projected Buddhist temple are displayed high up on the walls of the 'museum' at Itkhori. The Unesco application still awaits.

There are several villages around Itkhori where Buddhist sculptures have come to light. We visited Daihar village, a village of fifty two lanes and fifty two wells. Old Buddhist, Jain and Hindu statues have been pulled out of some of the wells, the better preserved pieces taken to Ranchi, the broken pieces piled in heaps in the lanes, where the villagers revere them with marks of vermillion, wrapping the odd piece in red cloth, as a mark of respect. As I stared down into the depths of one of the wells, too deep to see the water at the bottom, I marvelled at how, hundreds of years ago, these villagers could have dug and built the walls of such deep wells.

Over the years many ruins of the Buddhist monuments and statues have come to light in different parts of the state of Jharkhand. According to T. Bloch, several Buddhist remains were found five and seven kilometres from Dalmi and Budhpur in Dhanbad district, dating to the tenth century AD, according to Beglar. In 1918 FM Holo found Buddhist sculptures at Suraj Kund village in the Hazaribagh district near some hot springs. At Belwadag village, three km east of Khunti in Ranchi, an excavation has revealed a Buddhist Vihar, constructed of bricks similar to those used to build the Buddhist stupa at Sanchi.  Buddhist statues have been discovered in places like Jonha of Ranchi district, Katunga village of Gumla district, Bhula village of Jamshedpur (East Singhbhum) and Ichagarh in Dhanbad district.

At Mangarh a brick work Buddhist Stupa, twenty feet by twenty feet has recently come to light. At Tultul, near a waterfall, Koleshwari temple is Buddhist, Jain and Hindu. Some of these statues and parts of monuments have been taken to the post-graduate department of history of Ranchi University, but they are not well cared for. In the current climate of Hindutva, little importance is given to Buddhist archeological remains in India.

The UNESCO application for recognition of Itkhori as an important Buddhist site still awaits a response. Hopefully if it is recognised, attention can be drawn to the importance of Jharkhand as a major Buddhist destination. If money is provided for excavation and a proper museum, many more Buddhist sites will probably come to light.

the World of Rock Art Exhibition

I went to see the World of Rock Art Exhibition at the Vinoba Bhave University, Hazaribagh, Jharkhand this morning. There was a disappointing lack of information regarding the photos: rock art of India on the ground floor and a whistle stop tour of world rock art upstairs. None of the rock art was dated, photos of thousands of years old paintings sandwiched between obviously much more recent art with absolutely no explanation. There was no information regarding the geographical siting of the rock art either, merely vague indications about district where they could be found. 

Almost all the photos were over-saturated, leading to garish colour distortion. Overall it was a disappointing experience, though the map of India indicating the major rock art sites, was possibly the most inspiring thing in the whole exhibition, showing rock art sites in almost every state in India. Rock art in India varies from petroglyphs in the hills of South Goa:

Petroglyph at La Zarza in South Goa (my photo)

and paintings of animals in Bimbetka and Rajastan to pictographs in the Hazaribagh region of Jharkhand:

Pictographs at Isco, Hazaribagh, Jharkhand (my photo)

The exhibition included iconic images from the caves of Central France

The exhibition was culled from a much bigger and more detailed exhibition on Rock Art organised during the International Rock Art Conference at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) New Delhi form 6 December 2012 - 25 January 2013. I wonder whether the original exhibition was more informative than this, an exhibition designed to entertain, rather than inform.