Tiny tots on huge mountains
BARODA: Twelve-year-old Bhavika Shah was among the 300 children of Baroda who recently came back from a trekking trip to the Himalayas and, like the others, enjoyed every bit of the adventure.
But, beaming as the memories of the expedition flood her mind and yearning for more, she says one day she will go back – to climb the Everest. For a girl not yet in her teens, her determination and precocious declaration is at once disarming and stunning.
Her first step up the mighty Everest will be an advanced course this Diwali vacations in the Gujarat Mountaineering Institute at Mt. Abu.
“I loved everything we did: rock climbing, rappelling, river rafting, snow trekking,” says Bhavika, the standard VII student of Utkarsh Vidyalaya, of her experiences 10,500 feet above sea level during the fortnight-long trip from May 28 to June 15. “My parents always encourage me to go on such expeditions and this was my seventh,” she adds, all under the tutelage of Harshad Pandya, the man who runs the Nature Adventure and Sports Institute here.
This particular expedition, with its base camp 2000 feet above Manali at Solang, has benefitted in “giving us courage, strength and endurance: many times we would have to walk in the dark on the edge of a dangerous precipice where a mere slip of the feet would take you down to the depths of the abysmal depths of a ravine. And we didn’t fall,” the thrill in her voice unmistakable as she says it.
Jigna Patel, 16 and from the same school, loved the “greenery, the snow, so much nature….everything”. She is a few steps ahead of Bhavika, having completed three courses from the institute in Mt. Abu and, come May again, she will be off to do her Ice Basic course in the Institute of Mountaineering and Allied Sports in Manali.
Three other children – Visesh Kavi, Manthan Mehta and Anil Govil – completed the 26-day course during the camp itself, which, for six batches of 50, lasted about a month and a half.
From 10-year-old Vishal Kamal to 18-year-old Murtaza K Railwala, the expedition has inspired many of the participants to do the basic and advanced courses at one of the three institutes recognised by the Indian Mountaineering Foundation in Delhi: The Nehru Institute of Mountaineering in Uttarkashi, Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Darjeeling and the one in Manali.
Pandya, himself a mountaineer whose highest conquest is the Kun peak (23,300 feet) in Ladakh, regularly organises such expeditions, mostly the short duration variety to Pavagadh, Ratanmahal forests and nearby places. But during the summer vacations, he organises the more adventurous ones, like the one to the Himalayas this year.
He says as more children do the advanced courses from the three institutes, and thereby qualify to become instructors, the quicker will the spirit of adventure spread in the region, which was his dream when he started his adventure institute here.
Discovery Channel sweeps children off their feet
BARODA: Yashvir Singh once saw a butterfly on a tree in his backyard and to his young and imaginative mind it appeared to be behaving “rather funnily.”
On closer observation he realised with delight that it was laying eggs.
Promptly he marked those leaves on which the eggs were laid by piercing toothpicks into them, and over the next three to four weeks savoured every moment of watching them grow, through the stages of their transformation into caterpillars and pupae, into butterflies.
For him it was a real experience of what he had already learnt in school.
Yashvir was nine then. Eleven now, the nature lover, with his younger brother Shivraj, took a rare initiative on World Environment Day last week getting 50 like-minded children in the neighbourhood to sign an appeal to their local cable operator requesting him to show Discovery Channel 24 hours a day, even as the whole country laps up the film and soap fare dished out by the satellite invasion.
The kid brothers, who seldom have breakfast without Shelly, not the poet but their pet tortoise, on the dining table with their whole family, lament the fact that the cable operator is very whimsical in showing Discovery Channel – between movies as fillers.
“He shows four movies every day and another one at night,” they say, vexed and revealing a disposition refreshing for its being so odd.
The programmes they like to watch are Untamed Africa, Wild Life, Beyond 2000 and Cats but hardly ever get a chance to see them fully.
All the children who have signed the appeal say they like to watch the Discovery Channel but do not get to see enough of it because it is not shown round the clock like other channels.
