Day: October 2, 2025

Subho Bijoya Dashami

Ma Durga and her children — Ganesh, Lakshmi, Saraswati and Kartik. Click to embiggen.

Pujo ended today. Ma Durga’s visit to her maternal home is over and she’s gone back to her husband’s home. Bengali traditional iconography shows her with her children. In the picture above, from left to right, there’s Ganesh, Lakshmi, Ma Durga riding a lion in her incarnation as Mahisasurmardini (the slayer of the demon Mahisasur), Saraswati and Kartik. (Image from the puja pandal at PJC Bangalore.)

Mahisasur is a powerful asura (demon) depicted as a half-buffalo, half-human being born from the union of an asura king and a she-buffalo named Mahishi. He is known for his shape-shifting abilities, capable of transforming between human and buffalo forms. He gained immense power through severe penance, which led to a boon from Bramha Dev granting him invulnerability to being killed by any man or god. This boon had a critical loophole: he could only be slain by a woman.  Continue reading “Subho Bijoya Dashami”

Goodbye, Dr. Jane Goodall

A sculpture of Jane Goodall and David Greybeard outside the Field Museum in Chicago (wiki)

Dame Jane Morris Goodall (3 April 1934 – 1 October 2025), was an English primatologist and anthropologist. She was considered the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees, having studied the social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees for over 60 years. Goodall first went to Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania to observe its chimpanzees in 1960. (Source: wiki.) She passed away yesterday, 1st Oct., in Los Angeles, CA.

Her work with the chimps at the Gombe National Park was phenomenal. I first came to know about her work through a talk she gave at the National Press Club sometime in the late 1990s. I heard the talk on my local public radio station KQED 88.5. (Those were the days when NPR had not generated to the woke nonsense station it has become now.) Continue reading “Goodbye, Dr. Jane Goodall”