Meena shows her strength as a writer by painting the pictures of the palaces and gardens and beautiful architectures on the canvases of your mind, as she goes on unleashing the Chinese beauty in terms of nature as well as architecture. The writing style of Meena Prabhu is so much free flowing and detailed, so that she holds us witness to each and every event that happens during her journey into the culture, history and geography of the country.
Tianmen Square has enchanted her and she is fully successful in depicting the true value of this square in the minds of a Chinese, linking it to the history and events that got associated with this grand monument. The Forbidden City is equally beautiful and there is this deep surge of getting up and booking tickets to China as she describes the beauty and glory of these ethereal monuments of beauty.
The discovery of cultural monument, like terracotta army and many more such ancient artifacts gives you a glimpse of centuries old Chinese culture and keeps your breathless when you come to know the fact and figures related to these marvels, still available for us to see. It might have witnessed so many downfalls, so many glorious years and contributions of so many poor people, sweating day and night to fulfill the mad ambitions of their kings and queens. The wall of china is one such marvel and the span of this structure is almost twice the length of India, measured from Kashmir to Kanyakumari.
All those Chinese words that were totally obscure to me for long time, started making sense, all of a sudden after reading this book. For example chin, ming, han are the dynasties of the emperors that ruled china. Tao and Confucius were the saints or philosophers who guided china for centuries while tai chi is the ancient yoga like art from china to build and exhilarate the power of mind and soul. In fact the marshal art forms, like koong foo and karate are nothing but the offshoots of this great art of controlling your mind and body.
Yangtze can be called as the ganga of the china, it is also called as the yellow river. The example of what kind of prosperity a focused government can bring to the country is this huge dam being built on Yangtze. This dam is going to be a most ambitious project and would take care of huge need of power from the newly industrialized Chinese towns. It has 26 turbines and the whole world is watching this happen. Lot of stakes are in this dam for the Chinese government as well as its people. But everything seems to be happening well and Chinese seem to be well motivated to finish this project. The kind of electricity this would produce would be equivalent to 9 nuclear power stations.
I just wonder when we would be able focus, on our national needs and work towards building its resources. We are still not been able to satisfy the need of water in all the regions, leave around the electricity problems. The "ring canal" project is something I had heard of in my school textbooks. Although we have been given reasons like lack of funds etc, what we lack mainly is the political will, to even take up any such project. All the economic growth is useless, unless we build our basic infrastructure, provide jobs for everyone and have some vision for our country. But nothing of this sort seems to be happening.
continued ....
No comments:
Post a Comment