Shashwat Jaykumar, a 12-year-old student of Rosary School, says, “We.” speaking also for his younger brother Shashank, “used to miss Discovery Channel when we used to return from school and switch on the TV to watch it. We would at best get half-an-hour before the operator either put a movie or some local advertisements. He tampers in this way only with the Discovery Channel, not any other, when this is the one we are most interested in.”
Mario and Louis Menezes of Rosary School say, “We felt very happy that being so small we were trying to take a big step to make our cable operator show Discovery Channel. We felt very excited at the idea of signing the appeal because we like the channel so much and want to see more of it.”
Vaishal R Bhatt, the 11-year-old from Basil School, says she likes the channel and all the programmes that come on it very much and therefore immediately signed the appeal when Yashvir came to their house with it. Her younger sister Karishma, who goes to the Convent School, sits by and smiles coyly in agreement.
Forum V Chhaya, 12, of Baroda High School, Alkapuri, has seen the programmes on the channel and likes them but wishes “they would come all the time.” Megha H Mehta, of Alembic Vidyalaya, is also of the same opinion.
However, the idea itself came from Yashvir’s father, who was as upset about the cable operator’s lack of fancy for the Discovery Channel as his kids. He told Yash and Shiv on the eve of the World Environment Day that they ought to organise the support of other children in the colony and together make an appeal to the cable operator.
Both kids leapt at the idea and, having drafted the appeal, also with “some help” from their father, spent the next day visiting the houses of all their friends in the colony to gather support. During the process they realised that almost all the children felt the same way about the channel as they did and were just as annoyed as them at the cable operator.
When three of them – Yashvir, Shivraj and Urjit Parikh – took the appeal to the cable operator Saumil Desai on the morning of June 6, he was not at home, so they gave it to a lady in the house who promised to hand it over to Saumil.
The appeal by the children, all 50 of them aged between eight and 15, reads: “Today on World Environment Day, we the children of Pashabhai Park earnestly request you to operate Discovery Channel full-time. The channel is very informative and educative on environment and scientific subjects. Hence on this day we suggest you take a sensible and meaningful stride to help us get more knowledge and awareness about our surroundings and this earth.”
Saumil, with a network of 300 connections in Pashabhai Park alone, claims he shows 25 channels, and Discovery Channel 24 hours a day in the broadband range, which most TVs without a cable-ready tuner cannot receive, and fills up the blank spaces with it on his movie channel.
He cannot switch the Discovery Channel to one of the prime channels, he says, as he is only a franchisee of Telecable, the network which has four other franchisees with more than 2000 connections, and the consent of all of them will have to be taken. He also claims to have called a meeting of all the franchisees and hopes to resolve the matter in a week’s time.
But if he does not start showing the channel full-time, the children plan to go to his house en masse and appeal again.
Parents Malti and Ajit Singh Gaekwad have played no mean role in instilling the love of nature in their children, both already life members of the Society for Clean Environment (SOCLEEN).
Says their mother: “We use to take Yash to the zoo every month since he was three months old till he was a year old and as frequently as possible after that. We use to tell him, and later Shiv, all the things we knew about the animals we saw there. We also show them movies with a lot of wild life on the video and subscribe to the National Geographic.”
The Gaekwad family’s love for nature is not restricted to keeping harmless pets; they have a ferocious boxer and, in a glass box layered with sand and pebbles, a scorpion. Her husband “caught it on the road” for Malti, who comes from the mountains of Kashmir, because she is a Scorpio by birth and had never actually seen a scorpion.
They tell all who come to their house that, like snakes, scorpions too are harmless creatures and mind their own business unless provoked, and fail to understand why the first impulse should be to kill them. They are maintaining a list of people who have never seen a scorpion or touched an animal.
Besides, they have snails in their garden and rabbits – bought from the Shukrawari Bazaar, the local flea market – in the backyard. But as the snails used to ruin the garden eating up every green thing they saw and the rabbits multiplied too fast, they gave them all away as birthday presents to their children’s friends.
