PALA TIPO, THE PRIDE OF MARA PEOPLE

Pala Tipo (Mara Language for 'Swallowing Lake') or Palak Dil (Lushei language, which does not seems to connote any meaning) is the largest lake in Mizoram, Northeast India.This cool and virgin Forest is located near Phura village in Siaha District, within the Mara Autonomous District Council (MADC). Its geographical location falls under the Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot, and is therefore rich in animal and plant species.The reserve forest harbours mammalian wildlife such as enormous pachyderm like Elephant, Big Cats such as Tigers, Leopards and many varieties of other wild animals, fascinating specimen of birds, plethora of reptiles, amphibians, insects and a rich collection of flowering trees an medicinal plants. The reserve forest is a pristine and precious ecosystem endowed with rich biodiversity. The area around Pala Lake is being developed as a tourist resort with water sports facility. 

PALA TIPO

ORIGIN

The Magnificent Pala Tipo

According to oral history of Mara people Pala Tipo is said to be formed around 800-1200 CE. It coincided with the period of westward migration of Mara people from Burma. The origin of Pala Tipo is a well known folktale among Mara people. According to Mara legend the location area was originally a big village called Hnychao. There were about 300 families. At the center of the village was a large rock, underneath of which was a cave inhabited by a giant serpent. Villagers soon noticed that children playing around the rock frequently disappeared. At night their llivestock animals were missing too. The village hunters caught the serpent using a gigantic fishing pole, and using a goat (or dog in other version) as a bait. From this point there are two versions:

1. They killed the snake and the meat was distributed to all families. A widow with two children happened to get a share of the head. When she cooked it, the eyes were blinking and rolling, staring at her. Frightened, she threw the cooking pot into the street. When she looked out, their doorstep was being flooded and fled for life with her children. The pool rose to a lake submerging the entire habitation and drowning the rest of the villagers. The lake was eventually called Pala Tipo.

2. In an alternate version, when they caught the snake they could not completely haul out its body and cut it in the middle. The bottom half fell back into the cave with massive thunder. It created an upsurge of water from the cave, submerging the whole village. This became a permanent lake and was called Pala Tipo, literally meaning a "swallowing or submerging lake.

HOW TO REACH PALA TIPO (PALA LAKE)

Pala Tipo is situated within Mara Autonomous District Council (MADC), one of the three autonomous district councils in the southernmost part of the state of Mizoram. It is about 76 km away from Siaha, the headquarters of MADC. It can be reached by small/light vehicles only. There are villages such as Phura, Tokalo, which are in close proximity. Phura is the main route for visitors.

By Air - Pala Lake Reserve Forest is nearly 380 kilometers way from Aizawl. Nearest major airport is Lengpui Airport. Aizawl, the capital town of Mizoram is linked by Alliance Air Service everyday to Kolkata nearly 1 hour 45 minutes, Guwahati is 40 minutes and Imphal is 30 minutes. Indian Airlines connects Aizawl to rest of India via Guwahati, Imphal and Kolkata. Lengpui airport at Aizawl is connected with Guwahati, Silchar & Kolkata. It is well connected to all the capital cities of the north eastern states of India.

The euro crisis- The Greek run- It is not a good idea for Greece to leave the euro. But it is time to prepare for its departure

“GREXIT” is an ugly term for what may soon become an even uglier reality: Greece’s departure from the euro zone. As fury in Athens runs up against frustration with Greek recalcitrance in the rest of the European Union, the EU’s most troubled economy could be heading out of the single currency within weeks. If Greek banks suffer a mass run, as depositors withdraw euros for fear they will be forcibly converted into new drachmas, Greece’s fate could be settled even sooner.
Greece’s ascendant politicians, particularly Alexis Tsipras, leader of the radical left Syriza party, want to repudiate Greece’s rescue deal with its European and IMF creditors. The creditors, particularly Germany, are standing firm, rightly making clear that they will not be blackmailed into repeatedly rewriting bail-outs. If in fresh elections on June 17th the objectors have a majority, as the polls suggest, and if they renege on Greece’s bail-out deal, then the world will cut off the supply of rescue funds. It is hard to see Greece then staying in the euro.

