Festival of Blessings
The following article had been carried in the U.S. publication Whole Life Times and had been reproduced from its website. The article is also mentioned in the database of the Australian National Library. When I boarded the last bus from Tezpur to Rangapara, in the heart of India's north-eastern state of Assam, the orb of the rising moon already dominated the winter evening. I knew a Purnima (full moon) was approaching, more so because I was on my way to attend an obscure Buddhist festival. And these are inevitably held on full-moon nights. When the bus finally moved, the tiredness and irritation of the day's travel gave way to the intent of studying the moonlit countryside. This lasted until the vehicle turned off the highway to the side roads, which in daylight resembled nothing so much as a bombed airfield, were even worse in darkness. The moon I had so enthusiastically planned to observe kept bobbing up and down outside my window, disapp