SURiMOUNT

This blog has become a sort of personal-cum-public diary. As for its contents, some are meant for me and my friends and relatives; others are for the public. This blog will have only positive, ennobling, elevating, encouraging and uplifting thoughts/ideas/materials. Whoever visits should feel happy and should be able to pick up some good ideas/thoughts/links. In short, "NOTHING NEGATIVE" is my motto.(Grateful thanks to Jon Sullivan and Public-Domain-Photos.com for the background photo)

Saturday, June 30, 2007

BBC - Follow Your Dream

Classical Chinese Stories/ Parables

Classical Chinese Story / Parable in Chinese and English translation

Modern American Poetry

161 poets are covered in this site. Their Picture/Photo, Biography, Selected Works/Critical Excerpts, Interviews, Reviews, Bibliography, External Links and General Commentary are available.

The Poets

The Classic Text: Traditions and Interpretations

"In what ways have such classic works as the Bible and the plays of William Shakespeare been presented to a loyal readership over the centuries? How have the works of the ancient Greeks and Romans been transmitted through the millennia, and why do they continue to hold such potency and relevance? How has the vivid imagery of Dante's Divine Comedy been depicted and interpreted from the middle ages to the present? Would Milton's Paradise Lost have entered the canon of western literature without the untiring promotional efforts of its principal publisher? Why do works such as Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin continue to hold secure positions as American literary classics? Would James Joyce's Ulysses have remained an obscure modernist novel without the censorship issues that surrounded it?

These are some of the questions addressed by a major exhibition entitled "The Classic Text: Traditions and Interpretations," that was on view in the Fourth Floor Exhibition Gallery of the Golda Meir Library from May 1996 through March 1997. This exhibit was redesigned as a Web exhibit in 1997.

The exhibition of over 130 books, manuscripts, and prints, drawn principally from the library's Special Collections, is concerned less with the literary merits of the great standard classics, than it is with the text as cultural icon, offering insight into the question of what becomes a classic most, and why."

Some of these Classics are:

1. The Bible
2. Homer
3. Aristophanes
4. Virgil
5. Ovid
6. Saint Augustine
7. Dante Alighieri
8. Geoffrey Chaucer
9. Edmund Spencer
10. William Shakespeare
11. John Milton
12. James Fenimore Cooper
13. Nathaniel Hawthorne
14. Harrier Beecher Stowe
15. James Joyce
The Classic Text: Traditions and Interpretations: Table of Contents

Plays from The EServer Drama Collection

Drama: Plays

SRIMAD BHAGAVATAM (Bhagavata Purana) - The Story of Lord Krishna

SRIMAD BHAGAVATAM (Bhagavata Purana); the story of Krishna

What is the meaning of life?

The Short Story Classics: The Best From The Masters Of The Genre

Net Watch: The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Sayings of Lao-Tzu

The Sayings of Lao-Tzu Index

Eyecatchers-13: "The Meaning and Purpose of Life"

The Meaning and Purpose of Life

If you are like me, worrying whether there is some meaning in this life or whether it has got a specific purpose, you may find this site interesting.

There is also an intersting article on "Meaning of Life" in Wikipedia. If you so like, you can peruse that also.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaning_of_life

Eyecatchers-12: "Steve Pavlina’s Personal Development Blog"

Steve Pavlina’s Personal Development Blog

'Self-Help', 'Self-Improvement, or 'Personal Development' - Generally all these terms are used synonymously. This is a good blog for those who are interested in the subject.

Also furnishing a link to article on "Self-Help" from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_development

Eyecatchers-11: "Short stories at east of the web"

short stories at east of the web

Eyecatchers-10: "Short Stories from Project Gutenberg"

Search on Titles > Results - Project Gutenberg

Eyecatchers-8: "Bhagavad Gita and Mahabharata"

This site provides the great Indian epic, Mahabharata, and the great spiritual book of India, Bhagavad Gita.

One can read the Bhagavad Gita in any one of the three languages of one's choice: Sanskrit, Hindi or English.