There is already a whiff of inevitability about an outcome once deemed impossible. Central bankers now openly discuss the possibility that Greece may leave. As the impossible lapses into the inevitable, a growing chorus is arguing that it is even desirable. Advocates of an exit say that Greece would gain from a cheaper currency, and that the politics of forging a closer fiscal and financial union between the euro zone’s remaining members would be easier without a country that should never have joined in the first place. But it is wrong to pretend that a Greek exit is an easy or desirable outcome. Before it is too late, Greek politicians need to be honest about what an exit implies. And Europe’s politicians need to act far more boldly to protect the rest of the euro zone in case the worst happens.
Eirexit, Porxit, Spaxit and Ixit
Start with the Greeks. Most of them want to ditch the hated austerity policies that they blame for their plight. Mr Tsipras and his colleagues are fuelling the belief that Greece can somehow avoid austerity and still stay in the euro. In fact Greeks cannot avoid austerity, either within the euro or outside it.
It is true that Greece can survive within the euro only with a gruelling downward adjustment of wages and prices, which demands painful budget cuts and structural reforms. Yet even stronger medicine would be required if Greece left the euro. Cut off from foreign funds, the country would be forced into still tighter fiscal austerity. It would need a disciplined monetary policy and bold structural reforms to retain the gains from its cheaper currency and avoid hyperinflation. Discipline and reform are not familiar concepts in Greek politics.
Moreover a chaotic Greek departure would devastate the country’s political life, because Greece would risk expulsion from the single market and perhaps even the EU itself. A place that shed dictatorship as recently as 1974 would find exclusion from Europe traumatic. For a taste of what might ensue you only need to look at the rising power of extremists such as the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party.
If Greek voters deserve greater honesty about the Grexit, so do those in the rest of the euro zone. Greece may be a small economy, but a Greek departure from the euro, amid brinkmanship and bluster, would not be a small event. Most obviously, exit—and the subsequent default on its private as well as official debt—would cost European banks, firms and taxpayers a lot of money. And that is without counting the danger of a general contagion in weak euro-zone economies.
There is no formal mechanism for leaving the single currency. As depositors and bondholders across the euro zone factor in the increased risk that their assets could also fall victim to a break-up, other countries would come under pressure. Today’s much-ballyhooed “firewall” is not nearly strong enough.

Explore our interactive guide to Europe's troubled economies

People strive to avoid disaster. Yet the scope for political miscalculation and financial panic means that the worst might still happen—it may even come soon. Deposits are fleeing Greek banks at an accelerating pace. If financial panic forced a Greek exit before the vote, it would wreck the credibility of pledges that banks across the euro zone are safe. As the Greek economy shrinks within the euro, the economic arguments will become finely balanced—because capital will have fled and the debt burden loom larger. As Greece’s politics is bankrupted, the siren call of populism may grow irresistible.
These dangers require urgent action. First, to prevent a mass run, the European Central Bank must be ready to flood the Greek banks with liquidity—raising the losses to European taxpayers if Greece does eventually leave. And second, to stop a Greek exit being followed by a cascading loss of confidence in other peripheral economies, the euro zone must undergo much faster acceleration towards fiscal and financial integration than most European politicians will admit.
To safeguard banks in Portugal or Spain from runs, European policymakers will have to set up some form of euro-wide deposit insurance. And to reassure investors in the sovereign-debt markets, there will have to be much quicker progress to some form of debt mutualisation among the single currency’s members. The Europeans should have started work on these things during the lull in the crisis earlier this year. Germany resisted that. Now these changes must be done in a rush.
A vote to rock democracy’s cradle
The Greek election is in effect a referendum on whether the country will stay in the euro. It is not completely without hope. A new Greek coalition which vowed to stick to the rescue deal would in fact gain some help from the rest of Europe. At the same time, with the promise of a common banking backstop and some form of Eurobonds, the euro would at last start to look as if it could survive and the dangers of contagion would fall away. And if Greece were an isolated problem, it would be much easier to nurse slowly back to health.
The financial re-engineering of Europe is a prerequisite for the euro to survive. Greece is bringing forward that moment of truth. And yet politicians, particularly in Germany, have still to accept the logic, let alone explain it to voters. The prospect of a Greek exit means they must begin to do so—and fast.

Prtrol price hiked by Rs 7.54 per litre

NEW DELHI:  The rate of petrol has increase by an Rs 7.54 per litre. This is the steepest hike in petrol price ever, the previous high being Rs 5 per litre. Oil firms had twice raised rates by Rs 5 per litre – on May 15, 2011 when prices in Delhi were hiked from Rs 58.37 a litre to Rs 63.37 per litre and on May 24, 2008 when rates were raised to Rs 50.56 a litre.
The Government had decontrolled petrol price in June 2010 but rates were last increased on November 4 last year. This despite oil price rising by 14.5 per cent and 3.2 per cent fall in value of rupee against the US dollar.
Oil Minister S Jaipal Reddy had stated that the depreciation in rupee had necessitated an immediate increase in fuel prices.
State-owned oil firms, which had in the fiscal ending March 31, 2012 lost Rs 4,860 crore on petrol sales, were currently losing Rs 6.28 per litre on petrol.
The losses on petrol are besides Rs 512 crore per day that oil firms lose on selling diesel, domestic LPG and kerosene. Diesel is currently sold at a loss of Rs 15.35 a litre, kerosene at Rs 32.98 per litre loss and oil firms lose Rs 479 on sale of every 14.2-kg domestic LPG cylinder.
The three firms had together lost Rs 138,541 crore in revenue in 2011-12. This year they are projected to lose a record Rs 193,880 crore.

