Author Topic: Uttarakhand in World Media - विश्वविख्यात पत्र-पत्रिकाओं में उत्तराखण्ड  (Read 27242 times)

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इस टापिक पर हम उपलब्ध करायेंगे उत्तराखण्ड से सम्बन्धित लेख जो अन्तर्राष्ट्रीय पत्र-पत्रिकाओं में प्रकाशित हुए हैं.

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विश्व की सर्वाधिक प्रचलित पत्रिका "Time" में प्रकाशित लेख..
Source : http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1642444_1812375_1812353,00.html
Fresh Heights

Tibet and Nepal, the long-standing darlings of the Himalayan tourist trade, have not been the most welcoming countries for visitors over the past few months. Foreign tourists have been barred from Tibet since March's anti-Chinese protests. Political troubles in Nepal, where recent elections were marred by bombings, have deterred many holidaymakers. Understandably, some travelers are now beginning to look across these borders to the Indian Himalayas, where the state of Uttarakhand — until recently known as Uttaranchal — has quietly been building its own tourist trade. It offers drop-dead gorgeous trekking — the same as you would find in Nepal and Tibet, but in a less restive and less discovered environment than that of its neighbors.

For Hindus, the area has been a travel destination since pre-Vedic times, and pilgrimage trails still crisscross the mountains. The northern district of Garhwal, bordering Tibet, is the largest region and is the most popular with visitors due to its many holy places. One such site, Gangotri, is dedicated to the goddess Ganga, whose temple is located just below the Gaumukh glacier, the source of the sacred river Ganges. Garhwal also boasts two World Heritage sites: the Valley of Flowers, which erupts every spring into a carpet of colorful blooms, and Nanda Devi, the second highest peak in the Indian Himalayas. For environmental reasons, the peak has been off limits to climbers since the early 1980s, but day treks can be made to lower regions of the sanctuary.

The community-owned and -operated Mountain Shepherds tour company, mountainshepherds.prayaga.org, organizes excursions in Garhwal. These trips use locally hired staff and cost around $50 a day, which includes guides, cooks, equipment and transportation. Mountain Shepherds also plans to start longer excursions to local villages in the summer. Two visitors at a time will be able to travel with shepherds herding their flocks in the Himalayan meadows, with village homes available for rent.

Aquaterra Adventures, www.treknraft.com, offers slightly more upscale trekking. At around $70 a day per person, for a minimum of four people, the company tailors itineraries to your liking. These excursions range from easy hikes to demanding climbs to rafting trips, and accommodation includes separate dining, bathing and "living room" tents.

Aquaterra Adventures can also organize a quick tiger-spotting safari at the end of the trip. Besides the Himalayas, Uttarakhand's other famous attraction is Corbett National Park, in the Shivalik foothills. This 201-square-mile (520 sq km) reserve offers some of the country's best chances to catch a glimpse of the elusive and endangered Bengal tiger. But if you would rather make your own arrangements, simply book one of the 10 cottages at the Hideaway River Lodge, www.corbetthideaway.com, right in the middle of the jungle. Rates start from $375 a night, which includes meals, safaris, fishing, park fees and a naturalist on call.


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Fishing से सम्बन्धित एक और लेख "Time" magazine से ही..

Fish Are Jumpin'

September is the time India's big-game anglers pack their 10-weight rods and waders, and head to the Himalayas for a tryst with the golden mahseer, one of the fiercest freshwater fish in the world. Swollen by the monsoon, rivers gush down the rocky Himalayas — from the Ramganga in the western Himalayas to the Teesta in the east — and teem with the prized game. Living in fast-flowing currents, the mahseer is a ferocious giant — built to ascend the roaring rapids at spawning time — and gives sportfishermen a tough fight. Encounters with 40-pounders (18 kg) are commonplace and stories abound of injured casting arms and painful sinews.

Although Himalayan fishing licenses are easy to come by and cost only a few dollars, the roads are not always great — something that deters all except the most ardent, who are likely to find themselves alone amid the pine forests and scenic rapids. Fishing can go on past sundown, as the mahseer is known to take at night.

