Copyright@shravancharitymission

QUOTES 4/10/26
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You can’t become a dictator through checks and balances… TOMMY CHONG
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Blessed influence of one true loving human soul on another! Not calculable by algebra, not deducible by logic, but mysterious, effectual, mighty as the hidden process by which the tiny seed is quickened, and bursts forth into stem and broad leaf, and glowing tasselled flower… GEORGE ELIOT
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What insurance companies have done is to reverse the business so that public at large insures insurance companies…GERRY SPENCE
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“You are not wrong who deem
  That my days have been a dream;
    Yet if hope has flown away
    In a night, or in a day,
    In a vision, or in none,
    Is it therefore the less gone?
    All that we see or seem
    Is but a dream within a dream.” …EDGAR ALLAN POE
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Making new petroleum should be as simple and straightforward as brewing beer… GEORGE M CHURCH
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Practise loving those who do not love you. Feel for those who do not feel for you. Be generous to those who are generous only to themselves. If you heap hatred on your enemy, neither he nor you can perceive the inherent beauty of your soul…. PARAMHANSA YOGANANDA
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Shakespeare once said ‘You can smile and smile and still be a villain’.
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‘Some people with great virtues are disagreeable, while others with great vices are delightful’… FRANCOIS DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
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For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the desires of men…CS LEWIS
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A person is a person through other persons. None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, walk, speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings…I am because other people are… DESMOND TITU
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The job of the Central Bank is to worry…ALICE RIVLIN
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There are two aspects of individual harmony: the harmony between body and soul, and the harmony between individuals. All tragedy in the world, in individual and in multitude, comes from lack of harmony. And harmony is the best given by producing harmony in one’s own life….HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN
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It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square miles, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven…EM FORSTER in his novel HOWARDS END
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At its best, schooling can be about how to make life, which is quite different from how to make a living…NEIL POSTMAN
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What kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others…ALAIN DE BOTTOM
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I prefer peace. But if trouble must come, let it come in my time, so that children can live in peace…THOMAS PAINE
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The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion… ELISABETH KUBLER-ROSS
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Prejudices are what fools use for reason…VOLTAIRE

Copyright@shravancharitymission

DOES GEN Z ALSO FACE THE DILEMMA OF BEING CHOSEN, LIKE RIA?

What happens when you want to marry, find a companion and build a life with someone, but no one seems willing to choose you?

That is the question at the heart of One to Tango: Ria’s Odyssey, a story that begins with Ria’s search for a life partner but gradually becomes a much larger exploration of rejection, self worth, relationships and the search for meaning.

Ria wants to marry. She wants a companion with whom she can build a life. Yet one prospective suitor after another rejects her. The writer brings the arranged marriage process vividly to life through Ria’s encounters with prospective matches. Some of these meetings are amusing, even awkwardly hilarious, because of the questions asked and the expectations placed on a prospective bride. But beneath the humour lies an uncomfortable reality. A woman is placed before strangers, observed, questioned and assessed, sometimes as though her entire future depends on marriage and on being accepted.

For Ria, the repeated rejection is not merely disappointing. It slowly begins to affect the way she sees herself. The question changes from “Why did they reject me?” to the far more painful, “Why does nobody choose me? Am I not worth anything?”

And this is where Ria’s story becomes surprisingly relevant to Gen Z. The generation that speaks more openly about independence, personal choice, compatibility and self worth may approach relationships very differently from earlier generations. Yet beneath these changing attitudes lies a very old human desire: to be loved, accepted and chosen by someone.

Many women today consciously choose singlehood and create independent, fulfilling lives. Ria’s predicament is different. She wanted marriage, but circumstances gradually push her towards a life she had never imagined for herself.

Interestingly, the book places another kind of loneliness alongside hers. Viren is married, has a daughter and holds a high profile corporate position, yet his personal life leaves him emotionally unsettled. His troubled marriage, marked by conflict, hysterical tirades and emotional turbulence, raises another uncomfortable question: can a person have a family and still feel profoundly alone?

Ria and Viren therefore enter the story from very different circumstances, yet their lives begin to intersect in ways that make the reader look beyond the simple labels of married and unmarried.

One of the most powerful sentences in the book captures this paradox:

“There are some on this planet who never get to live with someone they love, and there are many who keep kicking their partners and don’t realise the bliss of God in making them life partners.”

It is a striking thought because it turns the familiar conversation about marriage on its head. Having someone beside you does not automatically mean having companionship, just as being alone does not necessarily mean living an incomplete life.

