Every Day is Halloween.

Or at least it ought to be. I know it's late, but here are a few Halloween pics. This year, the dogs went as Catholic school gir...

The Challenge of Indian Art

What is art? Is it a purely utilitarian object with some trappings of decoration, or is it pure aesthetics which has absolutely no purpose whatsoever than to appeal, rather hedonistically if you will, to the senses? This debate has raged amongst art circles from the earliest documented periods of art history : from the seminal essays of Alois Riegl to the lines and periods drawn up by...

Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong

Ho Xuan Huong (1772-1822) was a Vietnamese woman poet born at the end of the Later Le Dynasty (Period 1428–1788: the greatest and longest lasting dynasty of traditional Vietnam) who wrote poems with unusual irreverence and shockingly erotic undertones for her time. She is considered as one of Vietnam's greatest poets, such that she is dubbed "the Queen of Nom Poetry” and has become a cultural...

A Hindu Wedding in Nepal

"You have been destined to live together as husband and wife from your previous lives," said the young priest in Kathmandu as Raj and Claudia sat down cross-legged in front of the altar where scores of sacrificial objects were spread out on small cups made of banana leaves held together with tooth-pick sticks.Not all the stainless-steel thalis and Meissen porcelain would be ritually pure in comparison to the hand-made natural taparas for the Gods and Goddesses of the Hindu pantheon. And there they were, a German-Nepalese pair,...

Setting the stage (1968–1970)

BackgroundDuring the early to mid-1960s, Prince Norodom Sihanouk's leftist policies had protected his nation from the turmoil that engulfed Laos and South Vietnam. Neither the People's Republic of China (PRC) nor North Vietnam disputed Sihanouk's claim to represent "progressive" political policies and the leadership of the prince's domestic leftist opposition, the Prachea Chon Party, had been integrated into the government....

Agony of the Khmer Republic (1971–1973)

Struggling to survive From 1971 through 1973, the war was conducted along FANK's lines of communications north and south of the capital. Limited offensives were launched to maintain contact with the rice-growing regions of the northwest and along the Mekong River and Route 5, the Republic's overland connections to South Vietnam. The strategy of the Khmer Rouge was to gradually cut those lines of communication and squeeze...

The site of Preah Khan Temple

The fourth enclosure wall bears 5m garudas holding nagas. Buddha images in the niches above were destroyed in the anti-Buddhist reaction of Jayavarman VIII. The outer wall of Preah Khan is of laterite, and bears 72 garudas holding nagas, at 50 m intervals. Surrounded by a moat, it measures 800 by 700 m and encloses an area of 56 hectares (138 acres). To the east of Preah Khan is a landing stage on the edge of the...