The best time to go is mid-September to November, and then from February to early May. You can engage an angling tour service — easy enough to find on the Internet — to take you to where the best catches are, as well as provide equipment. Or you can just toss tackle and a tent into a hired 4x4 and head to the Ramganga River, near Jim Corbett National Park in Uttarakhand, where a 15-mile (24 km) stretch is maintained exclusively for sportfishing.


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Anger Under the Snows
« Reply #3 on: March 10, 2009, 04:30:40 PM »
पुस्तक समीक्षा THE WILD SWEET WITCH (234 pp.)— Philip Woodruff—Harcourt, Brace ($3).

Source : http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,887807-1,00.html

The cold mountain air of the upper Himalayas pervades this novel of north India, giving it a quality, like its setting, far removed from the luxuriant misery of the plains. It is a novel notable for a fair effort at balancing sympathies between

Indians and British. The scales tip, however; and no Indian will care for the novel's final implication that, by & large, three generations of British administrators were cool, active and kindly men faced with a buzzing of unstable—if lovable—children.

Novelist Woodruff, whose real name is Philip Mason, worked as a civil servant in India for 20 years, ending up as Joint Secretary of the Defense Department from 1944 to this year. E. M. Forster's Passage to India (1924), a novel in which certain types of British officials were treated with an irony amounting to loathing, has evidently been on his mind. He writes, in his foreword: "Perhaps I have been lucky in the people I have known and the visitors who write books after a six months' stay have been unlucky." This mild slap at

Forster, a profound, canny and better novelist, might be rash ; it would be rasher had not Woodruff written a fairly good novel himself.

Bravery & Bears. The first and best part of his story tells how a hillman named Kalyanu became the favored servant of Mr. Bennett, deputy commissioner of Garhwal, in 1875. Having killed a marauding bear by an exercise of intelligence and angry bravery, Kalyanu soared to the conclusion that bears were easy ; he failed to use his head on the next bear and got mauled. Mr. Bennett set his leg, healed him, and took him on as an orderly at a critical moment.

Mr. Bennett and his new servant, traveling through the hills, took by surprise a village where the forbidden "rope festival" was about to be held. In this rite, believed to make the fields fertile, the sacrificial victim had a sporting chance; he had to ride a forked stick down a rope stretched from a 500-ft. cliff to the fields below.

Mr. Bennett and his party arrived on the scene just as the fun was about to begin —an ill-timed arrival for Her Majesty's representative. Mr. Bennett faced down the sullen hillmen, stopping the show, and Kalyanu helped to see him through. Later, Mr. Bennett took Kalyanu along on an exploratory ascent of the high Himalayan range. On a glassy snow slope at 15,000 feet the two men were caught in a cloud. They fell, but broke their fall and were not killed. But Mr. Bennett would never have made it back to camp without Kalyanu.

Anger & Ambition. Three generations later, in 1923, the relationship between Kalyanu's grandson, Jodh Singh, and the new deputy commissioner, Hugh Upton, was more complicated. The district of Garhwal remained the same: the peasants tilled their terraced fields of millet on the mountainsides, drove their sheep and goats to the high, flowering pastures in the spring, sent their women out to gather sticks for the winter fires in the smoky stone huts. Jodh Singh, however, enjoyed the privileges won by his grandfather; he had been to Lucknow University, and he felt it his mission in life to fight for a free India.

Novelist Woodruff tries half-heartedly to get under the skins of his English characters, who are forever mooning over the little lanes and hedges of England but behaving with wise good cheer. The Wild Sweet Witch ends with Jodh Singh's death by violence in 1938. It is not violence brought on by his political beliefs. When he is framed by two of his enemies, he goes wild and kills them; then he dies fighting rather than surrender to the British commissioner. The "wild, sweet witch" of his visionary hopes—a free and happy India—has at least had a heroic lover.