Nobody's Child: Adopted at 3 months from India, 30 year old becomes global orphan

WASHINGTON: She's nobody's child. Orphaned at birth and losing her adoptive mother at eight was rough enough. But stateless at 17 after being disenfranchised and disowned by both her adopted country and the country of her birth -- how much more cruel can the world be, except of course to punish her with debilitating multiple sclerosis when she is fighting a pitiless legal system?

In a heart-breaking case that reveals the remorseless nature of governments, bureaucracies, and the judicial system, Kairi Abha Shepherd, now 30, who was adopted from Kolkata when she was only three months old by an American single mother from Utah, has been ordered to be deported to India, a country she has never lived in or visited.

Shorn of technicalities, the complicated case boils down to this: Kairi's mother Erlene, an American do-gooder who adopted 11 children from across the world, many of them with disabilities, did not complete the paperwork and other formalities that would have made the India-born child a US citizen, before she (the single mother) died of cancer when the adopted child was only eight.

Still, Kairi might have navigated the system with the help of her siblings and her mother's friends and come out unscathed. But at 17, she was arrested and convicted of felony check forgery to fuel a drug habit. That brought her under the shadow of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 that allowed deportations of legal permanent residents convicted of non-violent crimes. In 2004, Kairi was convicted on forgery charges, a crime of ''moral turpitude'' that was covered under the 1996 Act for deportation even after she served a prison sentence.

Soon the bureaucracy, procedures, and technicalities took over. Kairi's lawyers produced a birth certificate, legal adoption papers, and documentation to show that she qualified for citizenship under the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 and won favourable rulings from an immigration judge. But government prosecutors returned to show that she missed qualifying for the Child Citizenship Act by a few months and appealed the immigration judge's ruling.

Earlier this month, Judge Scott Matheson of the 10th circuit court, in a 23-page decision, wrote the court simply didn't have jurisdiction over determining Shepherd's legal status, a ruling that virtually upheld the federal government's right to remove her from the country.

''She just fell between the cracks,'' Kairi's attorney Alan Smith, who is working pro-bono on the case, told TOI in an interview. ''In my 30 years of legal practice, I have never seen anything like this.''

Smith and a group of lawyers who have volunteered to represent Kairi are now conferring about appealing to the US Supreme Court in the 45-day window before US immigration officials begin deportation proceedings. Not that either process will be easy.

Immigration authorities must first determine whether the country of origin will admit the person being returned, and there is no word from New Delhi yet on that. Besides, Smith and his team are also petitioning authorities to hold her removal in abeyance in light of her medical condition.

''We want authorities to hold back deportation proceedings till we exhaust all legal avenues." Smith said. ''Our biggest fear is that she might find it hard to survive in India with her multiple sclerosis condition with no support.''

Currently incommunicado fearing imminent deportation, Kairi is in touch with her attorneys over phone and email. She's a global orphan.

Untiring Love!!!!!!!

This is a true story that happened in Japan.
In order to renovate the house, someone in Japan tore open the wall. Japanese houses normally have a hollow space between the wooden walls. When tearing down the walls, he found that there was a lizard stuck there because a nail from outside was hammered into one of its feet. He saw this, felt pity, and at the same time he was curious. When he checked the nail, turns out, it was nailed 5 years ago when the house was first built.

What happened?
The lizard had survived in such a position for 5 years! In a dark wall partition for 5 years without moving, it is impossible and mind boggling. Then he wondered how this lizard survived for 5 years without moving a single step--since its foot was nailed!
So he stopped his work and observed the lizard, what it had been doing, and what and how it had been eating. Later, not knowing from where it came, appeared another lizard, with food in its mouth.

Ahh! He was stunned and at the same time, touched deeply. Another lizard had been feeding the stuck one for the past 5 years...
Such love, such a beautiful love! Such love happened with this tiny creature...
What can love do? It can do wonders! Love can perform miracles!
Just think about it; one lizard had been feeding the other one
untiringly for 5 long years, without giving up hope on its partner.

