When I was a a schoolboy, I had read that the great Buddhist scholar Rahul Sankrityayan had one day left a message on his table. “To Tibet.” He was gone six months. Rahul returned with the art that is now displayed at the Patna Museum. I don’t know whether the story is true but the message I have prepared above means that I’ll be back next week. Till then, keep dreaming of the fleecy clouds in Tibet.

The well-known photojournalist Eugene Richards, who is a Fellow at the Nation Institute, has been engaged in a documentary project on the effects of the Iraq War on the lives of young American soldiers and their families. Click here.

Via Uma. Also Freddy Deknatel has posted another story about National Guardsmen with photos by Eugene Richards.

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Bhaiyyas Rule!

If you register as a user on Time Out Mumbai, you will find in the current issue this little nugget wrapped like a tasty supari in a green leaf:

He’s probably the city’s most famous paanwala. It’s uncertain whether (as rumours suggest) he drives a Merc, but it’s clear for all the world to see that Prem Shankar Tiwari, the owner of Muchhad Paanwala paan shop on Warden Road, has his own website. It was built in 1998 by a devoted customer Vivek Bhargav. At paan.com, not only can you order paan online (a minimum order of 10 is required), you can also play a game that requires the participant to run from one end of the screen to the other to catch blobs of paan spit in a virtual bucket.

And if you visit the paanwala’s website, you are provided this history:

Paan was invented by Scholars of Aruvedas with the help of Dhanvantari thousands of years ago after taking experiment on rats. Paan was found out good for digestion Even reference of Paan is found in Shrimad Bhagavatam as Lord Krishna used to chew. This evidence is of 5000 years ago.

The tradition of eating Paan was popularised by Queen Noorjehan, the mother of King Shahjehan who built the world famous Taj Mahal for his Queen.

In olden days women used natural elements for makeup and cosmetics. Queen Noorjehan discovered that by adding some particular ingredients to the Paan and eating it gives a beautiful natural red colour to the lips. So along with it’s taste the Paan was eaten by women for reddening the lips.

What is a paan?

A Paan is a leaf from a creeper called the Paan creepers. There are different types of Paan creepers. These different types of Paan leaves are made into many different varieties of Paan by adding various different ingredients and then folding into triangular shaped Bidas.

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