Latest news with #Rama
The Hindu
a day ago
- General
- The Hindu
Rama's humility
Raghuveera Gadyam – the very title of Vedanta Desika's work in praise of Rama tells us that Rama was a veera. He was known for His valorous deeds. But in this work, Desika also says Rama sought refuge in Sugreeva, elaborated T.N. Aravamuda Thathachariar in a discourse. Desika praises this surrender of the Lord. Rama was the Supreme One incarnate, and therefore, was capable of granting moksha. That being the case, why should He seek refuge in a mere monkey? It was Desika's intention to highlight Rama's saulabhya (accessibility), and he does so by showing that even if it was a monkey, Rama was kind to him and made him feel that his service to Rama was important. Raghuveera Gadyam follows Valmiki's Ramayana, canto by canto, in praising the auspicious qualities evident in each canto. Desika uses the word 'Saranagataha', while describing Rama's approach to Sugreeva. So where is the source of this idea of Rama's surrender to Sugreeva? It is there in canto seven of Kishkinda Kaanda in Valmiki Ramayana. Rama, appreciating Sugreeva's offer of help, says that Sugreeva's effort is going to be significant in the search for Sita. Sugreeva, even while offering his help to Rama, consoles Him. Sugreeva says that weeping is of no use, and that Rama should stop crying over Sita, who will definitely be rescued. Rama replies that He is grateful for Sugreeva's advice. The whole episode shows the Lord humbling Himself before the monkey king. He does not need Sugreeva's advice, but lends him a patient hearing. That is why Desika draws attention to His swaatantrya, meaning His non-dependence on anyone for anything. For someone who acts independently, and needs no one's help for anything, His manner towards Sugreeva is a rare quality indeed. Hence Desika praises this quality of the Lord.
The Hindu
3 days ago
- General
- The Hindu
Hanuman praises Rama
Hanuman narrated the story of Rama to two of His devotees, Sita and Bharatha. When Hanuman met Sita at Asokavana, she was initially perplexed, and wondered whether Ravana was playing another trick, having once appeared as an ascetic, and now posing as a monkey. Hanuman prostrated at the feet of Sita to alleviate her fears and doubts — as Ravana would not prostrate. Sita gained confidence and told Hanuman that she was the daughter-in-law of King Dasaratha, the daughter of King Janaka, and the wife of Rama, who would never injure the feelings of others, and who considered his father's words greater than his own. Sri Damodhara Dikshitar explained in a discourse that, in response, Hanuman identified himself as the messenger of Sri Rama, who had mastered all the Vedas and astras, including the Brahmastra. By this, Hanuman subtly hinted that Rama would defeat Ravana. Following this exchange, Sita told Hanuman that she felt as happy as someone who had lived happily for a hundred years, and requested that Hanuman tell her more about Rama. Hanuman then began to describe Sri Rama thus: 'Rama is radiant like the Sun, yet pleasant to behold like the Moon (hence called Rama Chandran). He is valiant like Vishnu; wise like Bruhaspati, the preceptor of the celestials; and as handsome as Manmatha, the God of love. His sense of justice is always well-directed. Rama is lotus-eyed; his gaze, like honey in a lotus, is filled with divine grace. He enthrals all beings, is compassionate, and matches Mother Earth in patience. Though immensely strong, he remains serene and calm, steadfastly adhering to righteousness. Since your absence, he has observed utmost celibacy.' The poet Bharthru Hari says that four qualities accrue to few people by birth — giving in charity, speaking politely, remaining courageous, and adapting one's speech to the prevailing circumstances. Rama possessed all these unique qualities.
