Sadhu Paksha Continues….

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END OF PHASE
Today is the last day of our phase.
This edition of TAKA will remain posted
over our coming two-day retreat,
until Dasami Tithi, Sun One, Saturday, April 4th, Aslesha Nakshatra, Yogaswami’s Mahasamadhi day

Potriyan Sivanathan arrived from Malaysia today for three-month Task Force stay at the monastery. He’s been with Gurudeva since he was a little boy, being the son of Ramesh and Saraswathy Sivanathan, one of our oldest sishya families in Malaysia.

Here is with fellow task forcer, Maruthu, who now has a companion at the guest house for a couple of weeks before he returns to Malaysia.

One day before the silpis departure, Kauai Mission members came together and prepared and delivered a wonderful dinner to their home.

L/R – (standing) here are Pandi, Rajendran and Manikandan, and seated, Veylansami, Chelliaya, and Karupiyah all wearing beautiful blue jade garlands. Lavished with gifts and good wishes from both the monastery and the Mission devotees, they are returning to India after working with total dedication for the past five years fulfilling Gurudeva’s vision building the Iraivan Temple. Although we are sad to see them go, we are all very grateful for their gifts of hand-carved granite artistic perfection, dedication and hard work, and especially their good-natured cheerfulness and happy smiling faces. Nandri!

With Chidambaram Sthapati in the center, and Lokesh to the left of stapathi, here are the three new silpis who have just arrived from Chennai. (Left) seated is Chitayah, standing to the right of stapathi is Chelliaya, and seated on the far right is Andrapan. Kannan (not in the photo) was busy in the kitchen. These are the remaining silpis, under the expert guidance of Chidambaram Sthapati, who will bring the Iraivan Temple to its completion.

A few Mission members – Uma and Tandu with their grandaughter, and Isani Alahan and Leanora Orr (with Shama taking photos).

The Venerable Norbu Lama visited again today. This is is second visit to Kauai Aadheenam. We always honored to have our Buddhist brother monks come to the Aadheenam.

He comes today with a small entourage of Buddhist devotees to meet and talk with our swamis.

Click here for a brief biography of Ven. Norbu Lama

Josh and Michelle Mellicker came back for a final few hours of training with the monks this afternoon in the Ganapati Kulam.

We honored them in the traditional way of giving each a shawl as a blessing and expression of our appreciation.

We took Gurudeva's classical talk "The Self God" and made these three word clouds.

As mentioned earlier, this maps the frequency of words in his talk.

Mind and Self are clearly the most common words. Must and try, power and think, become and find are themes he drew in this masterful work on finding the Ultimate within.

In producing the quarterly video for Hinduism Today, which is a 10-minutes summary of what's in the magazine, Palaniswami ran across this new web tool. It's called a word cloud.

Click here for more word cloud slides

The software takes text, even a web page, and analyzes it for the number of times a word appears in the text, then it gives a relative size to the word: larger type means more instances appeared in that text.

It's a powerful visual way of analyzing text, to see what it's all about.

These are all different versions of the same text, as the site allows you to choose color, type, orientation, etc.

Want to make your own word cloud? Go to http://www.wordle.net and click create. You can click randomize to have the softward choose the graphics, or tweak it to your liking.