By: Monica Gupta,
on 8/23/2016
Political Cartoon – Current Topics मेरा सिधु आएगा .. ! भाजपा हो, कांग्रेस हो या आम आदमी पार्टी सभी की नजरे नवजोत सिह सिधु पर है कि क्या फैसला लेते हैं भिन्नता में एकता का साक्षात उदाहरण है कि पार्टी अलग अलग हो विचार धारा अलग अलग हो पर मंथन एक है और वो […]
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By: Monica Gupta,
on 1/5/2016
आतंकवाद -शहीद जवान और नेताओं की राजनीति आतंकवाद -शहीद जवान और नेताओं की राजनीति जिस तरह से आतंकी हमलों में हमारे जवान शहीद हो रहे हैं और नेता अपनी बयानबाजी से थम नही रहे हैं चाहे भाजपा हो या कांग्रेस और न्यूज चैनल आरोप प्रत्यारोप की राजनीति गरमाई हुई है … ऐसे में बहुत लोग […]
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By: Monica Gupta,
on 8/9/2015
राधे राधे …
अक्सर जब बडे बुजुर्ग मिलते हैं तो राम राम या राधे राधे करते हैं … ये उनके अभिवादन का तरीका है पर जिस तरह से आज कल इन ढोगी बाबाओ या देवियों की पोल खुल रही है जनता का इन पर से विश्वास ही उठता चला जा रहा है … बेशक अफसोसनाक बात है कि हम लोग पढे लिखे होकर भी ऐसी बातों को बढावा देते हैं और सबसे ज्यादा न्यूज चैनल पर हैरानी है कि अच्छी भली खबरे छोड कर, मात्र टीआरपी बढाने क्योकि खबर मे अश्लीलता रुपी ग्लैमर का तडका जो लगा है , पीछे पडा है …
IBN Khabar
राधे मां पर आरोप लगते रहे है कि वो सिर्फ आशीर्वाद देने में ही नहीं, बल्कि तंत्र मंत्र में भी निपुण हैं। बताया जाता है कि मुकेरिया में डकोर खालसा के बैरागी संत बीरमदास के संपर्क में आने के बाद उन्होंने तंत्र-मंत्र में अपना ज्ञान बढ़ाया। मुंबई पहुंचने से पहले मुकेरिया में गुरबत के दिन काट रहीं, राधे मां उर्फ सुखविंदर कौर उर्फ पप्पू लोगों की समस्याएं दूर करने के लिए तांत्रिक क्रियाएं भी करती थीं। इसी तंत्र-मंत्र और तांत्रिक क्रियाओं ने उन्हें ख्याति दिलाई और मुंबई का रास्ता दिखाया। Via ibnlive.com
ABP News
पंजाब के बिजली विभाग में काम करने वाले सरदार अजित सिंह के घर तीन मार्च 1969 को राधे मां का जन्म हुआ था. बचपन में राधे मां को घर वाले प्यार से गुड़िया बुलाया करते थे लेकिन जब उनका दाखिला गांव के ही स्कूल में करवाया गया तो उनका नाम बदलकर सुखविंदर कौर रख दिया गया था. दोरांगला के गवर्मेंट एल एस एम सीनियर सेकेंडरी स्कूल से राधे मां ने दसवीं तक की पढ़ाई की है. राधे मां को बचपन के दिनों से जानने वाले उनके भक्त विवेक पाठक उनके स्कूल की ये कहानी कुछ इस तरह बयान करते हैं.
दोरांगला के मोहल्ले की गलियों में राधे मां उर्फ सुखविंदर कौर का बचपन खेलते कूदते हुए गुजरा है. राधे मां को करीब से जानने वाले बताते हैं कि बचपन से ही उनका मन धार्मिक कामों में ज्यादा लगता था. राधे मां के पिता का ये दावा भी है कि बचपन में राधे मां उनके घर के सामने बने मंदिर में अपना ज्यादातर वक्त गुजारा करती थी. राधे मां के परिवार के करीबी रहे विवेक पाठक बचपन के अपने दिनों को याद कर बताते हैं कि सुखविंदर कौर उर्फ राधे मां कम उम्र से ही भविष्यवाणियां भी करने लगी थी.
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By: Catherine Fehre,
on 11/30/2014
Congratulations on your new posting in the Punjab. Rather than riding eight-hours-a-day on horseback, suffering motion-sickness on a camel’s heaving back, or breaking your back sitting on hard wooden boards in a mail-cart, you’ll be travelling on the Bombay Government Flotilla, one of four flotillas that carry thousands of Europeans and Indians up and down the Indus.
While you may question the expenditure of a government flotilla, we assure you it’s a lot simpler than loading a squadron onto a small fleet of country boats, with indifferent crews, in varying states of repair, which might never reach their destinations. On board we’ll keeping the regiment together arriving as it started out — in one piece and maintaining proper discipline in transit.
