International Women's Month

March 8 was International Women's Day and I wrote a tribute to my mother. I enjoyed honouring Mum in this way and got some good responses from readers too. When I showed the post to Mum, she was really pleased.
So far so good. But I think I'm not done with IWD yet. I think I'd like to write about other feminine influences in my life, particularly during my early life. So I'm declaring March International Women's Month. Watch out for more posts...
Meanwhile: who were the major feminine influences in your life when you were growing up? Write and tell us.

Sisterhood Award for Blogging

I have received a blogging award! How fab!
Alana Roberts, who runs the Womens Blogger Directory, has kindly given me the Sisterhood Award for “always being so caring and supportive of others and for your inspirational posts on all of your blogs” (see Alana's comment on the right side of this blog).
I am honoured and very happy to receive this recognition.
In my Oscar acceptance speech - :) :) - I’d like to say something about my “blogging philosophy.”
I write my blogs to share ideas and events that I think are worth sharing – designed to bring a smile to my readers’ lips; remind them to be kind to themselves and to others; touch their hearts in some way; or offer them different views of health, sprituality and relationship...
I am still learning some of these things myself, but as I look ahead to my 50th birthday, in July, I feel the need also to share that which life has already taught me. This is particularly true of Terataii, my blog on Reiki energy healing, holistic health, and spirituality. My latest blog, Wandering Pam, is more of a "just for fun" blog, with stories from my travels in Asia, Europe and East Africa.

My favourite blogs and bloggers in the Directory
In turn, I would like to award 2 of my fellow members of the Womens Blogger Directory:
Alana Roberts. This is an obvious choice - it is only Alana's ideas, drive and energy that have made this directory possible. Within a short time, the directory has grown to have 95 members who network, support one another, provide feedback and exchange ideas on the directory itself as well as in a Google group. Alana's blogs: Visit Ireland, Blogger Beginner, and Family Food and Recipes.
Vera Marie Badertscher. Vera's wonderful blog combines the two great pleasures of reading and travelling. Her posts inspired me to dig into my own memory and start writing travel stories. Check out Vera's blog, A Traveler’s Library.

International Women's Day

Ma Tujhe Salaam - A Tribute to My Mother
One day after International Women’s Day (March 8), I pay this tribute to the woman who has given me life and unconditional love, my most cherished human values and the best traditions of my Indian heritage.

My mother is loving and kind, yet strong and independent. Tell her a sad story and her heart melts within seconds; but cross her and she will never, ever back down! Her passion, I think, is feeding people.

When I was growing up, she was always there for me, being a full-time mother, wife and home-maker. My earliest memory is of falling off a tonga – a horse-drawn carriage – with my mother. This happened in Kashmir when I was about 2 years old. It is the only memory I have from that age. I guess I remember it because it was scary, or at least a huge shock to the system. Yet it’s also a memory of being protected because I remember sliding off the tonga still in my mother’s lap, with her arms tightly wrapped around me.

From later years, I remember my mother, a staunch follower of Mahatma Gandhi, telling me to turn the other cheek when my male cousins would hit me. Fortunately for me, my father had a more practical approach to life. He taught me to fight back, not to inflict too much damage on the other person but enough to discourage them from picking on me.

Though I rejected this particular lesson, I imbibed other aspects of my mother’s Gandhian views. She taught me to speak the truth without fear or reservation. So much so that my father says I’m not just truthful but often “brutally frank.” Well, I’m trying to temper the “brutality” without losing the frankness.

I learnt from Mum – and my father – to treat people with respect and courtesy. It did not matter whether they were Hindus, Muslims, or Christians; rich or poor; men or women.

I remember an elderly gentleman moving into our home in Delhi for the entire winter one year. Mum introduced him to me as her “godfather.” He lived in Norway with her older sister’s family, but found the winter there too harsh. So he had come to spend it with us. I loved this man, who told me a story from the Mahabharatha every night. Before he left, he had told me the entire tale, with all its twists and turns, and its myriad sub-plots. Wonderful.

It was only much later I learnt that he had been my grandfather’s housekeeper and had moved to my aunt’s household when she got married to help her run her new home, first in India, then Indonesia, and finally Norway.

Another year Mum’s elderly aunt came down to escape the cold winter in Kashmir. She, too, told me stories, half in Hindi and half in Kashmiri, which I didn’t know too well. Both my parents accorded her the respect due to the oldest member of the family and so I did too.

