dimanche 21 septembre 2025

EARLY ONE MORNING IN FOR COCHIN ON THE LAST DAY OF THE JEWISH YEAR 5785

As the hotel faces the Arabian sea and the inlet into the backwaters of Kerala, nothing better than a morning walk. Even at that early hour, the walk along the sea/bay shore was busy with people of all ages, all religions.
Some older people had staked out a piece of the sidewalk near the ocean and has a BEACH HEALTH CLUB and you can see several of them doing power and cardio exercises. Good Luck to you, mates!
You tend to see older, 20s 30s and above , i suppose the younger ones are still sleeping. there is no shyness about exercising in public and all sorts of poses can be observed, some yogic and some particularly individualistic. 
Fishing boats are returning home and at one part of the beach, there is an active fish market. i am told that since the advent of mobile phones, the fisherman cell them on line before reaching back to the shores. you can get the freshest of the catches in this informal fish market
The Cochin inlet was formed or "split by the river" around 1341 AD due to heavy floods from the river Periyar, which caused the ancient harbor of Muziris to become silted and created a new, larger opening at Cochin. This natural event led to the decline of the older port and the rise of Cochin as a major trading center. 
The chinese fishing nets which are seen dotted along the estuaries were introduced by the greatest seafarer of the 14th Century, Admiral Zheng He who visited Cochin four times on his various voyages
While the young people follow the fashions of Dubai and the Gulf where a sizeable portions of the remittances come from, most of the people adhere to local forms of clothing, convenient and cool in this hot humid climate 
At a time of islamophobia in the west, it is a nice lesson to be learned from Cochin where Muslims, Hindus and Christians coexist and they celebrate each others festivals. While older women tend to wear distinctive muslim garbs, the younger ones are indistinguishable from the rest of the population in their way of dressing or speaking or education. There is no discrimination against muslim girls being educated.

At this early hour, most of the stalls and cafés were shuttered but this roadside stall whips out hot milk tea, like chai latte of the west. The owner gives a welcome nod and pours out a steaming hot glass tumbler of tasty tea. The price of this refreshing drink is only 10 indian rupees, which is like 10 cents in the dollar or euro! Starbucks with their labour exploitative practices will not survive in Fort Cochin!
Fort Cochin was colonized by the three maritime powers of the west, first by Portuguese, Vasco da Gama was here in 1505, then came the Dutch in the early part of the 17th century and followed by the British who ruled for over 150 years until the Independence of India in 1948. Each colonizer left their mark in architecture and you can see the distinctive european features in many of the surviving building. The above is a good example of the British Colonial Architecture.
This street which now houses some fancy cafés, is called Burgher street not after the famous american concoction but during the dutch times, many traders lived there. To the jewish population, who were mainly merchants, the Dutch were benevolent.
This was the home of the last of the leaders of the Jewish community which alas is no more in Fort Cochin. Mr Samuel Koder of Iraqi origins was a leading industrialist and philanthropist.
The prominent jewish merchant during the Dutch era was Ezekiel Rahabi, whose family had migrated here from Israel during the Dutch occupation of Cochin. There is a tale of Ezekiel donating wood for the green mosque of mattancherry.

  • t was built as a residence for the Dutch governor, Hendrick Adrian Van Rheede, or to accommodate soldiers.

I arrived back to the hotel which is also built during the time of Dutch occupation of Fort Cochin
Who was waiting for me at the entrance, but Gunpati, the Ellegua of Hindus, the spirit that opens the doors for you. A good metaphor of welcome for me . Gracias

🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵

🔵 🌟💫🌙💫🌟🔵

🔵🔵🕊 🔵🕊 🔵🔵

🔵   Ꮭ’ᎦᎻᎧNᎯ    🔵

🔵       ᎢᎧᏌᎯ        🔵

🔵 🍎🐝🍯🐝🍎🔵

🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵

HAPPY 5786
PEACE FOR ALL THE PEOPLE ON EARTH 
AS MOTHER TERESA SAID : WE DEFINE OUR FAMILIES TOO NARROWLY. LET US EMBRACE HUMANITY. 

dimanche 14 septembre 2025

UPPER CLASS BUT HOMELESS. NOSTALGIA FOR IRAN

🕌 Nostalgia for Iran | دلتنگی برای ایران


مقدمه | Introduction


فارسی

امروز، یکشنبه‌ای در ایالات متحده است. صاحب‌خانه به ساحل رفته و من توانستم از سکوت خانه لذت ببرم.

اما این سکوت، پر بود از مهربانی‌هایی که از ایران می‌تراوید.


English

Today, being a Sunday in the United States, and with the owners of the house gone to the beach, I could finally enjoy the silence.

But that silence was filled with tenderness—a tenderness that seemed to pour in from Iran.


ایران و فرهنگ | Iran and Culture


فارسی

ایران کشوری است دورافتاده از جهان غرب، اما جایی که عاطفه و محبت را در بی‌پیرایه‌ترین شکل می‌توان یافت.

هرگاه سخن از ایران به میان می‌آید، همواره یاد فرهنگ آن می‌افتیم، چه گذشته و چه امروز.

امروز نیز از این قاعده مستثنی نبود. به آهنگ‌های محسن یگانه گوش می‌دادم؛

آهنگی که بیش از آن‌که موسیقی باشد، شعر و فلسفه بود. و البته به یاد فرامرز اصلانی افتادم…


English

Iran is a country so isolated from the Western world, yet one where affections are expressed in the most innocent and genuine way.