But a house can have only so many animals and only so much nature, and to broaden their knowledge of the earth and its environment the children want to watch the Discovery Channel.
Saumil Desai, however, sounded dubious when he promised to do something about it and whether the efforts of 50 children who wish to learn more about nature, instead of just watching meaningless movies and soap shows, bear fruit is yet to be discovered.
The sorry state of a once bustling cricket stadium
AHMEDABAD: The thoroughfare outside is so busy it’s a pain crossing the road on foot, and flanked on one side of it is the Sports Club of Gujarat, one of the most thriving, one of the most happening clubs in the city, swanky cars parked bumper-to-bumper in its compound.
Inside on the ground of the Sardar Patel Stadium (Navrangpura) there’s an eagle standing on the newly sprouted outfield turf, thanks to a bountiful monsoon, once in a while listlessly pecking the ground and gazing around. A little distance away there are four or five mainas hopping on a freshly and obviously reluctantly sheared portion of the outfield, an unattended mower lying near one of the mounds of cut grass.
The stands are layered with rancid algae and foliage springs to life between joints in the concrete. The white paint chipping off it, the picket fence is falling to pieces. A chilly monsoon breeze whistles eerily on a fresh morning.
Up in the sky, half a dozen eagles glide around in circles, like vultures waiting for life to seep out of a decrepit body they can gorge on. They’ve been hovering up there for as long as one can remember, witnessing several masala matches played by half-baked cricketers, undaunted by the thanklessness of the effort. The stadium is in a perennial state of coma.
Sad part of it is it wasn’t always like this. The ground has hosted a Test match against England under Kieth Fletcher, and several first class tour games. A former Test cricketer, Deepak Shodhan swears it used to have a very sporting wicket, which has gone to ruin now – on Thursday one couldn’t tell the wicket from the outfield – so that if one ball whizzes past your ears, the next one skids past your shins, going generally haywire.
“It’s in a sorry state,” says Shodhan, “they should have improved the infrastructure, but they’ve done nothing. They should have better and bigger dressing rooms, separate umpires’ rooms, media boxes and all, but there’s nothing.”
Even the groundsman, who wishes to remain anonymous, who prepared the seven wickets on the centre square and nine-plus practice wickets on the outfield four decades ago agrees. “I haven’t stepped on the ground for years and tears well up in my eyes when I see its condition now,” he says.
It’s a ground from which the careers of Mohammed Azharuddin and Ravi Shastri took off when they were still playing junior cricket, and the likes of Clive Lloyd, Alvin Kallicharan, Richard Hadlee, Sarfraz Nawaz have all praised the wicket during their time. The groundsman produces the accolades penned by them on yellowing letter-pad papers, many of them smudged indecipherably from the flood that inundated the stadium two years ago.
The ground used to be a place brimming with cricketing activity, and Jasu Patel, a late Test cricketer, during the late 1980s went on a hunger strike because the ground was sometimes put to use for activities other than cricket. They say Rajiv Gandhi requested him to end his hunger strike and the corporation gave him an assurance that the ground would be used in the future only for cricket.
But Jasu Patel is no more, and there seem to be no more cricketers with the same grit and conviction to go on another hunger strike, for the ground is now used more for other things – star nights, political speeches and election victory celebrations – and less for cricket.
“There are no toilet facilities for the public,” says the groundsman, “and whenever there is a function, I have seen people just turning their backs and relieving themselves right on the ground. The next morning it stinks so bad, they have to spray bleaching powder and DDT.”
There was a project to build an indoor stadium in its expansive backyard, for which LK Advani laid the foundation stone more than a decade ago. The second stone is yet to be laid. Has the project been abandoned? “Not exactly, it is pending but we have no funds,” says deputy municipal commissioner Dilip Mahajan, under whose jurisdiction the stadium falls.
Why aren’t offices of any sports associations, except the Gujarat Cricket Association and a regional sub-coaching centre of the Sports Authority of India, housed in it? Is there a policy of letting out space to sports associations, or on not letting it out? “There is no policy, let them apply and we shall see,” says Mahajan.
