October 05 is International Teachers Day. In India we celebrate it on Sept 05. I guess I’m one of those geeky people who is a perpetual student. I loved school! And later, I also loved being a teacher (I taught Biology) and wanted my students to love school. So for Teacher’s Day I thought I must write a piece for my teachers who taught me some of my most valuable lessons on life and living. See the article here on Youth ki Awaaz: 5 Very Important Lessons on Life and Living I Learnt from My Teachers
All posts tagged life
What My Teachers Taught Me About Life!
Posted by Rita Banerji on October 10, 2013
https://ritabanerjisblog.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/what-my-teachers-taught-me-about-life/
Will Kim Kardashian Modernize #Placenta Eating?
The reason I’m taking a curious interest in Kim Kardashian’s plans to eat her placenta, is because I’m actually keen to see how American doctors react to this. And there’s a reason why.
One of my oldest and closest friends is Hmong American. The Hmong are an ethnic minority from SE Asia, and live in an extensive community in mid-western USA, a community which I’ve visited frequently with my friend when I stayed with her parents or relatives. My friend’s mother was a shaman, and she worked with local hospitals translating concepts of health, illness and healing from the Hmong perspective for American doctors with Hmong patients, and vice versa.
Giving birth in ancient Egypt
When a woman gives birth, the Hmong believe that the placenta should be carefully buried under or near the family house, because it holds and guards the spirit of the child. They believe that if this is not done, then the child will fall very ill and could even die. There are many cultures that have similar beliefs. The Egyptians believed that a child is born with two souls, and one of them was housed in the placenta. So after birth, particularly for royalty, a special tomb would be erected for the burial of the placenta, like for a person. Interestingly where placenta was or still is eaten, as in China, Jamaica, and among smaller tribes as the Araucaninan of Argentina, it is usually ceremonially eaten by close relatives or fed to the child. This is symbolic of the same philosophy – i.e. preserving the spirit of the child within the home or by the family.
The problem for the Hmong living in the U.S. was, that American doctors couldn’t fathom this. They believed that the Hmong were actually eating the placenta (though they actually weren’t)! Placenta-eating is not (more…)
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Posted by Rita Banerji on August 25, 2013
https://ritabanerjisblog.wordpress.com/2013/08/25/will-kim-kardashian-modernize-placenta-eating/
Lessons from the Coconut in My Garden!
A garden is a grand teacher ~ Gertrude Jekyll
A coconutty breakfast this week – straight from my garden to my breakfast table. I am lucky to have a garden, even if tiny, in this very polluted and congested city. We are even luckier that there are many fruits in this garden – coconut, guava, mango, a wild banana, rose apple, papaya, and jackfruit, that actually bear fruit!
So one morning I woke up to find a man climbing up the coconut tree outside my window at 6 am! Occasionally, when the tree can’t hold on to its load of coconuts, the management of the building hires a man from the village, who shins up the tree like a monkey in two minutes and cuts down the coconuts. We have to keep the ground clear because he just hurls them down. Then all of us in the building get a few coconuts each. This time they had 40 or so! I thought that was very productive for one tree, in a hostile urban climate!
I had a lovely breakfast: fresh coconut juice, chilled in a glass in the fridge (it has been 40°C and I like it that way), and the soft, white flesh, which is called shaans, usually of gelatinous consistency and very sweet, scooped out from the inside. Botanically the coconut is actually the embryo of the plant; the white flesh is the equivalent of the placenta, and the water, well, it is the amniotic fluid! I taught biology, and I used to love to see the expressions on my students faces when I explained the same with things they all ate, like tomatoes, cucumber and other fruits 🙂
coconut flesh, soft gelatinous scooped out – yum!
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Posted by Rita Banerji on May 10, 2013
https://ritabanerjisblog.wordpress.com/2013/05/10/lessons-from-the-coconut-in-my-garden/
When Trees Could Walk Like People
How do we introduce our children to the world – the larger world outside the home and family? How do we explain to them what this world is and what their connection to it is? Probably it is through the stories we tell them via books and movies. I haven’t seen or read any Harry Potters yet, but I’m guessing by their popularity, that they are defining the world for millions of kids. And sometimes I wonder in what way?
When I was a child, one of my favorite authors was Ruskin Bond. I would devour his books. He lived in Dehradun, a small town in northern India, in the Himalayan foothills. There are many writers who live in rural surroundings and their writings bring forth their love of nature. But I think that Ruskin Bond’s writings struck a chord in me as a child, in that it revealed to me a joyous, nurturing—and very importantly—a personal connection that I as a child could seek and find with the larger natural world around me.
Recently, I re-read many of his books, a sort of nostalgic reading trip down a childhood memory lane. And what I realized was that what Ruskin Bond did for me as a child with his writings was what his father did for him when he was a child!! He had simply passed on to me the myths, stories and visions of the world that he had inherited from his father. I think as loved as Harry Potter is, Ruskin Bond should probably be made compulsory reading for all school children in India! I’m happy to say, he still lives and writes about the natural world he loves and invites his readers to share in it!
Here’s one of my favorite passages, an excerpt from his short story ‘My Father’s Trees in Dehra,’ [From the collection of stories, Dust on The Mountains]
Most of fruit trees around the house were planted by Father. But he was not content with planting trees in the garden. On rainy days we would walk beyond the riverbed, armed with cuttings and sampling, and then we would amble through the jungle planting flowering shrubs between the sal and shisham trees. “But no one ever comes here,” I protested the first time. “Who is going to see them?” (more…)
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Posted by Rita Banerji on July 14, 2011
https://ritabanerjisblog.wordpress.com/2011/07/14/there-was-a-time-when-trees-could-walk-about-like-people/
My Memory of An Assassination
It is strange, how sometimes our memory of a public tragedy is sustained by a totally unconnected personal experience. So it has been for me with Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination by a suicide bomber 20 years ago.
At the time I lived in Washington DC, and shared an apartment with a Taiwanese friend in the suave Foggy Bottom neighbourhood. Every morning at 7, I would sit at the breakfast table and watch people stream into the city to work in stiff grey and black suits, striding briskly, decisively, towards their destination. Each strider maintained an impervious bubble of personal space, taking care never to collide bubbles or intrude into another. And in-between the bubbles was the city’s uninhabited space: organised, methodical, clinically sterile….
Early morning on 21 May in 1991, my roommate, came rushing to my bed, newspaper in hand. “Look, an African woman has killed your prime minister!” Still disoriented, I scanned the front page trying to avoid the gory photo there. “He was not our current PM and she is not African…” Read the whole article here in The Times of India
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Posted by Rita Banerji on May 24, 2011
https://ritabanerjisblog.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/my-memory-of-an-assassination/
REVOLUTIONS IN MY SPACE: A BLOG BY RITA BANERJI 