There are a lot of commentories on the Gita by eminent persons. I have studied some of them. Generally, the first reading is from beginning to end, with a pen in hand to highlight/underline passages which appeal to me. During the second reading, I pay more attention to the highlighted passages and after that I open the book and read at random the highlighted passages only. Thus, without much effort, I always pick up some elevating/ennobling thoughts/ideas. Lord Krishna's advice to Arjun, holds good for us also and I found them helpful on many an occasion. Some of these gems I recall at random and give below:

1. The doer of good, never comes to harm.
( This motivates one to do good always.)
2. No effort is ever wasted.
(So I don't give up my efforts on the face of difficulties and go on with my efforts)
3. My devotee never perishes.
(For all embodied souls, death is imminent, even incarnations of God are not exempt from this.For the devotee who has surrendered himself to God, death will be an honorable one. He will not perish i.e. meet with ignominious death).
4. Give up cowardice/unmanliness, it ill becomes thee!
(This motivates one to face challenges in life manfully, instead of running away from them.)

This digital version should be more easier to refer to. So I feel it is a good contribution and deserves kudos. My sincere thanks to http://www.4to40.com/ !

Bhagavad Gita, Mahabharata, Bhagavat Gita in Sanskrit, Hindi, English, Krishna Arjun,Indian Mythology, Geeta Translation

Eyecatchers-7: "Paid Surveys | Paid Clicks | Paid Emails | Get Paid Programs Online"

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$$$ Paid Surveys Paid Clicks Paid Emails Get Paid Programs Online $$$

Random Thoughts-9: "Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda Literature"

I am a humble devotee of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. I worship Sri Ramakrishna, Holy Mother Sarada Devi and Swami Vivekananda at least once daily. I have been through turbulent times and I could find some solace only after my coming into contact with Sri Ramakrishna Math and after I started studying Sri Ramakrishna-Swami Vivekananda Literature.

I am glad to find that a devotee has taken pains to provide some most prominent books of Sri Ramakrishna-Swami Vivekananda Literature for the benefit of troubled souls like me. This website contains:

1. THE GOSPEL OF SRI RAMAKRISHNA (KATHAMRITA) Slightly edited translation by Swami
Nikhilananda published 1944
2. THE GOSPEL OF SRI RAMAKRISHNA (KATHAMRITA) Word to word translation
by Sri Dharm Pal Gupta
3. THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SWAMI VIVEKANANDAVIVEKANANDA A BIOGRAPHY
by Swami Nikhilananda (Published 1953)
4. SWAMI NIRMALANANDA – HIS LIFE AND TEACHINGS(Published 1943)
5. GAURI MA – A MONASTIC DISCIPLE OF SRI RAMAKRISHNA (Published 1994)

I am not able to identify the devotee who has very kindly done this wonderful job. My hearty and sincere thanks to him. Thank you, Sir, thank you very much!

Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda

Eyecatchers-6: "Short Stories from Bibliomania: Free Online Literature and Study Guides"

I used to be an avid reader of Fiction. About 20 years back, suddenly I started losing interest in Fiction and started moving towards Non-Fiction.

However, since the past four or five years, my interest in Fiction has started awakening, though it is very selective and limited. I have started reading the novels of Paulo Coelho and short stories, especially short stories. This Bibliomania site contains some very good short stories which I have enjoyed thorougly. For short-story afficionados, this site is a boon. I am reproducing below a passage from this website, which gives a clear idea about what to expect from this site.

"Short stories are often considered to be the most perfect form of fiction writing, and nearly every author of merit has many great tales to their name. We feature some of the most famous authors of short stories such as O. Henry, Saki (Hector Monro), Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Jack London and Henry James. Alongside them we have the stories of great dramatists and novelists such as Anton Chekhov, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Aldous Huxley, Antony Trollope and Emile Zola; and undeservedly lesser known authors such as the hilarious Ambrose Bierce, and Barnaby Rich (whose 1581 book 'Farewell to the Military Profession' provided Shakespeare with the plot for "Twelfth Night").

