Month: October 2019

Istanbul – The city of 3200 mosques

Neera 1 Comment

Ahmed was fourteen years old when he became the sultan of Turkey. His father died at a very young age. Aware of his own mortality, he decided to build something to be remembered for.

He called his chief architect and asked him to design a mosque with gold minarets. Unfortunately, the architect took his instructions a bit wrong and designed a mosque with six minarets. The pronunciation for the word ‘gold’ and ‘six’ are almost similar in the Turkish language.

He could have his head chopped off for that mistake but lucky for him that the Sultan liked the idea of a mosque with six minarets.

Usually, a mosque has two or four minarets; a mosque with six minarets was unheard of. Also, it was less expensive to build than gold minerals. 

So the project went ahead. 

The Mosque was built in a record time (in less than seven years), and the emperor died a year after aged twenty-six.

It turned out to be a good idea after all, because the mosque young Sultan Ahmed build is now the most famous mosque in the world.

Image by the author.

It is known as The Blue Mosque. But only by the outsiders. 

Turkish people know it as the Sultanahmet Mosque.

Istanbul has 3200 mosques.

Contrary to popular belief, The Blue Mosque is neither the oldest nor the biggest mosque in Turkey but is undoubtedly the most famous and the most beautiful one.

It got the name The Blue Mosque because of its blue interior.

What I found even more impressive than the mosque were the columns just outside the mosque:

  1. Constantine’s Column
  2. The Serpent Column
  3. Egyptian Column

Constantine’s Column

Erected by Emperor Constantine in 330 C.E., this column was constructed from 8 separate columns. Each column weighed three tons and measured three meters in diameter, which were placed one on top of another. 

It used to have the Emperor Constantine statue at the top, but it was struck by lightning in 1081 C.E. It used to be all covered in bronze.

Constantine’s Column

The Serpent Column

The Serpent Columns was brought from Delphi. It has three snakes coiled around each other. The heads of the snakes are broken; one of them is in the British Museum.

The Serpent Column

Egyptian Column

This 3500 old obelisk was originally set up by Tuthmosis III of the 18th Dynasty of Egypt in 1450 BC, along with a similar one in front of the Temple of Amun-Re at Karnak.

Inscribed on the obelisk is hieroglyph script, still clearly distinguishable. The script reads that it was his father’s honor that Tutmoses erected an obelisk at Karnak and a monument in Mesopotamia. Depiction of the Pharaoh and Amun-Re are also featured on it.

Several obelisks were transported from Egypt to Rome. Constantine displaced it from Rome to decore his new capital. But for some reason, the delivery took a long time. The obelisk didn’t get re-erected till the reign of Theodosius I. 

Egyptian Column – A 3500 old column was brought from Egypt. Because of its weight, only half of it could be brought.

Next post – how to see Istanbul in one day.

Airports – the new galleries for contemporary art

Neera

Airports have come a long way in the past few years.

With their massive atriums, seemingly endless corridors, and captive travelers, they are the perfect venues for contemporary art installations.

Traveling is stressful. Art combats boredom, frustration, and stress. It can provide a welcome distraction for those with delays or those waiting in an endless security line.

The above massive indigenous art is on display at Sydney International Airport.

The Hamad International Airport at Doha, Qatar’s capital, has got eleven artworks on display in collaboration with Qatar Museums.

Artwork at Doha airport
Massive Wooden Pinocchio statue at Doha airport

It is great to see that airports and the museums working together in transforming airports into an immersive exhibition space to showcase the works of locally, regionally and globally renowned artists with the ultimate desire to enrich the overall traveling experience by making art more accessible for everyone.

We have come a long way since 50s

Neera

Of all the places, I found a scrapbook at Qanta’s International airport lounge in Sydney.

Not any scrapbook, but The 1950s Scrapbook compiled by Robert Opie. It was interesting to see how far we have come in 70 years.

After the rations during the war, food started to come in abundance.

