thedawaring's blog

Ringing the New Year We are just 48 hours away from ringing in the brand new year 2014.  All of us are filled with hopes and aspirations that the New Year brings along. As for me, 2014 is the most awaited year in almost 4 years. I will be returning to my country after a long wait of four years. I will be visiting my beautiful village and meet simple and innocent villagers out there. I will be waking up in the 8 th happiest country in the world. I will be seeing the smile of happiness on my mother’s face after a real long time. This will be the year I pass out from my college. This year I will be interning at JDWNRH as a pharmacist. This year I will be writing Bhutan Civil service exams. 2014 is a life defining year for me. For the first time in my life I will start to work and earn and stand on my own feet. And I will also get a taste of all things Bhutan after a long Indian or rather Goan sojourn. I planned to bring in this exciting New Year with few old friends on t...

The impossible love story Every one of us has a story to narrate. This is my story.  I am Tensin Cinsel from Bhutan, a small Buddhist Kingdom in the Himalayas. I am a freelance photojournalist by profession.  I love photography more than anything in the world. Only and only the camera can put my mind to rest. I am crazy with this photography thing because when everything in the world dies, only photographs remain as a proof of our existence. I love travelling to different places and capturing its beauty. So, in the early months of 2009, I travelled to Sri Lanka as a part of my assignment. This was my maiden voyage to Sri Lanka. Little had I expect that my life would change forever after this fateful journey. Sri Lanka is a nation famed for serene smiles, happy greetings and helpful nature. My destination was a place called Kalawila, a town near the capital city Colombo. It is a place with very small population in the province of western Sri Lanka. One fine even...

The monk who laughed Many years ago when Lord Buddha was alive, there lived an enlightened monk named Katayana in a village in eastern India. One morning he set out around the village begging for alms as it was a common practice of Buddhist monks of that time. That same morning katayana happened to be at a house of a lady where she was having meal. He saw the lady eating boiled fish. She had a baby in her laps. She was so much caring and loving for the baby and breast feeding her with great love.  A poor skinny dog was trying to eat the bones of the fish that the lady had left behind. As the dog tried to eat the bones of fish, the lady got furious and beat the skinny dog mercilessly till it cried out of pain. The enlightened monk diligently observed all these events for a while and burst into series of laughter. The lady got irritated and decided to ask the monk , ‘why are you laughing so much without any reasons?’ The monk contemplated for a while and said,...

The concept of karma arises from the fact that everything in the universe is a product of interdependence. There is nothing that is not dependent on others for its existence. Interdependence is the nature of our existence. As I understand, karma literally means action in Sanskrit. Our own thoughts and actions translate into our being. If we perform good deed, then we get good results. If we do a bad action, then we have to bear the result for the bad action.  It is like if we sow rice seeds in the soil, we will be able to harvest rice only and we cannot expect maize sapling to germinate. As we commonly perceive , Karma is not something like a predetermined power that controls us. It is the consequences of our own thoughts and actions that we perform. In this way karma is in our own hand. In Buddhism , karma is classified into three different types. The first class of karma gives immediate results. For example, I said something bad to my friend in the morning. As a res...

Education in my village Not many years ago, people in my village had very little idea of what it really meant to be literate. Many of my village elders recall how they went about begging for authorities to pardon their children being enrolled for schooling. They would bribe the officials with oxen, pigs, chicken and the like so that they drop their children from needing to go to school and study. Back then children were meant to stay at home and help their parents in daily works. If anyone ever went to school, they would brand him as useless. This was some forty years ago. The notion gradually changed. The village folks began to realize that the only way for a better life is through education. I was fortunate enough to have born at a time when the dreaded notion was already changing. By the time I went to school, there were hundreds of children in my school from my village. Many of them dropped out due to some reason or the other. Some of us continued to manage till high school...

The Himalayan Days... I was born and brought up in a far flung village in the eastern part of the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan. Growing up in a lovely village on the mountains, my subconscious mind is filled with sweet memories of my childhood days. One of the memories I still vividly remember is watching the sun set over giant mountains of the eastern Himalayas.  I used to thoroughly enjoy the beauty of the dusk when the magnificent sun would sink behind the tall mountains. The sky would appear to me like a piece of painting: the thin whiff of clouds above the mountains would be colored in different shades due to scattering of sun light, a flock of sparrows would fly by above my head. On the mountain above, the monks at the monastery would blow conch shell while they burnt incense sticks to please the gods.  The sweet aroma of the incense sticks would gradually fill the whole valley downhill. I grew up believing that nature is the greatest artist.  Everythin...