Thrissur Fireworks Tragedy

For generations, ever since fireworks first reached our shores through ancient trade routes, they have become part of the celebratory language of our land. In Kerala especially, the sound of crackers and the brilliance of light have long accompanied festivals—whether in temples, churches, community feasts, or public celebrations. The scale may differ according to the size and resources of each institution, but the spirit of festivity remains the same.

Among all such celebrations, Thrissur Pooram stands as one of the world’s most renowned spectacles of ceremonial pyrotechnics, admired for its grandeur, precision, and emotional power. It is not merely fireworks, but tradition, craftsmanship, anticipation, and collective memory.

Yet behind every display are workers who manufacture, transport, store, and prepare these materials under demanding and often hazardous conditions. In our hot summer months—when many festivals are held—high temperatures, friction, storage lapses, and handling risks can turn danger into disaster within moments.

Yesterday, tragedy struck again in Thrissur as preparations were underway for the Pooram celebrations. Fourteen workers lost their lives, and many others remain in serious condition in hospitals. Families who expected their loved ones to return home now face unbearable grief.

Pyrotechnics are practiced across the world, and many countries have developed strict safety systems in manufacturing, storage, training, and emergency response. We too must continue moving toward the highest standards of safety, so that tradition can be preserved without costing human lives.

Today, our thoughts and prayers are with the departed, the injured, and their families. May those who died rest in peace. May the wounded recover swiftly. And may this sorrow awaken renewed commitment to protecting every worker whose unseen labour creates moments of public joy.

Dharma, Karma and The Cross

The Dharma, Karma and The Cross

Between birth and death stretches the quiet field of a human life.

What came before our birth remains hidden from us.

What lies beyond death is equally veiled.

But between these two mysteries we are given a journey.

Many traditions have tried to understand this journey.

Some speak of dharma, the duty and order into which we are born.

Some speak of karma, the consequences of what we do within that order.

Together they form the path each person must walk.

In another tradition, Jesus Christ spoke of the Cross.

“Pick up your cross and follow me.”

Perhaps these ideas are not so different.

The cross may simply be the life already placed upon our shoulders.

We did not choose our parents.

We did not choose the family or circumstances into which we were born.

We inherit an emotional world, a culture, a language, expectations and responsibilities.

From there the road continues:

education, work, relationships, marriage, children, duties, disappointments, hopes.

This is the shape of our cross.

Yet human beings often try to exchange the cross given to them for another of their own making.

We choose careers that are not truly ours.

We form relationships for reasons that do not belong to our deepest self.

We run away from responsibilities that seem too heavy.

For a time it feels like freedom.

But often it is only a detour.

Life has a patient wisdom.

Sooner or later it brings us back to the unfinished task we tried to escape.

And then we begin to understand something simple but profound.

The real question is not which cross we carry, but how we carry it.

Every tradition teaches this in its own language.

The path may be called dharma.

The consequences may be called karma.

Or the burden may be called the cross.

But the truth beneath them is the same.

We must live the life that has been entrusted to us.

For my own heart, the path I have chosen is the way of the Cross of Jesus Christ.

Yet the deeper lesson remains universal.

We did not choose our cross.

But we can choose the spirit with which we carry it.

In that spirit lies dignity.

In that spirit lies faithfulness.

And in that spirit lies the quiet possibility that even the heaviest burdens of life may become a path toward meaning and peace.

Pessach/Passover and Easter

The God of Abraham instructed Moses to tell his people to sacrifice a lamb and pour its blood upon their doorposts, so that the angel of death passing through Egypt would spare them.

Moses obeyed, and his people were delivered from bondage. 

In remembrance and thanksgiving, Israel celebrates Passover.

Thirteen centuries later, in that same land, during the Passover meal, a Jewish teacher—Jesus Christ—told his disciples that he was establishing a new covenant: one of his own body and blood, to be received just as the Passover lamb had once been.

Such teaching, along with his other reforms, did not sit well with many. He was crucified.

Yet his disciples proclaimed that he rose on the third day and appeared to them. They carried this message to the farthest corners of the world.

Those who believed began to observe this covenant—not as a repetition of sacrifice, but as a living remembrance. And after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the old system of sacrifice came to an end and has not been restored to this day.

