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

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

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

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.

A Thought for Today-2: June 22, 2007

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

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"

Random Thoughts-3: "The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna"

This book was originally written by Mahendra Nath Gupta, a school teacher. He has been visiting Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa at Dakshineshwar, a village near Calcutta (India)(Calcutta has been renamed as Kolkatta) during the last five years of the latter's life. He has recorded what he witnessed and heard during his visits to the latter. The popular English version was translated by Swami Nikhilananda. This English translation was presented to me by a dear friend of mine, who is a devotee of Sri Ramakrishna. I did not read it for six long years and the book was lying in my bookshelf. Then I read it and it started changing me.

It was also the starting point of my spiritual awakening. I still have to go a long, long way. Whenever my mind is disturbed I go to the book and read it at random. It has a soothing effect.

This book has influenced and helped a lot of spiritual seekers. Everyone who aspires for a spiritual life, irrespective of his religion, should read this wonderful book, that is my sincere feeling.

The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna: http://www.rkmath.org/articles/gospeloframakrishna
Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita: http://www.kathamrita.org/KathamritaMain.htm
Ramakrishna Daily Sutras : http://www.angelfire.com/ma/ramakrishna/sutra1.html
Lessons from the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna: http://www.geocities.com/neovedanta/gospel.html