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At home in the Himalayas
On a new trekking tour, our correspondent stays with a family for a taste of real life in the Indian foothills
From the upper slopes of the Gondokoro La in the Himalaya, this stupendous view of the Gondokoro glacier is revealed


by Richard Green published in timesonline uk (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/destinations/india/article2594651.ece)

The waiter served the food and carefully poured more chai. I leant back in my director’s chair and looked out over the cascade of rice terraces. Far away on the valley floor, women flickered through the fields in their vivid saris, brilliant as candle flames. Level with us, a steppe eagle glided in front of the Himalayan peaks.

This was a lunch stop on my walking trip in the Himalayan foothills, and after three days I had no blisters, no upset stomach – I’d barely broken sweat. Until recently, visiting the Indian Himalayas meant staying in a hill-station hotel or in a tent on a trek. The first option means you’re a long way from traditional mountain life, but you have your creature comforts. The second gets you closer to the villages: you get plenty of creatures, just no comforts. Now, a local company has found a middle way, with a range of easy walks through spectacular foothill scenery, staying overnight in converted village homes.

My trip did begin with a night at a hill-station hotel at 6,000ft to acclimatise to the altitude. I liked it rather too much – not just the views of the snowy summits, but my room’s antique wood-burning heater, fluffy quilt and hot shower. At 9am the next day, after porridge and tea, a young Indian arrived wearing a quilted body warmer and a polo shirt. He was our guide, Jaggart, a gentle and urbane chap whose easy manner made it feel as if he were taking us to see a new rockery planting, rather than into remote villages in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, just a few miles away from Nanda Devi (India’s second-highest mountain), Nepal and Tibet.

With our bags whisked ahead by porters, it was easy walking, downhill along the valley floor on dirt paths worn smooth by constant use. The first locals we passed were an elderly couple escorting a caramel-coloured calf up the valley. We stood to one side to let them by. “They are taking their animal to market,” Jaggart said, “and they will have been walking for many miles.” The happy couple cupped their hands towards their handsomely weathered faces and offered the traditional greeting: “Namaste.” I’d been too shy to namaste in India before, worried it might look affected, but here it would have been unthinkable not to.

We took lunch on a steep hill jutting into a valley, just yards after our crunching over pine needles had disturbed two guilty-looking jackals. Table and chairs waited for us, miraculously, in the lee of a shed-sized temple. As I walked round the building, I jumped as I discovered the cook huddled by a gas stove, tending a dark pot of dhal. Meals on the go were sensibly light, usually a mild vegetable curry and chapatis, with tuna sandwiches, rice pudding and fruit. And every so often, while walking, one of the two young bearers would flip open a Tupperware tub of Indian chocolate bars.

“The holy man who is looking after this temple is now higher in the mountains,” Jaggart told us. “He prays, fasts, and comes lower when the snows start.” Sounds like a hard life. “Well, no,” smiled Jaggart. “You might say that he is born into the lucky corner of life. The villagers leave him food, alcohol and marijuana. He prays, drinks and walks around.”

That afternoon, a figure in the distance caught my eye. He was unmistakably a holy man. His feet were bare, his beard was long, grey and straggly, and he wore orange robes and smears of ash on his face. As he stopped 100ft away to namaste, I realised that it is the perfect greeting over distance – less a wave, more of a long-range handshake. The holy man stood quite still, with his hands cupped, and watched as we walked away.

Our home for the night was a long-fronted house with a large family, an excitable dog and several calves outside. A young girl showed me my mud-brick room. It had carved beams around the windows and eaves painted a deep maroon. I ducked to enter where the earthen floor was funnelled smooth at the entrance. Inside was a small bed with heavy blankets, with a light bulb straining to pick out a photograph of a young soldier, a calendar showing a buffed-up monkey god and, of all things, a poster of the Himalayas.

I walked to the sentry-box-style ablution shack a little distance from the house. Inside one door was a western-style loo, spotless and candlelit, with pink toilet roll in a little wicker tray. In the other was a shower room, with one pail of hot water and one of cold, and a single plastic beaker.

