blog@Yantrajaal

On the hill of Bhimbetka, Madhya Pradesh stands a series of craggy sandstone formations in the form of tall and massive rock shelters. These are the painted rock-shelters that constitute the largest repository of pre-historic art in India. These 10,000  year old wall paintings have been inscribed in the World Heritage List and give us peek into the dawn of history when human beings had just about elevated themselves from a primitive animal existence and were learning to think beyond mere existence and express their thoughts through art forms that have survived till date. We approach the rock shelters through this tough landscape until we get a first glimpse of our destination ... These caves were first alluded to by W Kinkaid in 1888 but discovered and conclusively documented by V S Wakankar in 1958. This is the first of 400 odd shelters that are scattered over the region but of these about 12 - 14 can be accessed relatively easily on foot through trails m...

Modern nation states and governments have evolved from robbers and dacoits who extorted money, now known as taxes, from terrorised medieval populations and this behavioural pattern is encoded in the DNA of modern administrative structures. This is true even though they claim to be representative or even democratic. This tendency to extort money has been a common feature in India, and perhaps the world as well, ever since the days of Ashoka, Akbar, the British Raj and the current Sovereign, Socialist, Democratic Republic !   image stolen from http://discuss.itacumens.com/index.php?topic=44977.0 Why do I say so ? Consider the following .. You sell property and  you are slammed with a huge Stamp Duty. Any money paid should be in lieu of a service delivered but what service does the state deliver ? All that it is doing is that it is recording a transaction that shows a transfer of ownership. Why should the fee for doing so depend on the value of the transaction ? After al...