The new covenant, however, continued—embraced by millions who followed the way of Jesus Christ, worshipping in truth and spirit, with a Jerusalem built in their hearts through faith.

Who could have imagined that this teacher from Galilee, on a Passover night, was inaugurating a covenant that would reach beyond the one given through Moses?

Today, as the world watches the strength, resilience, and achievements of Israel, another question quietly remains—not of power, but of spirit.

For any people called to a spiritual center, greatness is not found in strength and knowledge alone, but in justice, mercy, love, and compassion—within themselves and toward the world around them—virtues embodied by this Jew, the same Jewish teacher, two thousand years ago.

This is the day the Lord has made; 

let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Happy Easter. ✨

Chag Sameach Pessach

APRIL 1/NISSAN 14

FAST OF THE FIRSTBORN

A fast in recognition of the fact that during the “Plague of the Firstborn” (which occurred at midnight of Nissan 15), G-d “passed over” the Jewish firstborn when He killed only the firstborn Egyptians. The prevailing custom, however, is to participate in a festive meal celebrating the conclusion of studying a section of Torah, thereby exempting themselves from the obligation to fast.

REMOVAL OF CHAMETZ

Chametz is not eaten from two hours before midday, and is disposed of an hour before midday for the entire subsequent 7 days of Pesach. The latter is done by: a) selling it to a non-Jew; b) burning the chametz found in our search on the previous evening, or otherwise destroying it; c) nullifying the chametz that has not been found by declaring it ownerless.

PASSOVER SEDER

The 7-day festival of Pesach (Passover)--also called “The Festival of Matzahs” and “The Time of Our Freedom”--begins at nightfall (technically Nissan 15). From the time of the Exodus through the present, Jews all over the world conduct a Seder (”order”) -- a 15-part ritualistic feast that encompasses the observances of the Passover festival: telling our children the story of the Exodus as described and expounded in the Haggadah; eating matzah (unleavened bread), bitter herbs and the afikoman; drinking the four cups of wine; together with song, exposition and questions, all commemorating both our slavery in Egypt and our liberation on this night.

2448 (1312 BCE):

Paschal lambs were sacrificed by the Jews in Egypt to be eaten later that night at the very first Passover Seder (Exodus 12:28), and their blood was sprinkled on their doorposts as a sign that G-d will “pass over” their homes when inflicting the final plague upon the Egyptians. This was an act of great courage, as sheep were regarded as gods in Egyptian society, and the Jews were technically still subject to Egyptian slavery. When the Holy Temple stood in Jerusalem, the Passover lamb would be offered and eaten by every Jewish family that made the pilgrimage. Today it is commemorated symbolically by the shank bone on the Seder plate and the afikoman -- a portion of matzah eaten in its stead at the end of the Seder meal.

Nelly Sachs

 

(1891–1970) was a German-born Jewish poet and playwright whose quiet but powerful voice emerged from one of the darkest chapters of human history. Born in Berlin on 10 December 1891, she grew up in a cultured and educated family and began writing at a young age. Yet it was only after the age of fifty, shaped by exile and loss, that her most important work came into being.

In 1940, as the Nazi persecution of Jews intensified, she fled Germany with her mother and found refuge in Sweden, thanks in part to the intervention of the Swedish Nobel laureate . Many of her relatives and friends did not survive the Holocaust. Living in Stockholm as an exile, often in fragile health and emotional distress, Sachs transformed her grief into poetry of rare spiritual depth.

Her writings speak of Jewish suffering, exile, and the destiny of Israel, yet they do so not in anger or political protest, but in language that resembles prayer. Drawing from biblical imagery and Jewish mysticism, her poems are filled with symbols such as stars, ashes, angels, and dust. She sought to give voice to those who had been silenced, turning mourning into lyrical remembrance. Among her best-known works are In the Dwellings of Death (1947), one of the earliest poetic responses to the Holocaust, and the dramatic work Eli: A Mystery Play of the Sufferings of Israel, which reflects deeply on Jewish pain and faith.

On her seventy-fifth birthday in 1966, she was awarded the , which she shared with the Hebrew writer . The Nobel Committee honored her “for her outstanding lyrical and dramatic writing, which interprets Israel’s destiny with touching strength.” With this award, she became the first Jewish woman to receive a Nobel Prize in any field.

