Holiday Destination In India

Holiday Destination In India

An interesting and informative view of India.

Doubts

Visit destinations in order of recent interest:
Uruguay 19
Ecuador 17
India 13
Panama 13
Argentina 12

~ Do I lack the strength, energy, and alertness necessary for a solo foreign trip?
~ What am I looking for?
~ What is my motivation?
~ I'm pretty sure that part of my motivation is an ancient one of looking for a home. How sane is that?
~ I'm thinking of renting my JT place before I start. Does that make good sense.
~ Should I make a shorter trip to more expensive lands?

Patanjali

Information about Patanjali and his teachings are available in English.

I suspect that I can find his teachings valuable and his life interesting.

My notion is now that he was skilled in dance, grammar, and yoga.

Let me list a bit of what I think I know about about him. The following is mostly made up of guesses and fragments from a faulty memory:

• he flourished in India about 150 BC,
• he was a Sanskrit grammarian,
• he was a compiler and a knower,
• Nandhi Deva might have been his yoga teacher,
• he was probably a master of dance,
• He seems to have been interested in a meaningful and worthy life,
• he wrote a work on grammar which is still available
• he wrote a four part book on yoga which is still available.
• he seems to have a rational and intellectual approach to reality,
• his teaching and understanding seems experiential and supported by concrete referents.

As my interest, energy, and the fates permit I may post more on Patanjali with focus on his Yoga Sutras.

India Is Big

India is big in population, area, variety.....
My first hours of my only visit to India were spent lost on streets on the outskirts of Bombay. In a matter of hours I escaped to Sri Lanka. I enjoyed Sri Lanka.

I'll need a lot of help to make a pleasant stay in India.

My ignorance of the country is my biggest problem. I have thought to start by trying to research some cities smaller than Cennai/Madras.

For luck I've selected seven more or less at random:
Thirovagoor, Madurai, Lucknoow, Thanjavur, Jamshedpur, Vijayangara, Chandigarth.
I'd like to find a comfortable city with great air quality.

Long Foreign Stays

I may be becoming a city person in my old age. For example In Uruguay I would certainly living in Montevideo

In Ecuador I think, that as much as I used to love the beach, like to live inland not much lower than Cueca. So I'd probably live in Quito or Cueca.

In Colombia I think that now I'd rather live in Bogota than in Medellin.

The variety of services in cities seems very attractive to this old man now.

The third country on my stay list, after Ecuador and Uruguay, is India. I am ignorant enough of India to have no idea of which city in which to stay. Probably not it the three or four largest.
I was so frightened of the crowds on my approach to one of those cities that on my first day there I escaped to Sri Lanka. Now even the size of the Quebec City of Canada frightened me away so it is now surprise that my first day lost on the streets of Bombay was a fright.

In India I may need to be carried around in a basket by a guide for the first couple of weeks.

Around 1500 BC

There was notable seismic upheaval.

The Shang dynasty in China was in full career. Beginning with the Shang we have well documented history of China. Great bronze work was being done. A dictionary of 40,000 characters was printed.

Tin was being mined in England. Phoenicians transported tin from mines in England to places around the Mediterranean. Phoenicians became the predominant trading power in the Mediterranean area.

The library in the Hittite capital had tablets in eight languages.

The Rig- Veda was written in India.

Chiapas de Carzo, an early settlement in Mexico, was founded.

The Dorians conquered the Peloponesus of Greece.

Hammurabi, king of Babylon, published his famous law cod. The Hmmurabic code included guidelines for medical practices and permissible fees for surgeries and treatments. Babylonians were using highly developed geometry as a basis for astronomical measurements. The Zodiac was used as a teaching tool.

Amenemhet III had the Great Labyrinth of Egypt built. A first Suez canal was probably built at this time. Contraceptives were in use in Egypt. A series of labor strikes occurred at Thebes.

Speaking of Labyrinths, the first palace of Minos at Knossos, Crete was built. Minos palace had light and air shafts as well as bathrooms with running water.

Troy was.

Via Eden and Petra

Around 825 BC there was an active and well used camel caravan route form Yemen to Palestine which was probably more important than was the Palestine/Mesopotamia route. It not only moved balsam, myrrh, frankincense and other products of the area, but also goods from Africa and India.

The tourist destination of Petra was more important in this BC period as trade destination. Later the Romans thought the trade through Petra so that it became central to their Province of Arabia Petra.

Yemenis traveling that route may have been passing through Eden.

River Travel.

www.pandaw.com has been developing and pioneering expeditions on the rivers of Burma, Cambodia, Vietnam, Borneo, and India.

I'm no longer much for making these trips on my own. Still I am very capable of enjoying them with a reasonable and helpful companion.

"The Irrawaddy Flotilla Company 1865" is an adventure in itself. Check it out.

I'm willing to talk and I am still a good traveling companion for a person of some illumination interested in discovery.