The Hindu
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Hindu
Cost of promises: on the Bihar election and poll-eve welfare measures
It is raining welfare in Bihar. Nothing surprising: the stakes are high for the ruling National Democratic Alliance in the approaching Assembly elections. According to recent announcements, household consumption of up to 125 units of electricity per month will be free, with effect from August 1 this year. This scheme will cover around 1.67 crore households. Under the Kutir Jyoti Yojana, the government will provide free rooftop solar installations for about 58 lakh Below Poverty Line families. The welfare hamper of the ruling coalition also includes a promise of 35% job reservation in all State government jobs for women, an increase in social security pension from ₹400 to ₹1,100, the creation of a Bihar Youth Commission, and more. A new internship support scheme offers between ₹4,000 and ₹6,000 a month to youth (18 to 28 years) for undertaking internships, and based on their educational qualifications. The plan is to start supporting 5,000 youth in the first year and scaling it up to cover one lakh beneficiaries over the next five years. To promote religious tourism, the State has announced a ₹882.87 crore redevelopment plan for Punaura Dham Janki Mandir, said to be the birthplace of Lord Rama's wife Sita. Migrants from the State who live outside will receive government support to return home during festivals. All this follows a familiar pattern of governments using welfare as an instrument of election-eve management of popular sentiment. The absence of any serious planning or vision behind such sporadic announcements is evident. They are often in response to the promises of a political rival. In Bihar, the Opposition Rashtriya Janata Dal has said that the Nitish Kumar government's welfare catalogue is a forced reaction to its promises of similar measures if voted to power. Ahead of the Maharashtra Assembly elections, the Mahayuti government rolled out a cash transfer scheme for women which helped it win. Later, the new government pruned the list, admitting that there were undeserving beneficiaries. Free electricity schemes now exist in several States. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has often questioned the rationale of 'freebies', but arbitrary new schemes continue to proliferate. In Bihar, the scramble among parties is also in the context of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's advancing age. His party, the Janata Dal (United), is smaller than the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the election could further alter the dynamics of State coalition politics. The control of power had increasingly shifted from Mr. Kumar to the BJP in the last five years and the future of the JD(U) is set to decline. Competitive welfarism is all that remains in the toolkits of all parties to woo voters.
North Wales Chronicle
3 days ago
- Politics
- North Wales Chronicle
Farage pledges target to halve crime if Reform enters government
Proposals to recruit more police officers and create new prison places contribute to the estimated £3.48 billion annual bill for the party's plans on crime and justice. Speaking at a press conference in Westminster on Monday, Mr Farage said: 'Reform will be the toughest party on law and order and on crime that this country has ever seen. 'We will aim to cut crime by half in the first five years of Reform government. We will take back control of our streets. We will take back control of our courts, of our prisons. 'If you're a criminal, I am putting you on notice today that from 2029 or whenever that may be, either you obey the law or you will face very serious justice,' he added. Documents handed out at Monday's press conference show that the party estimate a £17.4 billion cost over the course of a five year parliament for their plans, with a £3.48 billion annual cost. Plans to recruit 30,000 more police officers take up the biggest chunk of this bill, estimated at £10.5 billion overall. Mr Farage has pledged 12,400 new prison places on MoD land at a cost of £5 billion, and five new 'Nightingale Prisons' to be built with the assistance of the Army. He also wants to see more than 10,000 more prison places freed up by deporting foreign criminals to their country of origin through bilateral agreements, and Mr Farage claimed he was 'in conversation with Edi Rama', the Albanian prime minister over prisoners. I accept Prime Minister @EdiRamaal's invitation to visit Albania as his guest of honour. We will discuss the return of Albanian prisoners. — Nigel Farage MP (@Nigel_Farage) June 30, 2025 The two leaders have been involved in a social media spat over the matter. In a video on social media posted last month, Mr Farage said he would visit Albania and 'report back' after an invitation from Mr Rama. In response, Mr Rama said: 'I genuinely hope your upcoming visit to Albania inspires you to fight for ideas, rather than against people — in the spirit of the great liberal tradition your country has long stood for.' The party also wants prison places overseas in places such as El Salvador, a 'dynamic prisons' policy that the party estimates will cost £1.25 billion over the course of a parliament. Mr Farage said that he would be prepared to take back British criminals who are in foreign prisons as part of his plans. He told reporters at the press conference that 'of course we're prepared to take British prisoners from other parts of the world. 'That's fair, right and proper.' Mr Farage pledged that Monday's event was the start of a six-week campaign on law and order, as Parliament is about to begin its summer recess break. Labour chairwoman Ellie Reeves claimed 'Reform is more interested in headline-chasing than serious policy-making in the interests of the British people'. She added: 'Farage's Reform MPs voted against the Labour Government's landmark Crime and Policing Bill which tackles antisocial behaviour, shoplifting, violence against women and girls, knife crime, and child abuse.'