The care taken in the preparation, and the candles inside, lent the shack a shrine-like aura.

After sunset, the trees and houses on the other side of the valley glowed pewter in the light of the full moon, and wisps of silver smoke trailed from bright orange dots: other families cooking their food. I was drinking a Kingfisher beer when the grandparents of our family for the night – we were staying in converted rooms in the oldest part of their house – came over to their little herb garden. The grandmother hollowed out a fresh cowpat, filled it with water from a plastic beaker, and floated in some marigold petals. Then they prayed together in the direction of the moon, and the old man blew a note on a conch shell. The valley then filled with shell blasts from other families thanking their deities for a successful harvest.

It was a contrast from grandad’s earlier antics, when he had shown me his den in one of the half-height lower-floor rooms. Normally, these are reserved for livestock to shelter in during winter, but his contained a cot-like bed, a collection of combs in a glass and an enormous old television set. He switched it on and yanked out two chairs. On came the cricket – very, very loud. He clutched his knee and gyrated his foot with glee. I looked across the valley behind me, expecting to see a hillside of shaking fists. A young girl ran to her mum, tugged at her sari and pointed over. I don’t speak Kumaoni, but I guess she was saying: “Oh no, grandad’s showing off his TV again.” But he soon got bored, closing up his room, and peace returned to the valley.

Just when trekkers were pitching their tents and talking among themselves, and the tourists in the hill stations were dozens of miles away, getting changed for dinner, I’d been playing with the children, watching the women cook and witnessing Himalayan family life. Whether intimate or eccentric, it was completely unaffected and unstaged.

हेम पन्त

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The Australian  में प्रकाशित माइकल गेबिकी का यात्रा संस्मरण... माइकल ने कुमाऊं के अन्दरूनी इलाकों में चार दिन ट्रैकिंग करते हुए बिताये..

source : http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25100804-5002031,00.html

Walk tall

 
In the steep hills of the Kumaon the villagers are ploughing terraced fields in preparation for the winter wheat.

Himalayan peaks tower above a Kumaon village house. Picture: Michael Gebicki
Barefoot men are marching in a dusty nimbus cloud behind oxen yoked in grunting pairs. The villagers are drying red chillis on their rooftops, harvesting pumpkins, potatoes and yams and hanging cut grass in shaggy clumps in trees, both to dry and to keep it out of the mouths of the cattle it will feed through the winter.

And they are getting married, since harvest is a time of plenty, when a family might afford the gold, rice and mustard oil that are prescribed for the traditional three-day wedding.

A subsection of the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, Kumaon lies well below the headlines. It is calm and mostly contented, almost exclusively Hindu and calendar-pretty. Its whitewashed villages sit amid hills carved into steps, rising into forests of rhododendrons, oaks and whispering pines. To the north, separated by the Himalayas, is Tibet; Nepal lies to theeast.

I am on the march. With a guide, Jogender, and a porter, Jagdish, I am walking through a patchwork of peasant India. The Kumaon Village Walk was pioneered by Geeta Reeb and her German husband, Dieter, who also own Kalmatia Sangam, the small hotel where the walk begins and ends. With the assistance of Jogender, the Reebs have leased a chain of village houses they use as stopovers for their four-day walk. Hikers get a comfortable home in the middle of a village, local cuisine and the heartening benefits of ultra-light two-footed travel. For a couple, a small family group or even a solo hiker wanting to become embedded in the Indian village experience, with some astonishing scenery along the way, there's nothing else on the market quite like this.

It is already well into the morning when we start from the ridge on which Kalmatia Sangam sits and head down into the valley. The first part of the walk winds through a pine forest but by the time we descend a couple of hundred metres there's enough runoff to support the intensive agriculture the steep terrain demands. It is early November, prime time for walkers, and a busy one for farmers. Another month and frost will lick the valley, and then snow.