Nelly Sachs lived a simple and largely secluded life in Stockholm until her death on 12 May 1970. She never married and remained deeply devoted to her writing, which continues to be read as a testimony of faith, suffering, and spiritual endurance. For those unfamiliar with her, she stands as a gentle yet profound witness of the twentieth century—one who turned exile into poetry and sorrow into enduring light.

״המנט״. ביקורת

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״המנט״. ביקורת

מדהים להתבונן כיצד צעיר מתנהג בנוכחות עלמה, וכיצד אישה צעירה פותחת את ליבה בפני הגבר שהיא אוהבת. כבר מן המפגש הראשון ויליאם ואגנס מאבדים את עצמם זה בזו, קשורים בסקרנות, בתשוקה ובהבנה שקטה ההולכת וצומחת לאהבה עמוקה.

הבמאית והתסריטאית קלואי ז׳או, בעיבודה לרומן של מגי או’פארל ״המנט״, מעלה את סיפור האהבה הזה לגבהים ליריים. הסרט אינו מסתפק בסיפור אהבה; הוא מטביע אותנו בעולמם הרגשי של שני צעירים המגלים אינטימיות, שותפות וגורל בתקופה קשה ובלתי ודאית.

כאשר טרגדיה פוקדת את בני הזוג הנשואים עם מות ילדם השלישי, המנט, הטון של הסרט משתנה והופך לאבל צורב. אגנס חשופה ובלתי מרוסנת בצערה. היא אינה מסתירה את כאבה ומאשימה בגלוי את ויליאם בכך שלא היה נוכח כאשר בנם מת. אבלה רם, גופני ואנושי עד מאוד. ויליאם, לעומתה, נושא את האבל בדממה. הוא מקבל את האשמותיה ללא מחאה, וסופג את סבלו פנימה.

אך אבלו של ויליאם אינו קטן ואינו קצר. הוא בוער בו שנים ארוכות, ולבסוף מוצא את ביטויו במילים. הסרט מראה ביופי כיצד הסופר הגדול ויליאם שייקספיר ממיר את כאבו האישי לאמנות. דרך התמרה זו אנו עדים לאופן שבו כאב נעשה לשירה, ואובדן פרטי הופך לרגש אוניברסלי. לצופים ניתנת הזדמנות נדירה לראות כיצד שברון ליבו של שייקספיר עיצב את המילים שלימים ישברו וירפאו אינספור לבבות לאורך דורות.

קרבתה של אגנס לטבע, אמונותיה הפגאניות והבנתה האינטואיטיבית את החיים והמוות מוצגות ברגישות רבה. יסודות אלה משתלבים בהרמוניה עם בימויה של קלואי ז׳או ועם הצילום הזוהר של לוקאש ז׳אל, המצייר את הכפריות כמטפחת וכאכזרית בעת ובעונה אחת. הטבע מדבר דרך המוזיקה של מקס ריכטר והופך לעד לאהבה, לאובדן ולהישרדות.

עם זאת, הסרט מתמשך לעיתים. קצבו האיטי לאורך שעתיים של זמן מסך עשוי לבחון את סבלנותם של חלק מן הצופים, ולולא הסיום העדין והאמין ותיאור התקופה הריאליסטי, ייתכן שההשפעה הרגשית הייתה חלשה יותר. ואף על פי כן, האותנטיות של התקופה והכנות שבמשחק מצילות את הסרט מהיסחפות מיותרת.

״השאירו את לבכם פתוח״ הוא המסר המרכזי שהסרט מציע לעולם — תזכורת לכך שאהבה ואבל מתקיימים יחד, וכי סגירה מפני הכאב סוגרת גם את היכולת לאהוב. מסר זה מקבל עוצמה מיוחדת בזכות משחקם המרגש של ג׳סי באקלי ופול מסקל, המובילים את הסרט בגילומים טבעיים, מאופקים ונוגעים ללב.

בסופו של דבר, ״המנט״ אינו רק סיפור על בנו של שייקספיר; זהו הרהור על אהבה, אובדן והאלכימיה שבה סבל נהפך לאמנות. הסרט נותר בתודעה זמן רב לאחר שהאור כבה על המסך.

The Changing Parisian Coffee Culture

The Parisian Coffee Culture