Mausam

Mausam Zindagi Ke… is an anthology of human emotions, resembling the diverse seasons of nature. Life is about vibes, emotions and feelings. Sometimes, you love thyself so much that you feel you don't need any other person. Sometimes, you feel the same love for someone else and love seems to be in the air. Sometimes, you feel you are left out and there is nobody who loves you. These feelings are in likeness to the various seasons of nature. Summer—a season that makes you feel energized and everything around smiles because of the light all around. Winter—a season that makes you indolent, sometimes laid-back and sometimes gloomy. Autumn—a season when you look around and everything seems to be gone away. It makes you feel as if there is no tomorrow. Spring—the time when everything turns green, beautiful and makes you feel lively. There is so much to learn and get inspired from in our surroundings. Just one simple thing to understand is that if there is tunnel of darkness, there will be light at the end of it. Likewise, if there are moments that make you feel perished in life, there will come a time which will make you feel revived and you will surely rise in it. Mausam Zindagi Ke… connects human behavior with nature, both being beautifully infused in each other.

For Joonam. Only Joonam. An ode to Joonam. A gift for Joonam.

Aparna is still coming to terms with having contracted AIDS from her husband and being forced to end her pregnancy when she begins working at Jeevan Jyot, a hospice set up specifically for HIV patients. There, she meets George, another volunteer who also works with children, and starts developing feelings for him. In order to allow herself to be happy, she must get over the fears holding her back. But it isn't easy considering how society treats AIDS patients. At the hospice, they teach the kids to seize the day and celebrate life, but Aparna is struggling to accept that herself. A heartfelt, tender tribute to the forgotten survivors of a terrible epidemic, Mahesh Dattani beautifully highlights the issues of taboo and ignorance surrounding HIV/AIDS through this screenplay for the film Ek Alag Mausam. Directed by K.P. Sasi and starring Nandita Das, Rajit Kapur and Anupam Kher, the film was released in India in 2005.

Mausam' or Arabic 'Mawsim' refers to the season when ships could sail safely in the Indian Ocean and these seasonal monsoon winds underwrote both a shared culture in the past, as also the continued survival of maritime regions into the present. 'Maritime cultural landscape' was used by Olof Hasslof, the Swedish maritime ethnologist in the 1950s to indicate an understanding of the use of the sea by humans and included attendant coastal structures and cultural identifiers. The papers in this book examine the development of coastal settlements and architectural remains from the third millennium BCE Bronze Age to almost the present across a large part of the Indian Ocean extending from Arabia to Vietnam. A second objective of the book is to relate this understanding of the past with that of the present and to highlight the extent to which indicators of historical cultural networks provide building blocks for contemporary societies, as they work towards universal values and trans-border groupings-both of which underwrite UNESCO's 1972 World Heritage Convention. The Convention encourages the identification, protection and preservation of cultural and natural heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity, thereby focusing on the universal, rather than the local or regional. The book will appeal to readers of maritime history, as well as those involved in heritage studies.