Some fields are already bristling with the tender green spikes of winter wheat. In others, while their husbands plough, women are marching with flat baskets on their heads piled with black clods of rotted dung, the only source of fertiliser. There is no such thing as wheeled traffic; their ploughs are made entirely from wood. Apart from the electricity wires slung in a haphazard spiderwork across the valley, it is a landscape that hasn't changed much since the Bhagavad Gita.

Family is big here. When I ask to take a photo of a young girl in a blue sari who is combing her wet hair in the afternoon sunlight, she smiles sweetly and squats down beside her grandmother. Although the image is not quite what I had in my mind's eye, I can admire the sentiment.

Deep in the valley we descend a sharp, slippery slope covered with pine needles to a waterfall and follow its widening stream into pastures where goats are grazing, watched by a small boy who turns away when I raise my camera. When we leave the stream and climb into the forest, we meet a teenager coming down cradling a baby goat he has wrapped in leaves, followed by the nanny. It was born just a few minutes previously, he tells us, and he's taking it back to the flock. The walk is a gentle incline for the most part but at an altitude of just under 2000m, it's enough to set the heart romping. Beyond the pine forest we climb into a forest of oaks and deodars. The trail crests the ridge at a tiny Shiva temple with an orange roof where we stop for a picnic lunch of falafel with salad, hummus, yoghurt and chapattis.


अगली पोस्ट में जारी है.....

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....पिछली पोस्ट से आगे

Arranged in saw-toothed splendour across the horizon is the main range of the Himalayas with Nanda Devi as the centrepiece: 7817m of ice and rock rising into theheavens.

Tall and moustachioed, with a perpetual grin, Jagdish, too, stands out in this region. As well as being the porter, he's the cook for our small expedition, always ready to give me more chapattis, more dahl, another spoonful of rice, more yams with my lentils. He's also a social networker par excellence. When we stop on a hillside in the afternoon, Jagdish disappears over a garden wall for a conversation with an elderly couple and comes back cradling an armful of guavas.

I have named him Mr Have-a-chat because our walk is punctuated by the chirrup of his mobile phone, which rings with pulsating Bollywood-style music. The mobile phone has transformed communication in Kumaon. Where a line-based telephone network would be impractical, mobile phones provide instant links with sons and fathers working in India's big cities.

Not that Jagdish has any need of a phone for calls across less than 5km since the booming voice he amplifies especially for his Nokia could easily be heard over that distance.

On the descent into the next valley we pass a mason building a house. Although factory-made bricks are common in houses built alongside roads, in villages without easy access it's cheaper to employ a mason than pay for transport for bricks.

Each block must be chopped from granite and the mason will make, perhaps, 10 blocks in a day. The walls are about chest-high; Jogender says the mason began building in early spring.

One of the charms of this walk is the absence of other foreigners. In four days on the trail, I see not a single outsider. My passage provokes varying reactions. Schoolchildren gape, water buffaloes sniff the air and toddlers retreat into mothers' skirts. It is a stark contrast to the walking trails in much of Nepal, where acrylic paint, corrugated iron, tea houses advertising hot showers and the detritus of plastic bottles have changed the complexion of whole valleys.

Jogender's aunt is working in the courtyard of her house when we climb into the village of Deora; she is pouring dried lentils in an arc while her daughter whisks at the flow, creating a breeze that blows away the chaff.

Deora is our home for the night. It's also the home of Jogender and Jagdish.

My bedroom is on the upper storey of a typical village dwelling. It's a white house with shuttered windows and door frame picked out in scarlet with a staircase at the front. It is a neat fit between authenticity and comfort. The floor is made from packed mud mixed with straw, there's a bare 25-watt globe and the bed is a mattress on a charpoy, a web of string over a wooden frame. In a concession to foreign eccentricities, there's an outhouse with a sit-down toilet and a shower next door.

At 3am, I am drowsily awake and needing the toilet but all I can think of is a story Jogender told me as we strolled around the village. While howling dogs have tracked my progress for much of the day, this evening there is not so much as a whimper. It's the leopards, Jogender told me. Dogs are locked inside at night because leopards will sit on the roofs of houses, wait until a dog comes out andpounce.