Men, who were fighting for years, were building houses and making furniture.

I wonder what the people in seventy years from today will think about the life in the 2020s.

It will be worth making a scrapbook for them.

Travel Writing – the worst job in the world

Neera

In an article in The Telegraph, travel writing was rated as the most overrated job, even ahead of a chef, an advertising executive, an architect, and a junior investment banker.

Travel writing is called a profession akin to a nightmare with good weather.

Yet the universal perception is that that is a dream job.

Ask a professional travel writer and you will get the true picture.

On the face of it, travel writing does sound pretty amazing. You get paid to travel! You get to see the world, indulging two passions at once. You get to inspire people to follow their dreams. You get to see things and meet people that constantly amaze you, and you get to call it a job.

Ben Groundwater

Get the money and prestige out of it, travel writing is something worth pursuing for.

Why?

Because travel changes you. It gives you a new perspective on things.

You get out of the daily grind and suddenly the world becomes such an interesting place.

Humans were not meant to work twelve hours and day.

My bags are packed and I am on a four-week journey through Turkey, Egypt and Jordan.

Wait for daily dispatches.

 

How to find the work you would really love to do?

Neera

The happiest people are not those who have everything they ever wanted, but are those who love what they do.

But it is not easy to find what you love to do.

Some people know what they want to do even when they are in their infancy; others keep drifting from one thing to another, never sure what their calling is.

The problem with drifters is that they believe that their purpose is something that will sweep them off their feet, and they will glide through it fulfilling their destiny feeling each day on the seventh heaven.

Do you think Mother Teresa felt that way while helping the poor and destitute each day of her life?

To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We’ve got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it’s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.

Paul Graham wrote a great article in 2006, How to Do What You Love. Although the article is directed towards youth to help them find the work they would love to do, it has nuggets for people who are finding their true calling.

According to him:

Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think—because the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don’t have to force yourself to do it—finding work you love does usually require discipline.

Paul provides a three-point test to determine whether something is your calling or not.

The first is the prestige test. Is it prestigious work or not?

If it is not, and you will still continue to do it, it is your calling.

Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. If you do anything well enough, you’ll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.

He goes on to say:

… if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other. Your opinions about what’s admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one.

The second is the money test. Will it make you loads of money?

The test is whether you will still continue to do it even if you won’t get paid for it even if you will have to work at another job to make a living.

How many doctors or corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?

It is easy to do unpleasant work; with money and prestige, it is hard to do something for the love of it.

You are beginning to get the picture.

Now comes the third test. It is in just two words, so pay attention.

Always produce.

If you are working in a soul-wrenching job and plan to become a writer, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you’re producing, you’ll know you’re not just dreaming but working towards your dream. The toil you will put yourself through for no money, no prestige to develop the talent will determine whether the writing is your calling or not.

“Always produce” is a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you’re supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. “Always produce” will discover your life’s work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.

Experience different things and figure out what you love. Not several items at a time because you will not give yourself enough time to figure out what you like about it, but one thing at a time and giving it a go.

Only 66 days for the year to end

Neera

Each year, panic starts around this time of the year – only two months for the year to end. It is even more evident if you keep a daily diary and pages start thining on the right-hand side.

Still, a lot can be done in this period.

I have been frantically finishing a lot of projects I started this year, one of them is developing a Life Story Blogging course I will be workshopping early next year to the University of Third Age students.

A few months ago I started making photo books with thousands of digital photos on my phone camera. I have only been able to make two. There are at least three more to make.

Travel journals with brochures are another thing that I just started that will require a lot of input.

In a week’s time, thousands of people will be participating in National Novel Writing Month and will be writing a book within 30 days.

Each year I participate in this challenge. This year I will be traveling, so instead of writing 1667 words a day. Instead, I will be working on producing a page a day, of a travel journal, with writing, drawings, and lettering combining three of my passions.

If all goes well, I too will have a book to show at the end of the month.

I will keep myself accountable by posting it regularly here.