Our home was an open house to any relative, friend, or friend of a friend who was passing through Delhi. Female guests simply moved into the room I shared with my older sister. Male visitors slept on a thakhat in the living room. People who dropped in to say hello were invariably persuaded to stay on for the next meal.

I didn’t find any of this odd. I thought this was how all families operated and I enjoyed all the comings and goings. The house was open to all my friends too, of course.

Mum has always been a wonderful hostess. Equally, she is a gracious guest. Except for the closest of friends, she would not go to anyone’s home “empty-handed,” as she put it. She kept a stash of gifts to be dipped into as and when required. If she didn’t have an appropriate gift to hand, she would take flowers or fruit. Never, ever, under any circumstances would she go without a gift if it was the first time she was visiting someone’s home. That was an absolute no-no.

She was careful also to never allow her host to feel uncomfortable on our account. When I was in my teens, we had close family friends who lived nearby. Since the relationship was so informal, we would often drop in on each other at short notice. One time, when we had gone over, the lady of the house apologized because she had cooked only a simple vegetarian meal that day. My Mum, with her most innocent look, asked: “What day of the week is it?” When our hostess told her, Mum said, still with that innocent look, “Oh we never eat meat on Tuesdays” (or Thursdays, or whatever it was). This happened at least 3 times before our friend finally caught on!

In our own home, my Mum resolutely refused to teach me to cook or do household chores. I was possibly the only Indian girl of my age back then who couldn’t even make tea. (Actually, I still can’t do it too well.) Girls were generally groomed to be good wives and daughters-in-law in India’s joint family system. My Mum assumed, like others, that I would eventually marry and “settle down.” But, in the meantime, she wanted me to have fun. Enjoy yourself, she’d say to me, there’s no rush to get involved in cooking and housework!

Both my parents considered education to be of great value, both in itself (as knowledge) and in its ability to make one financially independent. Mum wanted her daughters to be well educated and to work before marriage, if not afterwards. I remember her talking about this even when I was really young, perhaps 10 or 12 years old. She felt it was important for a woman to know she was capable of looking after herself even if she wasn’t going to work after marriage. That way, “if anything went wrong,” she’d know she could be financially independent.

(As things turned out, I worked, married, continued to work, and never really “settled down,” happily moving around Asia with my husband.)

My mother, now 83, continues to be a loving presence in my life. She doesn’t cook in her own home any more, but when she visits my husband and me, she makes a special effort to make us a favourite dish once in a while. It’s hard for her to stand for long, so we put a chair for her in the kitchen. Our cook-housekeeper helps her by cleaning and chopping the ingredients, and in other ways too, but Mum directs the process. (Sometimes my parents cook together, but that deserves a post of its own…)

When she’s in her own home in India, with me in the Philippines, we talk often on the phone. She never fails to ask me to give her love to my husband – “and even more to you,” she invariably adds. Then she chuckles and adds: “But don’t tell him I said that.”

A love of postcards

Sometime in my teens -- probably around 15 -- I started collecting postcards. It wasn't a conscious decision, it just happened. In recent years, I've tried to curb this tendency because I feel I can't "do" very much with my collection. I've framed a few, but most just sit around in boxes.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a blog devoted entirely to postcards! Vintage ones from France, with little snippets of information attached to each card. How wonderful. And here I am joining Marie Reed's Postcard Friendship Friday with 2 recently-added cards from my own collection.



This one's an attempt by a small European nation to express with humour its frustration at being mistaken for a much larger country half-way across the world because of the similarity in their names.



The card copies Australian road signs warning of the possibile presence of kangaroos. But the Austrian postcard carries a very different message!



And this is a postcard from Australia -- of a wallaby, which is like a small kangaroo, with a baby peeping out of its pouch. Adorable, isn't it?

Haydn on a Bamboo Organ in the Philippines

Once a year a small church in the Philippines hosts a bamboo organ festival to celebrate the church’s unique organ made almost entirely of bamboo – 902 of its 1,031 pipes are made of bamboo and the rest of metal. Musicians come from different parts of the Philippines and abroad to play on the organ.

This year, I went with my family to listen to Austrian organist Christian Iwan play the works of Haydn, Kerll and Scarlatti. We sat in the old stone church, which dates back to the early nineteenth century. The walls are made from volcanic stones and the ceiling is bamboo.