Will a leopard appreciate the difference between a dog and a timorous foreigner with a full bladder? It is a nervy thought but eventually I decide it would make an interesting epitaph and bolt for the outhouse. Next morning, Jogender tells me that every year a handful of villagers fall prey to leopards.

In the next village along our line of march the men are warming up for a Twenty20 cricket match with a visiting team from Deora. Today is a relaxed walk, and we wait while Jagdish races down to bowl a few overs. While religion, politics and caste are the fault lines in Indian society, cricket is a unifying force, the opium of its masses.

As we leave the village we spot a teenager in a white school shirt sprinting away from us through the trees. "My boy," says Jagdish, with a nod in his direction. He's wagged school so he can watch the match and his father grins in appreciation. All that day Jagdish keeps up to date with the cricket game over his mobile phone. Despite a run rate of more than six an over, Deora loses.

Near a village we wait beside a forest trail while Jagdish goes off to buy some batteries. Young women with shaggy mounds of grass piled on their heads file past. They're on the return journey from market to their village, where the grass will be used for cattle feed. They have walked for more than two hours with 30kg of grass on their heads, and there's another hour to go.

Over lunch on the grassy banks of a stream, a young boy sidles past and Jagdish can't resist asking if he has eaten lunch. No, he's on the way home from school and while there's a school meal if he wants it, the cook is a harijan, a member of India's vast casteless sea. Whatever the cook has made would be ritually polluted, and the boy is a kshatriya, a member of the warrior caste.

On the fourth day of the walk, Jogender wakes me before sunrise with tea and we make a panting climb from the village where we've spent the night at 2200m, up another 200m. It's the highest point around. Sixty kilometres to the north and stretching for more than 250km across the horizon, the peaks of the Himalayas run like a plot of the Dow Jones industrial average in turbulence.

After a breakfast of parathas and honey, we walk down through a cool cedar forest, following a stream for an hour. Deep in the forest is the ancient temple complex at Jageshwar, where a priest dabs my forehead with vermilion powder and rice, and sprinkles flower petals in my hair. A car is waiting to take us back to Kalmatia Sangam but Jagdish leaves us halfway. He's walking home to Deora, across the hills.

We say our goodbyes and, until a bend in the road takes us out of earshot, I can hear him clearly above the noise of the engine and the rush of the wind, talking into his mobile phone.

हेम पन्त

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माइकल गेबिकी का एक और यात्रा संस्मरण "The Australian" से ही..

Source : http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,24970813-5002031,00.html

IT is hot, I am thirsty. And after walking for three hours, I am famished. When I come across a meadow beside the stream I've been following, I don't need a sign to tell me this is my lunch spot. I am marching through late autumn scenery around Almora, the hill station in India's Kumaon region, which squeezes itself into the hindquarters of Tibet.

I started out mid-morning from the rim of the valley, 900m higher up. From Paparselly, on the outskirts of Almora, I took a trail that plunged down the ridgeline into the cleavage of the valley, leaving behind a view of the snow-capped Himalayas and hillsides echoing with barking dogs and small voices greeting me with "Namaste, namaste!"

At the bottom the trail met a stream at a pretty yellow Shiva temple, took me across a bridge and up through fields where men were ploughing land for winter wheat behind grunting oxen.

On the hillside above, a group of workmen building a house had downed tools for lunch, which was enough to stir my tastebuds.

About 1km upstream from the bridge, near the remains of a stone water mill, the trail dipped

again to meet the stream at the meadow where I am sprawled.

It is scenic as well as peaceful, the hills on either side notched into terraces that give way to pine forests when they become too steep even for the industrious cultivators of the Kumaon. I park myself on a warm, water-smoothed boulder that crests above the grassy surrounds, remove boots and socks and snap open the catch on the tiffin carrier provided by my hotel.

