Student Paintings

The department I am in is in the film and art department, so we are treated to music rehearsals and recitals, sketches and paintings, 2-D and 3-D art.  The following are paintings from a theme on tea.  A favourite one.  And very special to asia.  All the following paintings are student paintings.  

A monk with a tea cup. 

Tea Plantation

Fika, usually with coffee is such an important aspect of Swedish culture!!  But here I guess, the 'teapot' represents tea!!

This was a photograph, but obviously altered for effect.  Women and Fika. Following are the notes with the images. In this picture as the following placard states, the photographers wanted to show people eating different kinds of food and drink, vegetarian, and fast-food included. 

Books or Movies?

Sake containers at a Shrine in Tokyo

Another post only for the link.  Are the books better than the movies? Can we make movies as good as books?  Should books adapt the movies completely? 

https://swarajyamag.com/culture/when-we-cant-say-which-is-better-the-movie-or-the-book

Enjoy, as I use this space to book mark the article and read it later. 

“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?” 

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.” 

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.” 
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.” 

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite a word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.” 
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.” 
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The New Village Idiom

So, the image has nothing to do with what I am going to add here, and its more for me, than the readers.  But the readers are welcome to read.  The article New Village Idiom, written by an Indian economist is trying to explain how India is not as rural or as backward, as it has been made out to be. Granted about 70% of Indians live in rural areas, primarily involved in farming, compared to nearly 21% in the US, but looking at definitions of what it means to be rural or urban....the author, Prof. Bibek Roy (also a prolific author on culture), highlights that villages can be further classified and that larger villages perform pretty much 'like urban towns'--thereby blurring the lines between rural and urban.