Collections by individual authors include P.G. Wodehouse's brilliant The Man Upstairs, Edgar Allen Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination and James Joyce's controversial classic Dubliners."

Thank you very much, Bibliomania, thank you very much!

Bibliomania: Free Online Literature and Study Guides

Eyecatchers-5: "Creative Commons Search"

Creative Commons Search

Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share.

For a detailed article on "Creative Commons":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons

Eyecatchers-4: "Flickr Blog"

Flickr Blog

Flickr is an image and video hosting website, one of the most popular websites. According to Wikipedia, it has more than 2 billion images! You can visit the site by clicking above and see for yourself.

If you want to know more about Flickr, you can read the article on "Flickr" from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flickr

Grateful thanks to Wikipedia.

A Thought for Today-6: June 30, 2007

There is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost - Martha Graham

Friday, June 29, 2007

Eyecatchers-3: "Odysseus Unbound - The Search for Homer's Ithaca"

Odysseus Unbound - The Search for Homer's Ithaca

Eyecatchers-2: "Odysseus, Ulysses, Greece, Greek mythology"

Odysseus, Ulysses, Greece, Greek mythology

Random Thoughts-8: "Poem Hunter: A Pageant of Poems"

My daughter was desperately looking for the complete text of about a dozen poems by various poets for her class. No book was readily available. We accidentally stumbled onto this site to discover one of the most complete repository of poems. We just love this website and have found many of our favourite poems, which we have almost forgotten. Even now, it helps my daughter in her class regularly, when the prescribed books are not available and when she needs the complete text of a poem.

As of September 2005, 87,319 poems by 10,065 poets are freely available!

In its own words, "PoemHunter.Com aims to spread the effects of poems in the social and individual life of people, where a continuous change is undergoing with the Internet. PoemHunter.Com without a pause, continues its activities with the active participation of thousands of members."

Thank you very much, PoemHunter, thank you very much!

http://www.poemhunter.com/

For free poetry e-books :

http://www.poemhunter.com/eBooks/

Random Thoughts-7: "Wikipedia: Warehouse of Wisdom and Wonders"

Another website I love is "Wikipedia". How many times it has saved me from embarassments! To me, it is the "www" of the Net: "Warehouse of Wisdom and Wonders". Yes, a Repository of not just information but knowledge and wisdom, which is absolutely FREE and is accessible to all! Thank you very much, Wikipedia!

Reproducing a few paragraphs from "Wikipedia: About" would give an idea about it.

"Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world. With rare exceptions, its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet, simply by clicking the edit this page link. The name Wikipedia is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a type of collaborative website) and encyclopedia. Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference Websites.

History

Wikipedia was founded as an offshoot of Nupedia, a now-abandoned project to produce a free encyclopedia. Nupedia had an elaborate system of peer review and required highly qualified contributors, but the writing of articles was slow. During 2000, Jimmy Wales, founder of Nupedia, and Larry Sanger, whom Wales had employed to work on the project, discussed ways of supplementing Nupedia with a more open, complementary project.

On the evening of January 2, 2001, Sanger had a conversation over dinner with Ben Kovitz, a computer programmer, in San Diego, California. Kovitz, who was a regular on "Ward's Wiki" (the WikiWikiWeb), explained the wiki concept to Sanger. Sanger saw that a wiki would be an excellent format whereby a more open, less formal encyclopedia project could be pursued. Sanger easily persuaded Wales, who had already been introduced to the wiki concept, to set up a wiki for Nupedia, and Nupedia's first wiki went online on January 10.

