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Newasa - Encountering an unique form of Vishnu, and Sant Jnaneshwar

The year was 1290 . A crowd had gathered around a clearing, where broken down pillars marked the presence of an ancient temple, now long gone. A young boy, just 14 years old, leaned against one of those pillars, deep in thought. Then, he began speaking, and the crowd fell silent, listening to his every word. He spoke without any notes, translating the Bhagavat Gita, from Sanskrit, which only the pundits knew, to the language everyone in the village knew and spoke – a variety of Prakrit which developed into the Marathi language. Even as he spoke, one of the men in the audience realized how momentous this event was, and how important this composition would be. He began writing down the words the young boy spoke, and this composition was named by its author and composer, the Bhavartha Deepika – the enlightening meaning (of the Bhagavat Gita). Now, the ancient, holy text, was no longer restricted to the pundits, but accessible to all, understood easily by them, composed as it was, in their...
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White Browed Wagtail

Udaipur, being a city of lakes, naturally attracts a lot of birds. However, considering that we were visiting the city in peak summer, I had little hope of seeing any birds. We might have missed the rarer ones, but there was no dearth of birds, even in the scorching summer heat, thanks to all the water in the lakes! Here is the first in the series of birds we saw on our summer vacation to Mount Abu and Udaipur.....



The White Browed Wagtail.....

The Fateh Sagar Lake at Udaipur had groups of them all over the place, though we couldn't get nearer....


At the Nakki Lake at Mount Abu, there were a couple we managed to approach without scaring them away!





Thanks to the close look we managed, we now know how to distinguish between the White Browed Wagtail and the Oriental Magpie Robin! But more about that in another post!!

Did you know that the zoological name for this bird is Motacilla Maderasapatensis - and that the name comes from the city of Madras? 


More Bird-related posts from my blog...
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Location: Rajasthan, India

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