When one speaks of Iran, there is always mention of its culture, past and present.

Today was no exception. I found myself listening to Mohsen Yeganeh—his popular song, more poetry and philosophy than music.

And, of course, remembering Faramarz Aslani…




شعر | Poem


فارسی


سفر کردم که یابم بلکه یارم را

نجستم یار و گم کردم دیارم را


از آن روزی که من بار سفر بستم

به هر جایی که رفتم در به در هستم


فراموشم مکن من یار دیرینه‌ام

بیا، خالیست جای تو به بالینم

تو را در خواب‌های خویش می‌بینم


در آغوشم بگیر، از خود رهایم کن

گرفتار سکوتم، من صدایم کن

میان روزهای خویش جایم کن


English


I traveled, hoping to find my friend.

I found no friend—and lost my homeland.


Since the day I set out on this journey,

Wherever I have gone, I remain homeless.


Do not forget me, I am your old friend.

Come—your place is empty beside me.

I see you in my dreams.


Hold me in your arms, free me from myself.

I am a prisoner of silence—call me.

Give me a place in the days of your life.


تأمل | Reflection


فارسی

این شاید بهترین توصیف از وضعیت کنونی من باشد:

اشراف‌زاده، اما بی‌خانمان.


English

This, perhaps, summarizes my current situation:

Upper class, yet homeless.


samedi 6 septembre 2025

THE MAGNET OF ALLIGATOR ALCATRAZ

The Magnet of Alligator Alcatraz


In Suriname, where the rivers coil like emerald serpents and the rain falls so thick it erases the line between sky and earth, there lived a doctor whose life was no longer his own but a caravan of other people’s illnesses. He traveled with a satchel of remedies through Cambodia, where monks whispered sutras to the fevered; through India, where the sacred cows walked more freely than the poor; through Colombia, where the air itself carried both healing and plague; and through the United States, where his hands were received like miracles but his foreign heart was regarded with suspicion.


Yet no medicine he carried could cure the one affliction that gnawed at his ribs like a hidden animal: the yearning for a girl in Iran who spoke Persian poetry as if her lungs were bellows of fire and roses. She was unnamed in the ledgers of governments but unforgettable in the night registers of his soul. When she recited Hafez, the verses traveled across the telephone wires like caravans of stars, and the doctor, wherever he stood—in the flooded villages of Cambodia, in the clinics of Colombia, or on the highways of America—felt himself transformed into a disciple of syllables older than empire.


It was then that he devised a plan so outrageous that it could only belong to the delirium of history itself: he would send her an intravenous injection of iron, secret and invisible in her veins, and then, from the swamps of Florida, he would purchase a magnet so powerful it could bend not only blood and bone but also borders and bureaucracies. The magnet would call to her like destiny, pulling her across mountains and deserts, through the dust of Anatolia and the waves of the Atlantic, until she arrived weightless, a flying verse, descending over Miami like a prayer answered by physics.


But fate is a scavenger bird that feasts on miracles. The Iranian police, who mistrusted poetry more than they mistrusted arsenals, discovered the plot. They declared it not love but contraband, not yearning but smuggling, and in their declaration the Americans found an echo. Since no Iranian citizen could enter the United States, the courts accused him of trafficking in Muslim souls, as if affection itself were a species of slavery.


He was condemned without trial to the most improbable of prisons: Alligator Alcatraz, a detention fortress raised on a swamp so humid that the walls perspired and so vast that the silence was interrupted only by the laughter of crocodiles who had once been men. It was said that the swamp itself conspired with the prison, that the mangroves twisted their roots into the foundations, and that the alligators, bloated on bureaucratic despair, recited Rumi when the moon was full.


On the night of his arrival, the doctor lifted his voice in anguish, and the inmates swore they heard the cry ricochet across the cypress groves:

“If I go to Iran, it is Evin Prison for me! And here—it is the Alligator Alcatraz!”

The words rose like smoke and clung to the ceilings, and the guards, unable to sweep them away, claimed they dripped from the rafters in the mornings like dew.


Soon, other marvels occurred. The magnet, which had been smuggled into his cell inside a box of medical supplies, began to hum at night, as though trying to remember the girl’s pulse. The air thickened with invisible currents, pulling the nails from the walls and dragging the cutlery across the dining hall. Inmates woke with the sensation that their hearts were leaning eastward, toward Shiraz.

TH

And then came the stories. Some prisoners swore they saw the girl herself hovering over the swamp, her body luminous with iron, suspended in the humid sky like a saint reluctant to descend. Others claimed that the alligators rose from the water, not to devour but to chant verses of Saadi, their jaws moving in solemn cadence. Even the swamp insects seemed to buzz in meter, repeating over and over a single line: “Beyond the prison walls lies the garden of poetry.”


The doctor, however, was never freed. He remained suspended between two prisons—Evin, which awaited him in one country, and Alligator Alcatraz, which swallowed him in another—forever condemned not for his medicine but for believing that a magnet could collapse the distances of exile, bend the bars of nations, and make love fly across the sky like a migrating bird who refuses to recognize the frontiers of men.


And the swamp remembers. On nights when the moon is round and the air trembles with heat, the waters of Alligator Alcatraz ripple as though stirred by an invisible force, and the alligators raise their snouts to the stars and recite, in broken but tender Persian, the verses of a girl who was never permitted to arrive.


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