Meanwhile, the vultures lay in wait for the stadium to die a natural death, so to speak.
Cricketer faces his worst defeat – at the hands of destiny
Bhavin Mahta received a letter from the Gujarat Cricket Association that he was selected to represent the state in the Ranji Trophy days after his daughter was born seven years ago, but she did not see her father leading Gujarat in more than one match, brutally crushed under the debris, along with her mother, that their apartment complex Shikhar was reduced to in the earthquake on that Black Friday.
Used to waking up early for his daily practice, Bhavin, who made his debut as Gujarat captain in the last match of the season against Vadodara which ended on New Year’s Day, could not stay in bed later than 7.30 am on the fateful day, even though he had gone off to sleep watching TV the night before, tired after playing a Gordhandas Cup match on January 24 and 25.
Having heated the milk, he made himself some tea and read the newspaper before deciding, at 8.45 am, to leave his third floor flat, into which he moved only in May last year with his wife Ashmi and daughter Tithi, to buy some hair dye, which saved him – but separated him from his small family forever.
“Tithi had woken up. I switched on the TV for her and gave her the remote control, and before leaving I thought of waking up Gopi (as he fondly used to call his wife Ashmi at home) but decided against it as it was a holiday,” says a stone-faced Bhavin, now back with his father and elder brother in their home in Khadia in the walled city.
The all-rounder, one of the most feared and respected off-spinners in the West Zone, decided to walk it to the shop scarcely 50 metres away, instead of taking the Scooty as he always did, and thinks it was a fatal mistake. “If I had decided to take the Scooty, it would have taken some time to start, and I might have been able to rush back upstairs and do something to save them,” he laments.
But as fate would have it, as soon as he bought the pack of hair dye and stepped out of the shop, he felt the ground wobbling, and, looking up, he couldn’t believe what he saw. The 10-story building was crumbling down, “as if a floor was being chopped off at a time.” Bhavin was stupefied, his mind went blank, and he just didn’t know what to do.
When he stumbled to a pay phone, he couldn’t remember the number of his home.
It took some recollecting, but he managed to inform his father, and then began his torturous wait for the bodies to be recovered, hoping against hope that Tithi, whom he had left on the sofa, would somehow be saved under it.
Both were in different rooms, and when the bodies were being extracted, Bhavin kept looking from one side of the debris to the other, but exactly 12 hours later they were found – clutching each other.
“Either Tithi had run to Gopi or Gopi had run to Tithi,” says Bhavin, almost in tears, “and they had almost reached the drawing room door, because they were lying very close to it.”
The 32-year-old veteran of 39 Ranji matches, in which he had scored 1,144 runs and taken 67 wickets, says his wife and daughter used to encourage him to play to the exclusion of everything else. Gopi, herself a working woman, would tell him not to worry about home or anything, and Tithi, every time she used to watch Sachin or Kambli on TV, used to say, “Papa, your friends, your friends.”
Once when Bhavin, an employee of Bank of India, insisted on not playing a local match, guilty that he was not spending enough time with his family, “Gopi complained to Harshang (his elder brother) and together they persuaded me to go and play.”
“My daughter was so lucky for me,” says Bhavin, “that whenever she came to watch me playing, my performance has always been extraordinary. In the recent Metal Trophy final against Central Bank of India, Tithi came to see me playing and I notched up figures of 6-2-10-5.”
Pressing problems!
Rohit Joshi
VADODARA, April 6: It was nothing short of pandemonium in the press box, if it can be called that, in the media tower of the IPCL cricket ground during the India-Zimbabwe match on Sunday, compelling outstation journalists to send a one-line memorandum to the secretary of the Board of Control for Cricket in India JY Lele.
``Are we sitting in a public gallery or a press enclosure? Please clarify,'' read the laconic memo fired by 17 scribes who were unable to concentrate on their work due to the unending chaos.
