Nayan Sthankiya: Sanskrit

Image Copyright © Nayan Sthankiya-All Rights Reserved
Nayan Sthankiya is a Canadian photojournalist of East Indian decent, currently based in India covering international news in the Asia Pacific region. He has traveled to over 40 countries world wide. He studied multi-media arts at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Nayan slowly gravitated to photography. After spending a year lobbying the Chinese for the release of an imprisoned Korean photojournalist, he realized the power of the image to effect change and to inform and teach the world.

I feature Nayan's photo essay on a Sanskrit school in Karnataka, India. Sanskrit is one of the world's oldest languages and is still in use in India today. Its position in the cultures of South and Southeast Asia is akin to that of Latin and Greek in Europe and it has influenced many modern-day languages of the world. A school in the tiny village of Melkote is dedicated to its study, and is an archive for some 2000 texts. The school has been in operation for the last 150 years.

Nayan's Indian Sanskrit

Five minute Traveling

A sweet dessert, Cendol...




It was Sunday and I thought I do something different. So, off I went to town lugging my digital camera along. I had a sweet, savory dessert, Cendol sold by an Indian Muslim. Then, off I went to Taiping War Memorial which is situated between Taiping picturesque Lake Gardens and Bukit Larut and took some shots to share with you. Here you are, Taiping War Memorial:








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Traveling Tip: You don't need a lot of time to travel!

NY Times: Afghan Terrain

Image Copyright © Tomás Munita/NY Times-All Rights Reserved
The New York Times has a slideshow of Tomás Munita's excellent photographs that accompany an article describing a $40 million experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. The objective is for the anthropologists to understand subtle points of tribal relations, and explain these to the combat troops.

As an example, one of the anthropologists identified an unusually high concentration of widows in one Afghan village, whose lack of income created financial pressure on their sons to provide for their families, and drove the young men to join well-paid insurgents. As a consequence, the US military developed a job training program for the widows.

It's clear that no one has any idea if this experiment will work long term, but at least it's a constructive step and hopefully may yield some results. The Afghans are justifiably suspicious of Western influence (aka interference), be it from Russia in the 80s or the United States, so I'm not holding my breath.

Whatever the long term outcome is, this experimental program is certainly intellectually and morally more in sync with our values as Americans than the thuggish and xenophobic behavior that we read about so often these days.

Here's The New York Times' Human Terrain

Alexandra Boulat

Image Copyright © Jerome Delay/AP-All Rights Reserved
It is reported that photojournalist Alexandra Boulat, one of the founding members of the VII photo agency, died last night in a Paris hospital. She was 45. Boulat suffered a brain aneurysm last June while living in Jerusalem, Israel. She was later transferred to Paris.

Boulat was one of the most talented photographers of her generation. She was born in Paris in 1962 and was originally trained in graphic art and art history, at the Beaux Arts in Paris. She was represented by Sipa Press for 10 years until 2000. In 2001 she co-founded VII photo agency. Her news and features stories were published in many international magazines, above all Time, Newsweek, National Geographic Magazine and Paris-Match. She received many International Awards for the quality of her work.

Among her many varied assignments, she reported on the wars in former Yugoslavia, the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, the war in Iraq, Afghanistan at the fall of the Taliban, and women's condition in the Islamic world. Other large assignments published in National Geographic include country stories on Indonesia Albania, and Morroco.

A grand capital called Persepolis

Some 2500 years ago, Darius the Great of the Achaemenid Empire built a grand ceremonial capital called Persepolis. Persepolis is about 50 km from Shiraz at the foot of the Rahmat Mountains. Alexander the Great destroyed it in 330 B.C. but archaeologists combing through its debris managed to reveal most of what was left of its structure. From Naqsh-e Rustam, our taxi had taken us to Persepolis. The Shah of Iran, before being toppled by the late Ayatollah Khomeini, reportedly held a glitzy party for the World Rich and famous there. Only the privileged must be able to roam such a grand place!

Moving into Persepolis...



Gateway to Persepolis...





A top view of Persepolis ...




What's left of Persepolis..

CS Monitor: A Village in Ghana

Image Copyright © Peter DiCampo/CS Monitor-All Rights Reserved
Although the northern Ghanian village of Wantugu has high-tension power lines in place since 2000, its people are still lacking one key element: electricity flowing through those wires and into village homes. For most people in developed countries, living without electricity is unthinkable, but in Wantugu it is the norm, rather than the exception.

Even without electric power, the 3,500 inhabitants of this rural farming community are active after dark, with young people get together to study English homework or the Qu'ran, while others gather to watch a film on the only TV in the village.

The feature is photographed and reported by Peter DiCampo, who has used the Soundslides quite effectively. You'll see that he's effectively created motion in some of the pictures of the Ghanaians' dance (two-thirds into the feature) by adding virtually identical photographs of a dance scene and keeping the time delay between these to the minimum of a second... using the same flip-book technique I used in The Dancing Monks of Prakhar slideshow. I also liked the audio soundtrack that accompanies DiCampo's slideshow.

Here's CS Monitor's Wantugu village

A boat ride in Amsterdam's Canals

One morning, someone read in a brochure that there was a free walking tour round Amsterdam. Interested parties would have to wait outside the railway station at about nine in the morning. We went there the second day we were in Amsterdam but failed to meet up with the man who would take us for a walk. So, since there was a ticketing booth nearby, we had bought tickets to go for a boat ride in Amsterdam’s canals instead

Get your tickets from booth like this...






Taking a boat ride in the canals in Amsterdam offers a beautiful sight of old buildings...

Buildings along the canal...

Traveling Tip: Look for alternatives.