For more complex works by Mozart and Bach the organist, and the audience, moved to an auditorium in a newer wing of the church complex so that Iwan could play on a “normal” organ with metal pipes. I guess this means the bamboo has a limited range; but it has its own distinct and beautiful quality of sound. And the old church is the perfect setting for the music.


The bamboo organ has an interesting history. Housed in the St. Joseph Parish Church in Las Piñas, one of the 16 cities that make up Metro-Manila, it is believed to be the only bamboo organ in the world. The organ was built in 1824 by Father Diego Cera, a Spanish missionary and the first parish priest in Las Piñas. It took 8 years to build this unique organ (1816-1824). About 60 years later, in the 1880s, the organ was damaged by a typhoon and an earthquake. The pipes were put away and remained in storage for nearly a hundred years. Then, in 1973, they were shipped to Germany to be repaired. The fully repaired organ returned to Las Piñas 2 years later.

Globalization - some questions

First off, let me say that I am not against globalization. I believe that all human beings are connected (or “interconnected,” as Buddhists say), so how could I be against a connected world? I am not.

On the contrary, I think globalization doesn’t go far enough. It is restricted to global corporations, global production and global trade. It does not apply half so well to human values or the hearts and minds of people.

While global corporations employ people all over the world, they do not employ them on the basis of “equal pay for equal work.” In fact, one impetus for globalization came from the fact that production costs are lower in countries where workers can be more easily exploited. Even at middle and senior levels, nationality and race is certainly a factor – though not the only one – in compensation packages. At the highest levels, ability and experience appear to be the deciding factors – but probably not the only ones.

Moving on to the second part of my question: why does the concept of globalization leave our hearts cold?

Recently, desperate men from Myanmar’s much-abused Rohingya minority were picked up by the Thai navy attempting to land illegally in Thailand. The Thai navy beat them up, then threw them onto rudimentary boats (little more than rafts) in their injured state, and pushed them out to sea without food or drinking water.

Three boatloads of Rohingya men are still missing, but 6 have been picked up in other Asian countries. One of these countries is Indonesia, where the men have been given medical treatment and temporary shelter. But the Indonesian government said it would send them back to the hell that is their life in Myanmar, where they are not allowed to own property and have no civil or human rights. (The government has now softened this stance in response to pressure from within the country – see below.) Read about the plight of the Rohingyas in a recent reports by the Associated Press and in the International Herald Tribune.

In other words, as a global community, we are happy to exploit low-paid workers for our ends wherever we find them; but we will not extend a helping hand to desperate people if we don’t stand to gain anything from that. Nice.

How can the plight of such desperate men – not to mention the women and children they left behind – not touch our hearts? How many of us have protested in any way against Thailand’s treatment or Indonesia’s (initial) decision to send them back? Or tried to find out how we might be able to help the Rohingya, if not in Myanmar itself, then in neighbouring Bangladesh, where many of them find minimal shelter in very harsh conditions.

So much for hearts. Now for minds. How does the idea of globalization gel with the “us and them” attitude that is so common today throughout the world? Going back to the Rohingya refugees, Muslim organizations – and many ordinary citizens -- in Indonesia have appealed to their government to let the Rohingya men stay.

In response to this and other pressure, the Indonesian government has finally softened its stand and agreed to allow representatives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to meet the Rohingyas. Still unwilling to allow them to stay in Indonesia, the authorities now appear more willing to discuss resettlement in a third country.

One reason that has been cited for the attitudes both of the Thai authorities and Indonesia’s Muslim organizations is that the Rohingyas are Muslims. This is also cited as a reason for their ill-treatment in their native Myanmar. Thailand and Myanmar are predominantly Buddhist countries; Indonesia is predominantly Muslim.

I think this explanation may be somewhat uncharitable to the Indonesian people, but at least one of the Muslim organizations has pleaded for them because they are “our Muslim brothers.” This is a positive sense of community – but it is nowhere near a global sense of community. One has to wonder how this organization might respond to Buddhist or Christian refugees facing a similar plight?

And what about the Thai authorities? Do they see the superficial differences of race and religion, but not the underlying common humanity that Buddha, Jesus and Mohammad spoke about?

Can we be truly “globalized” if we can’t see that underlying common humanity?

On Valentine's Day...

St Theresa's prayer:
May today there be peace within. May you trust that you are exactly where you are meant to be. May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith in yourself and others. May you use the gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you. May you be content with yourself just the way you are. Let this knowledge settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love. It is there for each and every one of us.

Chinese proverb:
It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.