The Flaneur is the indie art and culture magazine and website. It is written by artists, writers, poets and reviewers from around the world. Please read our articles and then vote on them – the best will be published in our real-world magazine.

And, I am fortunate enough to have joined this crew of world strollers as a contributor! A piece from my very own FictionPals – the Pen vs The Sword – is featured on this interesting magazine. Do visit it for some off the wall, exciting writing, art, poetry and other musings on the state of culture on our lovely planet.

This piece was written by my mother P. Singha when she visited us in Halifax, NS in 1995. It was first published in the St. Peter’s Birch Cove newsletter, our church.

To understand conversion in India, I feel one must have a basic knowledge of the social, economic and religious structure of our great country.

The East has always been religious and most or almost all religions have sprung up from Asia and the Middle East. Some have been born in India. Man has dominated Man by superiority of intellect, economic power or sheer physical strength.

Naturally, the ignorant accepted, respected and obeyed the intellectual, who interpreted natural phenomena as a revelation from a Super Power – God. Such a person claimed a personal link with this power. All over the world there were periods when individuals claimed to have this link and they became the priestly class. They were the intellectuals who rose above all other human beings in their communities. These intellectuals created social divisions based on economic and physical status of the rest of their race and community.

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Check it out on Lazy Cook’s La La Land

This is a light refreshing dessert and a delightful way to round off a summer meal!

Some time ago this e-mail arrived in my inbox joking about how fattening the American diet can be. In a fit of silliness a bunch of us wrote some pithy verses on the subject that I thought would be a hoot to publish on FictionPals. Read the rest of this entry »

The figurine is a green penguin no more than one and half centimetres in height. He has a yellow beak and feet, pink hat, black glasses, a notebook in his ‘hands’ – which are really more like a penguin’s flippers – and a pencil in his ear. Unlike penguins his body is all one colour – a bright leaf green. It’s hard to tell whether he is alive or an artefact collected by the famous Antarctic explorer Captain Richard Byrd, as some folk say they have on occasion seen the tiny creature’s eyes move.

In the late Captain’s log books we have discovered the following account of a strange land to be found somewhere in the coldest part of that ice-bound continent. Captain Byrd, who is said to have suffered carbon monoxide poisoning in his 1935 Antarctic exploration, states that that is the year he discovered a place called Galapagalpeng.

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Diamonds are forever. Diamonds are for beauty. And diamonds are for death, despair and misery. But, pearls, they say are for tears.

The tiny shards of diamonds were set in bright, harsh, white gold. A little floral pattern with the diamond dust spinning out in shiny petals from a centre that consisted of a single, soft, lustrous pearl the pattern was repeated in the pendant, ring and earrings. At certain angles the diamond dust would catch the light and then it seemed as if a thousand stars burst forth twinkling and winking in a silver night sky. At other times a ray of sunlight would be Read the rest of this entry »

She blinked once and then she was wide awake. Her brain hummed.

Her senses tingled. Oh! the very special joy of being alive. She loved it. The day had begun. She’d woken up with the gentle thunk of the first coin of the morning. That was when she went through her paces. Racing the cars. Teasing, just a little bit. As usual, the player lost. Lost, from her point of view, that is. Read the rest of this entry »

A conceit

Quill pen & Ink well

In an electronic world is one permitted to muse upon the future of expressions such as ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’? Today, can we say, ‘the (computer) key is mightier than the sword? Or, more appropriately, the ‘chip is mightier than the missile’? Then too, with the integration of computers/electronics and warheads/missiles does a comparison exist? After all neither one can be mightier than the other when they are, in fact, the same. Or, should we, in musing, revert to Read the rest of this entry »

I had in my possession an old family Bible, given to me for safekeeping almost twenty years ago. On the flyleaf is an inscription in almost fading black ink, its flowing cursive lines are testimony to an age when penmanship was considered of great importance. It is a simple dedication made out to my maternal grandmother from her aunt and dated June 26th 1913.

To be honest I had never really looked at the Bible much – I have one of my own of more recent vintage – and what’s more it was tied in an old handkerchief that has grown a pale yellow although it has retained its resilience. I thought it was time to pass it on to a family member who still carries my mother’s family name.

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When does it happen? At what precise moment? Where? And how? You are never sure, never sure at that time. But later, yes, much later it flashes in upon your mind that it was this experience, or such and such a year in which you ceased to be a child.

Is that experience always bitter? I wonder. I wonder if Amar would call it bitter, or bitter‑sweet. Sad, yes, because childhood is almost always lost. Not shed like a skin or moult. But lost like an image in a kaleidoscope and all your twisting and turning cannot recall it. No never exactly as it was.

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