By: Raymond Greiner The desert appears lifeless, void of color. No cathedrals only isolation, heat and blinding sun. One must hike the desert’s long trail to understand it. Hunker down on a cold desert night while scorpions sleep in your…
By: Ramlal Agarwal Jawaharlal Nehru was an aristocrat: a connoisseur, a lover of luxury and beauty. And yet, he was a democrat to his fingertips and rarely mixed parliamentary sessions. Mahatma Gandhi chose him as Prime Minister of India because…
By: Ramlal Agarwal Ruth Prawer Jhabvala came to India in 1951 after her marriage to an Indian Parsi architect and settled in a posh locality of Delhi. She had earned her M.A. from London University by writing a thesis about…
By: Ramlal Agarwal The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje was declared the Golden Man Booker winner, a special one-off award to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Booker Foundation in 2018. It was chosen as the best work of fiction…
By: Raymond Greiner The year was 1947, my seventh. On Saturday mornings my Dad accompanied me to the YMCA for swimming lessons. We took the streetcar from Vienna, WV to Parkersburg, a six-mile trip. The streetcar clattered, as the operator…
By: Raymond Greiner Today I have been thinking about geometric patterns and shapes, their intention and purpose, the obvious, the less obvious, and those, which are more ambiguous. I’m thinking about geometry’s vast and profusely influential melding with Earth’s…
By: Mozid Mahmud Kabir’s life still holds importance in a society in pursuit of the one true Lord, steeped in religiosity and caste. He was born at a time when the Hindu-Muslim strife was raging across the subcontinent. Divided into…
By: Raymond Greiner Preparing for winter. It is mid-October and the trees are spectacular. I anticipated autumn to be less colorful. We had such a dry summer; driest of the ten summers I have lived at this place. The…
By: Debra N. Diener I have ridden on the Carousel of Happiness. I remember everything about it so clearly — —bright red/blue/green/gold/purple lights multiplying in number as they flashed off mirrors overhead and on every surface of the carousel, –…
By William T. Hathaway Posted on streetlamps all over Germany are stickers showing fleeing silhouettes with the caption, “Refugees welcome – bring your families”. Some have been blacked out with felt markers or ripped partially away. The Germans have mixed…