Dwarka

Harriett got me to thinking of India, soo ....

Krishna was born in prison at Mathura and was smuggled out. As a teenager he returned to Mathura and killed Kamsa, the king; openinging the way for the old king, Ugrasena, to regain the thrown. Krishna and his Yadav clan became the de facto rulers.

Krishna was soon sent to Guru Sandipani's ashram to complete his education.

Kamsa's relatives and allies came to regain the thrown and Krishna returned to help his clan, but soon he and his clan had to retreat.

He retreated far and built a fabled city at Dwarka on the western coast of India. He built on the sunken ruins of of other important cities of even more ancient fable.

If we studied the texts of the Mahabhrata and of the Bhagwat Puran we might discover more or those fables.

Does my retelling seem true

Sailing, Sailing

Which Arabs traveled to India during the Roman Empire? Did they take Jesus or any of his disciples to India? Did you know that Arabs sailed around India to the southern tip of South East Asia to meet Chinese and Malay merchants there?

How many Arab or Semite civilization existed during the the times of the Greek and Roman empires? What might we learn by looking at their history? We might learn how they sailed farther than he than Columbus more than 1500 years before he sailed.
What did Columbus learn from them? How did he do that? What did those Arabs contribute to the Greeks and Romans by transporting inventions and thoughts from the Far East to them? How did the people of Ur of the Chaldese use sea routs Arab seaman used? From whom did the people of Ur learn their seamanship? Who did they teach? What do you care?

Okay. Why did the Seleucid army in Syria have elephants while the Ptolemies had none? How did their elephant technology differ from Hannibal's? How might we benefit from knowledge of those technologies? How might elephants benefit?

How have seagoing merchants differed from Pirates? How did seagoing English merchants handle the opium trade? the slave trade? How have we handled the banana trade?

Okay. Why didn't Anthony and Cleopatra complete their planned escape to India via the Red Sea after their defeat at Antuim? Who benefited by learning from their experience?

Some History

I like 'history' so much that I intend to put some talk of it on this blog. The problem is I don't know much. I don't know much history, I don't know many of its details or its lessons. I don't know what part of the subject you might find attractive. I do know a bit about some of the ways historical information has been organized and ways it has been presented.

I also have some idea about what I like. For example, I like it in the form of a good story, even accurate historical fiction. I even enjoy looking at a timeline. I also know that I tend to like he older stuff better. But the fact is I don't know much.

So, when someone says to me, "What about those Iranians!" I have grin to say "Yeah, how about those guys.!" I'd like to know more.

My hope is that you will tell me some bits of history here. Please don't wait for me to get you started. Just say what you know or what you'd like to know or what you have begun to find out or .... If you really know something you'd like to get across, you may find us surprisingly teachable.

To try to do my part to get started, I'll make a few comments and then ask some questions. If my efforts are laughable or a crying shame, please be kind, generous, and gentle. Feel free to nurture me into better ways.

Archaeologists have done a lot to help us fill in the historical record. I imagine them enjoying that work right now. I am grateful to those archaeologists who make the effort to help us understand their findings. The way they tell their story changes from person to person and from time to time. One telling might be stiff and unimaginative in an attempt at scientific honesty. Another might, in an attempt to breathe life into the story and give it heart, might let his (or her) effort at synthesis and interpretation wander into fantasy. A third telling might be just right. Archaeologists are human and a lot like historians.

Sociologists have helped in the interpretation of history, We may not yet have a clear language for describing human societies or for making statements concerning their cohesion. A sociologist might be working on stuff like that at this moment.

Here is a kind of bare bones beginning. Iranians moved out of a homeland north and east of the Black Sea about 2500 BC. It was a tow pronged movement. One prong headed into the Central Asia steppe. The other moved into the Indus an Ganges valleys of India. I believe that they were master horsemen.

When I think Danubians, I think Indo-Europeans. On linguistic grounds the Danubian culture represents the arrival and establishment of the Indo-Europeans in Central Europe.

Often a study of Western history is begun in classical Greece. The geographical area of those Greeks was the Greek Peninsula, the Aegean Islands, and Ionia. During the Greek colonization period the Carthaginians were the dominant sea power of their world. Guess they are closely related to the Phoenicians, pioneer seafarers of the Med. Phoenicians where very much like the inhabitants of the Syria and Lebanon of those days.

Appears we could use the help of persons who know something of linguistics and geography as well as about sociology and archaeology.

Here are questions which occur to me:
What's interesting about the "Iranian Plateau?"
What is a good story that features the Black Sea?
Did the Iranians have anything to do with the Helen whose face launched a thousand ships?
Who has dealt with the history of horsemanship in a fun way?
What wee the Danubians like?
What even remotely related to this stuff interests you?
What's the deal with Indo-Europeans?
What did the Carthaginians have to do with what is now Spain?
Who will tell us something about Ionia?