There was considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia's editors and reviewers to the idea of associating Nupedia with a website in the wiki format, so the new project was given the name "Wikipedia" and launched on its own domain, wikipedia.com, on January 15 (now called "Wikipedia Day" by some users). The bandwidth and server (in San Diego) were donated by Wales. Other current and past Bomis employees who have worked on the project include Tim Shell, one of the cofounders of Bomis and its current CEO, and programmer Jason Richey. The domain was eventually changed to the present wikipedia.org when the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation was launched as its new parent organisation, prompting the use of a .org domain to denote its noncommercial nature. In March 2007, the word wiki became a newly recognised English word. In May 2001, a wave of non-English Wikipedias was launched—in Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish; these were soon joined by Arabic and Hungarian. In September, Polish was added and further commitment to the multilingual provision of Wikipedia was made. At the end of the year, Afrikaans, Norwegian, and Serbocroatian versions were announced.

Random Thoughts-6: "Project Gutenberg: The Book-lovers' Paradise"

This is another wonderful website to which I shall remain ever grateful. For booklovers like me, who cannot afford to buy all the books they love to buy and read, this is the solution and a perfect heaven! It is the first producer of e-books. Its mission "To encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". It has more than hundred thousand books in various languages.

If you have a Palm organizer or smartphone, you can download the plucker version of any ebook and read it on your Palm organizer or smartphone.

They also offer other special services like:

Handy ebook Listings to consult offline.
Audio Books, both human-read and computer-generated.
"Best Of" selections on CD and DVD.
Digitized Sheet Music

Thank you Project Gutenberg, thank you very much! I shall be grateful to you ALWAYS!

The link to Project Gutenberg Catalogue is furnished below:

http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/

Random Thoughts-5: "Refdesk and the services offered by it"

It is one of the best sources of facts on various subjects on the net.

I am very much fascinated by this wonderful website. Though it does not need any introduction as it is universally well-known, I am posting it for the sake of some of my friends.

From the sitemap of this website, one can see the various fields covered by it. The link to this sitemap is:

http://www.refdesk.com/toc.html

Random Thoughts-4: "The Google Magic !"

,NAs already somebody has put it, I belong to the netizen group to whom "Google is Internet, Internet is Google".

Oh, how much knowledge I have gained, how much I have enjoyed, how much I have benefitted through Google! I am grateful to you, Google!!

I am posting this mainly for my children, who think Google is just a search engine. I am requesting them and children like them to click the link and see for themselves the wonderful services freely offered by Google and HOW FAST they do it!

Thanks once again Google, I am very grateful to you!

Addendum: I have got the book, "The Google Story" by David A.Vise, which is simply exciting. I have learnt a lot even from the first three chapters. I have included Sergey Brin and Larry Page in my list of Heroes, who deserve the gratitude of humanity.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/about.html

Eyecatchers-1 : How to construct Blogs?

http://betabloggerfordummies.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-to-construct-blog-links.html

A Thought for Today-5, June 29, 2007

God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers.

Rudyard Kipling

Thursday, June 28, 2007

A Thought for Today-4: June 28, 2007

Every man who knows how to read, has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make life full, significant, and interesting - Aldous Huxley

Monday, June 25, 2007

A Thought for Today-3: June 25, 2007

Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.

- Winston Churchill

Invocation

Holy Feet of Mother Sarada Devi

June 25, 2007

Today's posting, I am starting with prayers. O Lord Vigneshwara! May this blog of mine become useful to everybody and everybody may find something interesting and useful in this blog.

“Gajananam bhoothaganati sevitham palasara pakshitham namami vigneshwara paatha pankajam.”

Let me also invoke the Rig Veda saying, “Let noble thoughts come from all sides” and commence this day’s posting.

O Saraswathima! Goddess of Learning, bless your child to have ennobling and enriching thoughts to post on this blog, which uplifts and elevates everybody who comes across this blog and let the postings on this blog wake up the dormant inner spark inside everybody.

Saturday, June 23, 2007

A Thought for Today-2: June 22, 2007

Anything that makes you weak -PHYSICALLY, MENTALLY and SPIRITUALLY - reject it as poison. - Swami Vivekananda

Saturday, June 16, 2007

A Thought for Today-1: June 16, 2007

After a long gap, I am posting something on my blog. So let me start with a good 'Thought for the Day':

"Take away love and our earth is a tomb - Robert Browning"