Greetings on Krishna Janmashtami

 

Today is Krishna Janmashtami. The festival of Janmashtami commemorates the birthday of Lord Krishna, the eighth incarnation of Lord Vishnu. The festival is also referred to as Gokulashtami, or Govinda in Maharashtra. Janmashtami is one such festival that is celebrated equally in North and South India.  Different parts of the country celebrate the festival differently. In South India, the celebrations are most prevalent in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

Gokul and Vridnavan (Lord's birth and growing up place) witness flocks of visitors coming to the place to celebrate the festival at Krishna janmabhoomi, the other parts organize different events and practice different rituals to mark the occasion. In the cities of Mumbai and Pune, dahi-handi is organized wherein a group of men form human pyramid to reach a high-hanging pot of butter and break it. In the city of Dwarka in Gujarat and the eastern states of Orissa and West Bengal, people celebrate it with fasting and doing puja at midnight. Though the rituals practiced vary from one region to the other, the spirit and devotion to the Lord is same everywhere.

Greetings to all on this festive occasion !!

Philatelic Tributes to Firaq Gorakhpuri

Today is also the birth anniversary of great Indian Urdu Poet, Firaq Gorakhpuri. Firaq Gorakhpuri's real name was Raghupati Sahay. He was born in 1896 in Gorakhpur, India. He left his imprint on three important genres of Urdu poetry - ghazal, nazm and rubaayee. He wrote more than 40,000 couplets. He was a poet of love and beauty. His poems are published in three anthologies - Rooh-o-Qaayanat, Gul-e-Ra'naa, Nagma-numaa. He passed away in 1982.

As a distinguished poet, Firaq Gorakhpuri was well-versed in all traditional metrical forms such as ghazal, nazm, rubaai andqat'aa. He was a prolific writer, having written more than a dozen volumes of Urdu poetry, a half dozen of Urdu prose, several volumes on literary themes in Hindi, as well as four volumes of English prose on literary and cultural subjects.

   

(28 August 1896 – 3 March 1982) 

Selected works

Gul-e-Naghma ,Gul-e-Ra'naa,Mash'aal,Rooh-e-Kaayenaat,Roop (Rubaayi),Shabistaan,Sargam,Bazm-e-Zindagi Rang-e-Shayri

Awards

• 1960 – Sahitya Akademi Award in Urdu
• 1968 – Padma Bhushan
• 1968 – Soviet Land Nehru Award
• 1969 – Jnanpith Award (First Jnanpith Award for Urdu literature)
• 1970 – Sahitya Akademi Fellowship
• 1981 – Ghalib Academi Award