Adventures in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Let's go to India for a few sublimely ridiculous non-adventure holidays. It's hot, cheap and freaky over there. These are the stories of my three trips to India. Most of the action happens in India, but Nepal, Sri Lanka, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, Netherlands and England also feature. If you have ever travelled in South Asia, you will probably relate to some of this. Look out for the story of the two laundry men who looked similar to each other. They caused all kinds of confusion. The first India trip was from the perspective of a tourist, but foir the second and third trips I brought along some larger-than-life personalities, Bongo van Latte and Streev Greebling. Third world or no third world, we're gonna party! Wittily written, well designed, and illustrated with photographs and artwork.

Religious minorities have long been the target of a range of different forms of persecution, such as hate crimes, threats, attacks on places of worship, and forced conversion. Nevertheless, in recent years there has been rising hostility against India’s religious minorities, particularly since the current right-wing BJP government promoting Hindu nationalism took power at the national level after its election in May 2014. In particular, communal violence disproportionately affects India’s religious minorities – especially Muslims, but also Christians and Sikhs. While often instrumentalized for political gains, communal violence draws on and exacerbates a climate of entrenched discrimination against India’s religious minorities, with far-reaching social, economic, cultural and political dimensions. Such violence is frequently met with impunity and in certain instances direct complicity from state actors, ranging from inciting violence through hate speech to refusing to properly investigate communal incidents after they have occurred. The aim of this short briefing is to contextualise these recent developments, drawing attention to the ways communal violence is linked to wider discrimination against religious minorities, and infringes upon their enjoyment of minority rights.

There are many strange but true facts that we hear or read about without actual registering the unusual context. And there are other facts that we may never have even heard about.Did you know that:*There is an annual ghost mela held in Madhya Pradesh?*Switzerland attracts the most suicide tourists?*Sicily is seen upside down from an Italian village?*A new Japanese jeans actually slows down ageing?*In ancient times, iron cost more than gold?*Silver can destroy 650 disease-causing bacteria?*Mahavira wasn t really the founder of Jainism?*There s a fruit that smells like shit but tastes like heaven ?*The banana could be extinct in 10 years?*There is a plant that goes searching for water?*The Puffer Fish contains a poison that is 500 times deadlier than cyanide, yet it s a delicacy in Japan?The book uncovers the latest unusual facts to amuse, amaze and enthral you, and also boost your current affairs and general knowledge.Through this plethora of strange but true facts, readers will learn a lot about India and the world s unusual past, present and future.Truly an unputdownable book!

This is a volume about the life and power of ritual objects in their religious ritual settings. In this Special Issue, we see a wide range of contributions on material culture and ritual practices across religions. By focusing on the dynamic interrelations between objects, ritual, and belief, it explores how religion happens through symbolic materiality. The ritual objects presented in this volume include: masks worn in the Dogon dance; antique ecclesiastical silver objects carried around in festive processions and shown in shrines in the southern Andes; funerary photographs and films functioning as mnemonic objects for grieving children; a dented rock surface perceived to be the god’s footprint in the archaic place of pilgrimage, Gaya (India); a recovered manual of rituals (from Xiapu county) for Mani, the founder of Manichaeism, juxtaposed to a Manichaean painting from southern China; sacred stories and related sacred stones in the Alor–Pantar archipelago, Indonesia; lotus symbolism, indicating immortalizing plants in the mythic traditions of Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia; lavishly illustrated variations of portrayals of Ravana, a Sinhalese god-king-demon; figurines made of cow dung sculptured by rural women in Rajasthan (India); and mythical artifacts called ‘Apples of Eden’ in a well-known interactive game series.

While sectarian violence has greatly diminished on the streets of Belfast and Derry, proxy battles over the right to define Northern Ireland’s identity through its new symbolic landscapes continue. Offering a detailed ethnographic account of Northern Ireland’s post-conflict visual transformation, this book examines the official effort to produce new civic images against a backdrop of ongoing political and social struggle. Interviews with politicians, policymakers, community leaders, cultural workers, and residents shed light on the deeply contested nature of seemingly harmonized urban landscapes in societies undergoing radical structural change. Here, the public art process serves as a vital means to understanding the wider politics of a transforming public sphere in an age of globalization and transnational connectivity.

One of the most radical philosophers of the twentieth century, Gilles Deleuze has become hugely influential in philosophy, cultural studies, literature, art, and architecture. Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts brings together leading specialists from a variety of different disciplines in an easy-to-access primer on Deleuze's work. Deleuze's concepts - such as assemblage, the fold, difference and repetition, cinema and desire - are key to understanding his philosophical approach: they work to unsettle particular bodies of knowledge, to open them up and link them to other concepts within and outside that body of knowledge. The short and accessible chapters in this book each focus on a single concept, offering a definition and showing what the concept does. The contributors also consider how the concepts are engaged, intersect, and link, and how they may deviate from other areas of postmodern thought.