What follows takes Ria somewhere she could never have anticipated. Her encounters with Viren become an important part of her journey, but the real transformation happens within her. Slowly, the woman who once measured her worth through the eyes of prospective partners begins to look at her life differently. Rejection starts losing its power over her, and new possibilities begin to emerge.

This is where the book becomes more than a story about finding a husband. It becomes a story about finding oneself.

The language is fluid and easy, making the book accessible without making its questions simplistic. There are moments that make you smile, moments that make you uncomfortable and moments that make you reconsider what we casually call a “settled life.”

For Gen Z and for those who came before them, the book raises a timeless question. Relationships may have changed. The way we meet people has changed. Our expectations of marriage have changed. But has the fundamental human need for companionship really changed?

And then there is the title.
Tango is traditionally a dance for two. Ria begins her journey believing that certain dances in life require another person. But what happens when the other dancer does not appear? Does the music stop?

Perhaps that is the question readers should carry into the final pages.
Because One to Tango is not simply about whether Ria finds the person she has been waiting for. It is about what she discovers along the way.

And the final turn in Ria’s journey is beautiful. It is unexpected, deeply moving and best left for the reader to experience. Revealing it would take away from the pleasure of discovering how Ria’s journey finally comes together.

Sometimes the most beautiful endings are the ones we never see coming

22/4/26 INSIDE THE FIREPROOF VAULT HOUSING US MOVIE HISTORY
… Around 1,45,000 film reels from over a century ago are being stored in a specially designed library…
    Back in the golden age of Hollywood, the movies were bigger, the stars brighter and the celluloid they were filmed on was explosive literally. In fact, they were so combustible that the US Library of Congress maintains a fireproof vault near Washington DC to store these films.
    A highly combustible nitrate film was used in cinema from the 1890s until the early 1950s. The medium is volatile but durable, and thanks to the facility’s efforts in digitising these, they can also be safely viewed for the first time in decades.
Chilly vault, warm memories
    At the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, some 1,45,000 film reels are stored in fireproof conditions in a vast, chilly vault. It is crammed with cinematic treasures that rekindle warm memories of an era when movies ruled.
    In all, there are 124 cells –including one dedicated to storing the Disney archive — in floor-to-ceiling cubby holes, said George Willeman, the nitrate film vault’s head. Each cell holds film canisters containing negatives and prints, all arranged meticulously: Packed tight to prevent canisters from opening, but far enough apart to prevent any fire from spreading.
    Since being set up in 2007 in a former US Federal Reserve building, the vault has maintained a perfect no-fire record.
    FAN’S DELIGHT
    Nitrate film is just one part of the Center’s collection of more than six million items of moving images and recorded sound. They also have supporting scripts, posters and photos.
    Willeman, who sports a button badge with an invocation to ‘Experience Nitrate’, said the Library of Congress began preserving the medium in the 1960s, when “it was discovered that so much film was being lost” due to fires and defunct companies throwing negatives away.
    With the American Film Institute, the library began collecting and copying nitrate film, including the holdings of big Hollywood studios: RKO, Warner Brothers, Universal, Columbia and Walt Disney.
They also tapped into the personal collections of film icons such as movie impresario and silent era star Mary Pickford and motion pictures inventor Thomas Edison, whose early studio produced hundreds of films. “We’re some 50 years in, and it (the collection) just keeps growing,” Willeman said.
DIGITAL AGE CHALLENGES
With the arrival media, the mission has expanded beyond preservation — cinema historians say movies actually look better on nitrate footage. “Now we can make them available for everybody, which is just amazing,” Willeman added.
Nitrate film made by early artisans often preserves better than the later safety film, said Courtney Holschuh, a nitrate archive technician.
At a workstation with no light bulbs or exposed batteries — either of which could ignite dust or gas from vintage film– Holschuh recounted how she carefully peeled apart a cache of a 10 vintage reels donated by a retired school teacher.
There were 42 different titles on the reels, of which only 26 have been identified. This even included a lost film, Gugusse and the Automation by French cinema pioneer Georges Melies. “So much of our early film history is still out there for us to see and experience,” Willeman said.