The tiffin carrier is an ingenious instrument. It consists of five metal bowls that sit one on top of another, held in place by a U-shaped metal band that also serves as the handle. This is the standard lunchbox for desk wallahs across the nation. Without the tiffin carrier, India would grind to a halt.

One of the marvels of Mumbai is the network of dabbawallahs who collect many thousands of tiffin carriers from suburban housewives each day, code them and pack them off on city-bound trains from which they are collected by another dabbawallah and delivered unerringly to their rightful owner.

Although standard tiffin fare is curries, rice and dahl, mine has a Mediterranean accent today. One bowl contains felafel balls, another chapattis, then salad, yoghurt with cucumber and finally hummus. I lay them out, glistening in the sunshine, slit open a chapatti to make a pocket and load it with felafel and salad, moistened with a dribble of yoghurt.

Just as I am crunching the first satisfying mouthful, a goat rounds the corner of the stone wall beside me with half-chewed grass in its mouth, lifts its head and sniffs the air lasciviously. I ignore it for a moment, hoping the animal will continue munching grass, but the goat has ideas that do not involve mowing. It advances, nickering with pleasure at this feast that fate has brought its way.

When it begins licking its chops over the hummus, I decide that a line must be drawn. I push its head away, gently but firmly. The goat shoves my hand back with greater vigour.

Enough is enough. I leap to my feet, manage to insert my body between goat and lunch and, with the bowls clutched in my arms and chapatti clamped between my teeth, leap across the boulders to the other side of the stream, slopping yoghurt down the front of my shirt.

On the far side is an isolated rock with steep sides where I arrange my tiffin bowls, safe from the cloven-hoofed criminal.

When I cross back to the other side to retrieve the rest of my belongings, the goat is regarding me with a melancholy expression. From its mouth dangles half of one sock. It is going to be a painful climb back to the top.


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चीन के प्रसिद्ध मीडिया समूह "झिन्हुआ" की एक खबर

New energy-boosting medicine plant discovered in India  
 
 NEW DELHI, March 15 (Xinhua) -- A new energy-boosting medicine plant or a fungus, Cordyceps sobolifera, has been found by an Indian scientist and professor of Garhwal University, S.P.S Visth, in hill areas of north Indian state Uttarakhand, the Hindi language daily Nai Duniya said on Sunday.

So far, the plant has only been found in Europe, Canada and China.

The drug does not show positive results in anti-doping tests, and is considered safe for use by players to boost energy, the paper said.

Because of high protein content, the drug made from the plant is more popular for use than even Vigra among men in Western countries, said the report.

The plant is also known to be capable of curing asthma and cancer patients, the paper said.
 
 

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Report on Uttarakhand's forest fire in Chinese New TV "New tang Dynasty Television"

The fire is not only polluting the environment but is also a safety concern for the people living nearby.

The locals believe that the fires are caused by either human carelessness or villagers who hope they’ll get better grass from the forest after the fire.

[M. Negi, Local]:
"One of the reasons is that while passing through the forests some people throw burning cigarette butts, secondly sometimes children do it unknowingly, and thirdly the villagers, they start the fire. Untill they understand that the forests are for them, the fires cannot be curbed. There has to be awareness and until the villagers are aware, the government cannot do anything."

People are frustrated about the lack of help from the Indian government. In some places the villagers have had to fight the fire themselves.

[B.S. Chaudhary, Local]:
"There have been no measures taken by the government. At a few places villagers tried to curb the fire but because they had no proper means, there were some casualties."

But the forest department says it’s looking into the issue.

[R.B.S. Rawat, Principal Chief Conservator of Forests]:
"I admit that maybe the people are not happy with the workings of the Forest Department. Maybe they are unhappy with our schemes. We are going to research these aspects so that, policies can be framed in the near future."

The blame may go to anyone but the fires are destroying resources and disturbing the environment.


Tos see a video related to this news.. Please click

http://english.ntdtv.com/ntdtv_en/ns_asia/2009-05-06/544076518393.html

 

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