So what can you expect on this exciting journey?
1. Expect sun and swelter. Everything you touch will be red hot. You won’t be able to go below in the daytime, but the thin awnings on deck will do little to relieve you in the 115 degree heat. Many soldiers ask whether they should sleep with a berth next to a furnace or choose a wall of heat on deck. With dry winds that come down from the ‘burnt-up hills’, laden with fine sand, everything and everyone will be covered in a layer of fine grey grit. And don’t forget the sand-flies — they bite hard.
2. Expect an uproarious time. Remember that you’re travelling on white man’s mastery of nature, so don’t expect to be the most important thing afloat. Your accommodation will be conveniently crushed between the machinery of furnaces, boilers, pistons, transmission, and paddle-wheels. Passengers trapped in close proximity to the machinery enthuse about the clamour of pistons ‘working up to four or five hundred horse-power’, the splash of paddle-wheels beating the river-water into foam, and the deafening hurricanes when engineers blow off the boiler’s steam ‘half-a-dozen times a day’. And if you’re lucky enough to have the wind blowing in your direction, look forward to being choked by the smoke, singed by the sparks, and splattered by smuts from the funnels.
3. Expect to get intimate with your fellow passengers. When moving to a theatre of war, you’ll be squashed together on the decks ‘like pigs at a market in a pen at night’. Your comrades may jostle to get enough space to lie down; the top of a hatch is a prize reserved for the best bare-knuckle fighter. Never mind about a restless colleague, you’ll be packed so tight in the gaps between the baggage, that once you’re settled down it’ll be impossible to move until the morning.
4. Expect cool nights with fresh dew. As you lay on deck with only a thin cotton awning over your head, gather round the funnel to get a little warmth. Be sure to hang on to your guttery [very thin duvet stuffed with raw cotton] as there will be no great-coats among the soldiers. Not to worry, the women and children suffer most.
5. Expect to be out of your element and out of sorts. Feeling exposed? Living on the open decks for weeks on end in the winter will reduce your resistance to all common Indian diseases. Should you be lucky enough to get an attack fever and dysentery, you’ll lay stretched upon the hard planking without anything under or over you. The sepoys’ conditions, as one would expect, are the best of all. It will be impossible to cross the deck without walking on sick and dying invalids. If they die in the night, they will be ‘instantly thrown overboard’. And after the steamer arrives in the delta, the survivors are off-loaded into sea-going ships destined for Bombay.
6. Expect unbelievable meals. Passengers praise our ‘coarse and unpalatable’ food. Everyone from the boat captains to the cooks have their special arrangements with prices too high for poorer travellers and meals ‘so indifferent’ that passengers who had paid for them refuse to eat them. Even the water is undrinkable! Perhaps your whole regiment will be reduced to foraging in the villages along the banks. Sheep and cows can be bought for a few rupees; Muslim butchers slaughter them; and you can enjoy broiling away till midnight.
7. Expect a tranquil environment. It takes a month or more to get up the whole navigable length of the Indus and they’ll be nothing to see on long stretches of the rivers, except ‘a vast dreary expanse’ of desert stretching out to the horizon, or an endless belt of tamarisk trees running along the low, muddy banks. Many villages are miles from the river to escape the floods, so it’s possible to sail all day without seeing another human being. Throughout the journey you’ll receive small stimulations from a native boat spreading its sail to taking pot shots at the largest living creatures to hand. Never mind the cost of the cartridges: simply steal rounds from the pouches of sick sepoys.
8. Expect a friendly drink or two. Fed up with watching the ‘dreary wilderness’ floating slowly past? Drink yourself stupid. As a hundred soldiers boarded the Meanee en route to the siege of Multan, one of them – delirious from drink – ‘slipped from the men who led him and fell overboard’, a second died of delirium tremens during the voyage, and a third ‘was expected to do so’. En route they ‘lost three or four in the river from drowning’. Worried the military authorities will restrict the sale of alcohol on the boats? Buy country liquor from the villagers – it has roughly the same side-effects.
9. Expect genuine thrills. The most intense excitement on a voyage on the Indus is the occasional shipwreck. Test your phlegm, and proof of national identity. Charles Stewart dismissed the danger of drowning with the utmost nonchalance on his sinking vessel. The really serious inconvenience was the interruption to his meals. React with that much aplomb, and we’ll know you’re British.
10. Expect to see people working together in new ways. Watch every latent animosity in race relations come to the surface. British captains beat Indian pilots every time a boat runs aground; engineers beat the lascars feeding logs into the furnaces if the steam pressure falls; and soldiers beat the cooks if they make a mess of the grub. Passengers straight from England are often shocked.
Remember, in an alien and often threatening environment, it’s worth paying a premium for the reassurance of a European-style cocoon: a steam-hotel, albeit a poor one, gliding along the river while the guests sit on the decks.
Headline image credit: Indus Sunset by Ahmed Sajjad Zaidi. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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