There were evidently too many people in the enclosure brandishing `press passes' who had come only to watch the match, and enjoy it, but not to report it. And with no barricade separating them from the public gallery into which the enclosure extends, with a common entrance and exit for both, the problem was only aggravated.
Scribes not only had to bulldoze they way through the entrance whenever they had to go to the toilet a floor below, but had to constantly yell at the noisy public to keep quiteand let them work. The scorer, who announces all the statistical data, was hardly audible.
At the instance of his colleagues, a heftily built local scribe had to physically stand guard at the entrance for most of the duration of the match to prevent unauthorised persons from entering the press box.
When it transpired that it was the IPCL officials who had in fact issued the passes, the jurnos were livid. ``When the Baroda Cricket Association is organising the match,'' said one of them, ``what business does the IPCL have to issue passes? We will not let the Board allot a match to Vadodara in the future. We've done that to Ahmedabad before, and we can do it to Vadodara.''
Lele blamed the IPCL authorities for the mess the journos found themselves in the thick of. ``The IPCL authorities have issued too many passes to the newspapers, when only those covering the match should have been given passes,'' he said. There were some newspapers that had as many as 10 ``representatives'' present in the press box.
Hedid not spare the scribes either. ``It is your fault as well. Why should reporters who are not covering the match enter the press box at all? And then I get this,'' he said, fishing out the memorandum from his pocket. He added that a local paper's owner had called him up and demanded 150 passes, and that he had to tell him, quite curtly, that there were only 120 seats in the press box.
IPCL officials said it was the BCA, of which also Lele is the secretary, who had said they ``wanted only the ground and the wicket and wanted us to manage everything else''. And Lele said the opposite thing, that IPCL officials said they would manage everything else.
The matter is still unclear, but it was the sports scribes who were caught in the crossfire.
---- The Indian Express – Thursday, April 7, 1998
Dance your way to fitness
Every man wants good health and fitness, but it is only the rare one who is willing to do what it takes to be fit:Exercise. Of course there are sportsmen, body builders and others whose bread and butter depends directly on their being physically strong and possessing great stamina. But at the end of the day, there is no work – absolutely no work – in this world which does not require you to be in good health, which is why it is said that health is wealth. But exercise? Nah! Nobody wants to do it. “It’s such a pain,” is the common refrain.
And this is where dance comes in. Whether it is Kathakali or break-dance, or for that matter Gangam Style, it makes exercise fun.
Moreover, dance is a far more immersive experience than any other exercise can be, because apart from physical health it imparts the dancer an aesthetic beauty and, when done with the full involvement of the body and soul, it is said in folklore that dance can even lead to God realisation. Such is the power of dance.
But that is the spiritual aspect of dance, and is altogether a different subject. Materially also, any form of dance is a great exercise to stay healthy and fit, because in it almost every part of the body gets toned up. And good fitness is the key to reducing the risk of injury, improving productivity at work, and improving concentration. A dancer is healthy in both body and mind, and develops the ability to meet the demands of a specific physical or intellectual task at optimal levels.
Research studies have shown that students who dance on a regular basis perceived positive physiological changes, such as reduction in fatigue, improvement in general energy levels and improved concentration levels while studying and working. Research has also laid emphasis on the aspects of warm-up before dancing and cooling down after the dance session to prevent illness and injury. So do take care of these things before you go full throttle.
Last but not least is the fact that the more you dance, the fitter and healthier you become, and the fitter you become, the better you dance. And the best part is that the better you dance, not only does it give pleasure to you, but it also has the capacity to transport the beholder into another zone. Dance is therefore a pleasurable exercise both for the dancer and the one who is watching. And, who knows, the one who is watching too may get sufficiently inspired to start dancing himself or herself. After all, who doesn’t know that dance is an infectious exercise.