LOVE STORY
BAUCIS AND PHILEMON
    Ovid is the only source for this story. It shows especially well his love of details and the skillful way he uses them to make a fairy tale seem realistic. The Latin names of the gods are used.
    In the Phrygian hill-country there were once two trees which all the peasants near and far pointed out as a great marvel, and no wonder, for one was an oak and the other a linden, yet they grew from a single trunk. The story of how this came about is a proof of the immeasurable power of gods, and also of the way they reward the humble and the pious.
    Sometimes when Jupiter was tired of eating ambrosia and drinking nectar up in Olympus and even a little weary of listening to Apollo’s lyre and watching the Graces dance, he would come down to the earth, disguise himself as a mortal and go looking for adventures. His favourite companion on these tours was Mercury, the most entertaining of all the gods, the shrewdest and the most resourceful. On this particular trip Jupiter had determined to find out how hospitable the people of Phrygia were. Hospitality was, of course, very important to him, since all guests, all who seek shelter in a strange land, were under his especial protection.
    The two gods, accordingly, took on the appearance of poor wayfarers and wandered through the land, knocking at each lowly hut or great house they came to and asking for food and a place to rest in. Not one would admit them; every time they were dismissed insolently and the door barred against them. They made a trial of hundreds; all treated them in the same way. At last they came upon a little novel of the humblest sort, poorer than any they had yet found, with a roof made only of reeds. But here, when they knocked, the door was opened wide and a cheerful voice bade them enter. They had to stop to pass through the low entrance, but once inside they found themselves in a snug and very clean room, where a kindly-faced old man and woman welcomed them in the friendliest fashion and bustled about to make them comfortable.
    The old man set a bench near the fire and told them to stretch out on it and rest their tired limbs, and the old woman threw a soft covering over it. Her name was Baucis, she told the strangers, and her husband was called Philemon. They had lived in that cottage all their married life and had always been happy. “We are poor folk,” she said, “but poverty isn’t so bad when you’re willing to own up to it, and a contented spirit is a great help, too.” All the while she was talking, she was busy doing things for them. The coals under the ashes on the dark hearth she fanned to life until a cheerful fire was burning. Over this she hung a little kettle full of water and just as it began to boil her husband came in with a fine cabbage he had got from the garden. Into the kettle it went, with a piece of the pork which was hanging from one of the beams. While this cooked Baucis set the table with her trembling old hands. One table-leg was too short, but she propped it up with a bit of dish. One the board she placed olives and radishes and several eggs which she had roasted in the ashes. By this time the cabbage and bacon were done, and the old man pushed two rickety couches up to the table and bade his guests recline to eat.
    Presently he brought them cups of beechwood an earthenware mixing bowl which held some wine very little vinegar, plentifully diluted with water. Philemon, however, was clearly proud and happy at being able to add such cheer to the supper and he kept on the watch to refill each cup as soon as it was emptied. The two old folks were so pleased and excited by the success of their hospitality that only very slowly a strange thing dawned upon them. The mixing bowl kept full. No matter how many cups were poured out from it, the level of the wine stayed the same, up from the brim. As they saw this wonder each looked in terror at the other, and dropping their eyes they prayed silently. Then in quivering voices and trembling all over they begged their guests to pardon the poor refreshments they had offered. “We have a goose,” the old man said, “which we ought to have given your lordships. But if you will only wait, it shall be done at once.” To catch the goose, however, proved beyond their powers. They tried in vain until they were worn out, while Jupiter and Mercury watched them greatly entertained.
    But when both Philemon and Baucis had had to give up the chase panting and exhausted, the gods felt that the time had come for them to take action. They were really very kind, “You have been hosts to gods,” they said, “and you shall have your reward. This wicked country which despises the poor stranger will be bitterly punished, but not you.” They then escorted the two out of the hut and told them to look around them. To their amazement all they saw was water. The whole countryside had disappeared. A great lake surrounded them. Their neighbours had not been good to the old couple; nevertheless standing there they wept for them. But all of a sudden their tears were dried up by an overwhelming wonder. Before their eyes the tiny, lowly hut which had been their home for so long was turned into a stately pillared temple of whitest marble with a golden roof.
“Good people,” Jupiter said, “ask whatever you want and you shall have your wish.” The old people exchanged a hurried whisper, then Philemon spoke. “Let us be your priests, guarding this temple for you –and oh, since we have lived so long together, let neither of us ever have to live alone. Grant that we may die together.”
The gods assented, well pleased with the two. A long time they served in that grand building, and the story does not say whether they ever missed their little cozy room with its cheerful hearth. But one day standing before the marble and golden magnificence they fell to talking about the former life, which had been so hard and yet so happy. By now both were in extreme old age. Suddenly as they exchanged memories each saw the other putting forth leaves. Then bark was growing around them. They had time only to cry, “Farewell, dear companion.” As the words passed their lips they became trees, but still they were together. The linden and the oak grew from one trunk.
From far and wide people came to admire the wonder, and always wreaths of flowers hung on the branches in honour of the pious and faithful pair.