“He who knows no foreign languages knows nothing of his own.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe I am Indonesian by birth and spent half my life in the Arab World. I know English, Indonesian, Arabic, and I studied French. Arabic, for example, has its words loaned in the other languages I speak, and through learning …
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The 2015 Nepal Earthquake
On April 25, 2015 9,000 people lost their lives, a further 23,000 were injured and there was major destruction of homes infrastructure. The earthquake resulted in more than 5,000 schools being damaged or completely destroyed. On May 12, 2015, a second 7.3 earthquake struck the country, causing further devastation and loss of lives. — All …
Tradition and Essentialism (Assessment)
The identity of places is very much bound up with the histories which are told of them, how those histories are told, and which history turns out to be dominant. — Doreen Massey. In this blog post, I am going to talk about essentialism. Place essentialiasm promotes the idea of innate or internal ‘essence’ of …
Newari Architecture
But perhaps the quintessential Newari art was woodcarving. With their talent for design and invention, the Newars turned the window into a lavish display of the carver’s skill and imagination; instead of a rectangular hole, the window became richly decorative, exuberant, playful. — Marcia R. Lieberman . Art is always present in our everyday lives, …
Mount Everest as a Symbol (Assessment)
We live in a whirl of symbols, and to make sense of the world around us, even as children, we need to become experts in attaching appropriate meanings to an immense range of images, logos, numbers and signs — From Land of Symbols by Melissa Harper and Richard White. Symbols of countries and ordinal things …
Salutations from a Global Citizen!
Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology. — Pico Iyer. Welcome to my blog! I am the Holy Monk and I am endeavoring to seek meaning in life through travel and pilgrimages. I believe travelling humanizes the images and knowledge we see …
The Holy Monk's Adventures in Nepal 