Writer's block is only an excuse for not writing
In this world there is genius – and there is perspiration. The good news is, as you may have frequently heard, genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. If you dig into the history of humankind, you can come up with hundreds of thousands of examples of the veracity of the above saying. This is true as much in the case of a writer as it is in the case of a painter, or for that matter, in the case of a potter. Only, when it comes to a writer, you tend to call it a writer’s block. You keep searching for excuses not to do the 99 percent hard work which is needed to bring that one percent of genius to fruition.
So, when you feel that you have hit the so-called writer’s block, look within and check what the root cause is. More often than not, you will see that you are rather tired, mentally or physically; or you are so preoccupied with other things that you just can’t come up with an idea or the right turn of phrase to keep the words flowing.
Besides, the most important thing to remember while doing some creative work like writing is to “get into it” – like Mark Twain used to do, be at ease and don’t put unnecessary pressure on yourself. To wit, once, as a famous anecdote goes, when Mark Twain was writing a book, he spent the whole day revising one paragraph. A person close to him told him at the end of the day that he had seen him staring at the same page in the morning, afternoon and evening. Mark Twain just replied saying that in the morning he put a comma, in the afternoon he removed it, and in the evening he put it right back.
So, all you writers out there, stop making excuses for not sweating it out, and get down to the chase. As in every aspect of life, there will be highs and lows, but that doesn’t mean you throw in the towel and give up by blaming it on the “writer’s block”.
A few tips may help. First, forget about the fancy-sounding phrase writer’s block; there is no such thing. Then, sit down in earnest, be clear what you want to write about, make an outline, and let it rip! It’s as simple as that. If you can goad yourself, no matter how negative you may be feeling, to just get down to actually writing, you will see that it is just the starting problem that was bogging you down, and you will be surprised at how, once you have started, the rest of the stuff just flows out. And once the words start pouring out, they pour out in floods, and there is little else in this world which can give a person with a creative bent of mind more satisfaction than this.
There you have it in a nutshell. The mantra for every writer who is blaming his or her lack of productivity on the writer’s block – Just cut the excuses and get down to the chase!
It is the eye of the photographer, not the camera, which takes a good picture
Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. This is a universal law, and applies to every aspect of life. If a human being’s beauty lies in the eyes of the lover, the beauty of a subject of photography lies in the eyes of the photographer – not in the camera, or its lens, no matter how technically powerful they may be.
Many people tend to think that they could take beautiful photographs if only they had a good and powerful camera, and if they happened to visit a beautiful place. That’s just not true. The really good pictures come when there is a genuinely appreciative eye behind the camera. The camera may be the limiting factor in some situations, where you can’t get as clear a photograph as you may want to, or the shutter speed might not be as fast as you may want it to be, but getting yourself a better camera can only remove the limitations. It can’t make you take better pictures.
What really matters is the photographer, who has to create the picture first in his mind, and then capture it in his camera. And a person who has an eye for detail, or beauty, can capture it even in the most mundane of situations and with the most rudimentary of equipment.
The fact is that this world is beautiful. It’s just that some people tend to see it through a lacklustre eye, some through a rose-tinted eye, and a majority of the people are so busy with their routine lives that they neither have the time nor inclination to see the beauty of the world around them. This is where the good photographer comes in. He captures the real beauty of the world and exhibits it as a piece of art for others who can’t see it with their own eyes.
Just the number of megapixels on your camera would make no difference, unless there’s an artist behind the camera who can capture the beauty of the world. Or else, the higher number of megapixels would only gobble up more space on your memory cards and hard drives – and make them cluttered.
So, if you happen to be a budding photographer, just remember a few things that can take you a long way. First and foremost identify your subject, look at it from different angles and perspectives, observe the minute details of the subject carefully, take a vantage position, and then press click!
Is tattooing an art?
Whether tattooing is an art or not is, to a large extent, a matter of opinion. It’s a relative thing, coloured (pun intended) by the prejudices of the person judging it. The fact that tattoos are a fad, and increasingly becoming so by the day, doesn’t mean they are not an art, if you go by the bottom-line definition that anything that involves even a little bit of creativity has to be an art. If an MF Hussein makes his paintings on a canvas, a tattooist goes to work with a needle on the human skin, irrespective of whether it’s a dragon he tattoos or the image of a Goddess, or, coming down to it, if it’s just the name of a lover that a person wants to be tattooed on his forearm in Gothic font.