Middle East Eye
3 days ago
- Health
- Middle East Eye
Children in Gaza die as David Lammy says UK is 'happy to do more' to help
Urged in parliament to do more for Palestinian children in Gaza who need medical treatment, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy said last week he would be "happy to do more" if requests were made to bring them to the UK. There is, in fact, a request on the table that is still awaiting a decision. A British coalition of doctors, lawyers and humanitarians asked the government over a month ago to facilitate and help fund a group of 20 to 40 Palestinian children to receive treatment in the UK that is no longer available in Gaza's devastated healthcare system. The request from Project Pure Hope (PPH) comes as children with treatable conditions who have been proposed for medical evacuation are dying before they make it out. UN data shows Israeli authorities have drastically limited the number of patients permitted to leave the Palestinian enclave in recent months. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters According to the World Health Organization, at least 12,000 adults and children need to leave Gaza for specialised care, but only 33 were evacuated last month, with just 23 having left in July so far. Since Israel's war on Gaza began, over 7,000 Palestinians have been evacuated. Mostly to Egypt, the UAE and Qatar, with Jordan, European countries - particularly Italy, Spain and Romania - and the US taking much of the rest. The United Kingdom has taken just two. Rama, 12, and Ghena, five, arrived in April with assistance from PPH and the US-based Palestinian Children's Relief Fund. The girls have been treated in the private wings of leading London hospitals, funded entirely by charitable donations. Last week, Lammy told parliament's international development committee: "If there are more children we can work with [Project Pure] Hope and others to bring in, of course we will do that." Omar Din, one of PPH's co-founders, said Lammy's comments were "very welcome" and that the government has been supportive of individual cases PPH has highlighted. But now the initiative is pushing for more: unlike Ghena and Rama, who came to the UK from Egypt with congenital conditions, PPH is asking the UK to welcome a group of children directly from Gaza who have recently been wounded or are suffering acutely. "The only way we can do that is with government support," Din told Middle East Eye. 'We cannot now turn our back on the children of Gaza' - Sam Rushworth, Labour MP Their call for the UK to do more is being echoed by Labour MP Sam Rushworth, whose question during the committee hearing sparked Lammy's comments. "We honour the work of people like Sir Nicholas Winton, who helped refugee children escape from the Nazis, and more recently our 'Homes for Ukraine' scheme. We cannot now turn our back on the children of Gaza," Rushworth told MEE. "Both of those schemes required legal changes to serve a humanitarian purpose. So I am looking at what needs to change so Britain can open our hearts, hospitals, and homes if needs be to save innocent lives and relieve suffering." 'We couldn't move fast enough' The case of Haitim, a three-year-old suffering severe burns, shows exactly why Project Pure Hope believes it's important to make the pathways for Gaza's children to the UK easier - and that evacuating several at once would increase efficiency. On 15 May, Haitim's home in southern Gaza was bombed, killing his father and pregnant mother instantly. The toddler survived, but 35 percent of his body was burned. When British plastic surgeon Victoria Rose met him at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza's Khan Younis, she worried. "He looked very scared. His eyelids were burnt," she said. "He was so little and it was such a big burn." Haitim was taken into an operating theatre where Rose and others cleaned his wounds and started dressing them. At this point, he became acutely unwell, spiking a temperature and developing an ulcer in his stomach. Haitim, three, sustained burns across 35 percent of his body after a bomb hit his family's home in southern Gaza (Dr Victoria Rose) Ulcers are a well-known consequence of burns, but it is very uncommon that they develop so quickly and in such a young child. "He needed a specialised paediatric burns unit," Rose said. The UK has some of the best burns units in the world, including one at the hospital where Rose works in London. As soon as she had met Haitim, she started calling colleagues in the unit and Project Pure Hope to see what could be done. If Rose could get Haitim to London, there would be a bed for him, she was told. A second boy, Karam, was also on PPH's radar. The one-year-old had been undergoing surgery in the European Hospital in southern Gaza when it was bombed. He required further surgery. So the plan was to bring both boys to the UK. But they would need visas and their biometrics would have to be taken. The nearest UK visa application centres where that could happen are in Egypt and Jordan. Ten children a day losing a limb in Gaza, warns UN-backed body Read More » Before those involved could get the boys to Jordan, the Italian government stepped in. MEE understands that, under an agreement between the EU and the WHO, Italy and other European countries are able to take patients without having to issue passports or visas. According to Rose all they needed in that case was approval for their evacuation from Cogat, the Israeli military unit overseeing movement logistics between Gaza and Israel. "For the Americans, it is the same," Rose said. "That can still take time, don't get me wrong. Children are dying on the evacuation list so it's not great, but what the UK do is put on another layer of bureaucracy." Din said: "We couldn't move fast enough. We tried very, very hard, but you do need government intervention in this and support. "We are really pleased of course that they are now safe and receiving treatment, but we did really want to treat them in the UK." Uphill battle Even without the UK's requirements, aid workers and doctors say it is a feat to evacuate Palestinians from Gaza for medical treatment. They say this is largely because Israeli authorities, who must sign off on all evacuations, make it hard and because there are so few countries willing to accept patients and exert required political pressure to get them out. Médicines Sans Frontiers said last week that since the start of the war it has only been able to evacuate 22 patients for medical care. "This list originally [included] hundreds of patients and we were blocked with no response from the countries we were approaching," said Hani Isleem, MSF's project coordinator for medical evacuations from Gaza. To seek treatment abroad, patients first register with the Palestinian health ministry and the World Health Organization. Then a list is provided to countries to pick which patients they will be best suited to help. 