If a small creature like a lizard can love like this...
just imagine as a human-being how we can love if we try............

To Winter By William Blake

 

Winter Poem By William Blake                                                                                                          

O Winter! bar thine adamantine doors:
The north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark
Deep-founded habitation. Shake not thy roofs,
Nor bend thy pillars with thine iron car.'
He hears me not, but o'er the yawning deep
Rides heavy; his storms are unchain'd, sheathиd
In ribbиd steel; I dare not lift mine eyes,
For he hath rear'd his sceptre o'er the world.

Lo! now the direful monster, whose 1000 skin clings
To his strong bones, strides o'er the groaning rocks:
He withers all in silence, and in his hand
Unclothes the earth, and freezes up frail life.

He takes his seat upon the cliffs,--the mariner
Cries in vain. Poor little wretch, that deal'st
With storms!--till heaven smiles, and the monster
Is driv'n yelling to his caves beneath mount Hecla.

Aung San Suu Kyi Is Freed At Last

                                        Freedom At Last, Mrs. Suu Kyi, 2010.
Myanmar's iconic and pro-democracy leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, today was freed from seven and a half years of house arrest. She was greeted at the gate of her compound by thousands of jubilant supporters. She stood weaving and smiling in pink long sleeved shirt, as people cheered, chanted and sang the national anthem.

She held a white-handkerchief in one hand and said, "Thank you for welcoming me like this", clutching the iron bar of her gate as  she looked out at the cheering crowd. " We haven't seen each other for so long, I have so much to tell you".
She said, she would speak again on Sunday at the Headquarter of her now defunct political party, the National League For Democracy.

"We must unite!!!". She said, " If we are united, we can get what we want".
Aung San had spent 15 of the last 20 years under House-Arrest, and her release had been the leading demand of Western Nations seeking to pressure the ruling Junta on questions of Human Rights and political freedom.
Mrs. Suu Kyi is a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. Though she long has had no contact with the world outside her Lake side Villa, she has remained a symbol of hope for the people of Burma and lovers of Democracy around the world.
The crowd outside her party headquarters on Friday buzzed with anticipation. A man rode a bycycle near her house with a sign hanging from the  handlebars with the picture of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi and a Poem titled " Until We Achieve Success".
* Aung San Suu Kyi is one the few women leaders that I admired so much, her love for Liberty and Freedom for humankind is amazing. I hope and pray that, her dream of Free Burma will soon be a reality.~Delson

Baptiste Daleman and his band in the campus!!!!!1

On the 22nd of March 2010, we had a very wonderful time in the campus. On the occasion of La culture francaise s'invite en Inde, Baptiste Daleman and his band came to our University to perform different music, which was really good and it was the first time I'm listening to French music Live.The band include, Richard who is a celebrated guitarist, Anatole guitarist and co-singer, Pierrick Rossi who is an actor, saxophone player and singer is living in artistic world since he was born. He joined conservatiore de Lyon when he was 8.Later he became the singer and played saxophone for a band called "ZUMBAKAI". Baptiste could have some common points with any Hawaian guitarist. But his music and personality are definitely based on French influences. Still young but already very experienced. With his guitar player and co-singer Anatole, they released their first album called 'Deviens-toi'.The programme was worth watching!!!!!

North East Festival In The Campus.

We had a North East Festival in the campus. It was really wonderful and colorful.All the North Eastern States comprising- Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura showcased their cultural dances and songs. We got good response from other communities, and the DST Auditorium was packed with crowds. I also participated in group song, we sang the song called "We will Stand" by Gaither Vocal Band.It was really nice to see all the Dances and songs coming from different2 states. The programme makes me Home-Sick, as the environment was so North-East.I also invited some of my foreign classmate and they really enjoyed too, I guess. My friend Kevin from US was like 'Oh Oww' when he saw Mizo's performing 'Bamboo Dance'.I thanked all my friends who came to attend the programme, I also thanked for their wonderful compliments that they bestowed upon us through words, sms, phone etc, those compliments were really special for us and I hope, next time we will do better than that.I never expect to get so many audience. It was out of our expectation.Oh the Chief Guest was Dr Christina Chawngthu IAS from my State. I heard lots of thing about her and that was the first time I encounter face to face with her. Her words were very inspiring and she is really talented.
As I have a limited time, I won't be able to upload photos that we took, but from next time I shall try my level best to upload photos as well.After having had a wonderful function I came back to hostel.I had a deep sleep, just like a child.