There are people who dismiss tattoos as trash or cheap, and some may even call it meddling with nature. But the tattoo artists take their practice extremely seriously, more than any artist, no matter how great a reputation he or she may have, for the simple reason that the tattooist has an extra responsibility to the person on whom he conducts his drills.
One reason why tattoos are judged negatively is because in olden times it was solely the pirates, prisoners or the religious bigots who got them made on their bodies. Reactions to it ranged in the extremes. For the religious bigot who had the image of his deity tattooed on his body it was a matter of pride, and for the prisoner who was branded in the same way, it was a matter of shame.
But increasingly, especially people in western countries, are taking to it to make a statement. So, a tattoo is no more a taboo, it expresses individuality, as the choice of image, design and artist communicates the person’s interests and significance of their own imagination. The art form is gaining in international acceptance, and now there are even awards which reward tattoo artists. Consequently, people are judged by the kind of image they have tattooed on their skin. There are people who go to the extent of expressing even their sexual orientation through the images they get tattooed on their bodies.
And the ultimate compliment to this art form comes when it is done for love, not by the tattoo artist, who practices his art for the love of it anyway, but by the obsessed lover who has the name of his lover tattooed on some part of his or her body. The name of your lover permanently inked on the forearm or the back, is a declaration of your undying love for your sweetheart.
MAHASHIVRATRI
Among the myriad festivals that Hindus celebrate, one of the most significant is Mahashivratri, which falls on the 14th night of the dark fortnight of the month of Phalgun (February or March as per the western calendar). It is the glories of Lord Shiva, who forms one of the Holy Trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh (or Shiva), that are celebrated on this festival to appease the God whose anger is legendary (exemplified by the fact that he burnt to ashes the god of love, Kamadev, who attempted to disturb his tapasya, simply by opening his third eye). However, Lord Shiva is also known to be the most compassionate God and is the easiest to please, and his boons have tremendous power.
The festival of Mahashivratri is of particular significance to women because Lord Shiva, the hermetic God whose abode is situated in Mount Kailash in the Himalayas, is considered to be the ideal husband. Unmarried women worship him on this day to obtain a husband like him, while married women worship him for the welfare and longevity of their husbands. However, even men worship Lord Shiva on Mahashivratri with great devotion as it is said that this leads to salvation and liberation from the cycle of birth and death.
Devotees of Lord Shiva consider him to be the most supreme God of the Holy Trinity. The Puranas recount a story in which Brahma and Vishnu were once arguing as to which one of them was greater, and just then appeared in front of them a gigantic Shiva Lingam engulfed in flames. It left them stupefied and overwhelmed. As they looked up to ascertain its height, they could not even see its end. Even as they were wondering what it was, Lord Shiva emerged from the Lingam and declared that he was the greatest of the three, and that he should be worshiped in this Lingam form.
There is another story in the Puranas where the gods and demons were churning the ocean, known as Samundra Manthan, to obtain nectar for gaining immortality. However, what emerged from the ocean first was a pot of poison, which was so vicious that it could have burnt up the whole world. Not knowing what to do and afraid to even touch it, they, the gods and demons, ran to Lord Shiva who saved them, and the whole universe, by consuming the poison. But he was careful not to let even a drop of it enter his stomach, which symbolically represents the universe, and held it carefully in his throat, which turned blue. Therefore, he is also called Neelkanth, and devotees worship him on Mahashivratri to thank him for saving the world from this dangerous poison.
On Mahashivratri, devotees worship Lord Shiva by bathing the Lingam in a Shiva temple with milk, curd, ghee, honey, the belpatra (a leaf which is very dear to Lord Shiva) and various other substances as the mantra “Om Namah Shivaya” or the Mritunjaya mantra are chanted continuously.