'You have to coordinate with Israel. You have to coordinate with Jordan. So it's really complicating the system even more' - Amande Bazerolle, Médicines Sans Frontiers' emergency coordinator in Gaza Once a country has picked who it wants to evacuate, Cogat has to sign off on their departure. Since Israel closed the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza in May 2024, aid workers say it has been much more difficult to get patients evacuated and that it has become even more challenging in the past few months. Amande Bazerolle, MSF's emergency coordinator in Gaza, said evacuations have "dropped completely". Bazerolle told MEE that since June it has been "very difficult" for UN agencies and humanitarian organisations to engage with Israel about the evacuations as Israeli authorities focused on implementing aid distribution in the enclave through the US- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. "They were so focused with that, there was no other way to discuss and move forward," she said. Bazerolle also said that medical evacuation flights that were leaving from Ramon Airport in southern Israel have also been stopped recently. With the Rafah crossing still closed, that leaves Jordan as the location where medical evacuees must go to get out. "So you have to coordinate with Israel. You have to coordinate with Jordan because they are going to end up there before they can fly out to a third country. So it's really complicating the system even more," she said. A Cogat spokesperson told MEE that the Israeli army, through the agency, "is working to allow and faciliate the exit of patients and their escorts from Gaza through the sovereign territory of the State of Israel to third countries". "In this context, dozens of evacuations from the Gaza Strip through Israel to host countries around the world have been coordinated in recent months, most of them for patients in need of continued treatment outside the Gaza Strip," the spokesperson said. "As evidence, in recent weeks, over 2,000 patients and their escorts have exited the Gaza Strip for treatment in third countries, as well as Gazans holding dual citizenship or residency visas." The spokesperson did not immediately break down for MEE how many of the 2,000 figure were patients. The spokesperson added: "It should be emphasised that such passage is contingent upon a request from a third-party host country and the completion of an updated security screening conducted by the security authorities prior to entry into the sovereign territory of the state of Israel." A Palestinian medic cares for children who were injured in Israeli strikes at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis on 15 May 2025 (AFP) Inevitably, Palestinian patients on the evacuation list are dying before they can get out of Gaza. But MEE understands that the exact number is not being recorded by the health ministry because the healthcare system is so disrupted that there is no capacity. What is clear is that the pace of evacuations is so slow that the WHO has said it will take years to work through the backlog at the current rate. "There is really a bottleneck," Bazerolle said. "But it starts with the countries. Saying they are going to take 20 patients? Thank you, but there are 12,000 patients actually." 'They are just children' Many, including Din and British politicians, have highlighted the support that the UK government has previously provided for those in need of medical care fleeing other conflicts. He and the other two co-founders of PPH have worked together in England's National Health Service for the past 15 years. "In the NHS, we've delivered care to Ukrainian, Syrian and Afghan refugees, in all of the crises that have taken place in the last few years. And we were very, very honoured and privileged to do that," he told MEE. "There is no reason why Palestinian children shouldn't have the same recourse to humanitarian support. What's the difference between a Ukrainian kid and a Palestinian kid? There is no difference. They are just children." Din said PPH has recently told British officials that trying to bring Palestinian children over individually was not a good system. 'The UK government has been incredibly generous in other cases. We are asking them to exercise that wonderful spirit for Palestinian children' - Omar Din, Project Pure Hope "The issue with it moving slowly is that the risk of mortality is very, very high. It's happened to us before where we had kids on our lists and they ended up dying before we could do anything. You have to move fast," he said. Scaling up the number of children received at once will, he acknowledged, require government funding to supplement more than £1m that PPH has already raised. "We are not diplomats, we are not the NHS, we aren't the government. We are ordinary citizens and we ask the government to step up to do what it has in its long history of being very generous in disaster aid work," he said. Din said the PPH "live by the fact that every child deserves hope". "That's number one. Secondly, we live by the fact that if you save one life, it's as though you saved the whole of humanity," he said. "Having said that, if you look at a practical level, the amount of effort it takes to get one or two children, you may as well have one cohort. There is a real efficiency to be had. And the UK government has been incredibly generous in other cases - we are asking them to exercise that wonderful spirit for Palestinian children." Rushworth, the MP for Bishop Auckland, said it was "heartbreaking to see children orphaned, suffering from starvation, maimed or injured - innocent victims of war and war crimes". In many, if not most, cases, he said, children will be better off treated closer to home and supported by surviving relatives. "I am only talking about cases where there is a real need for Britain to step up," he said. MEE asked the UK government whether it was seriously considering PPH's request, what might be holding it up and when a decision could be expected. The Foreign Office declined to comment on record.
