Frogs are my favourite animals, especially in this rainy days. What I know they are from amphibian community, but they live in water. They have various sizes and sub groups. Almost all over the world it can be found. In our part of the world they multyply in numbers in this rainy season only. So we come to see all the stage of its life cycle in this time of the year.
Actually it was very useful in our science classes, just collect a big sized frog, tear it apart vertically and go through its inner parts that resemble as that of mammals. The first thing a new college goer to do is to collect a frog, a prised catch mainly in the rainy season. This is to note here that at the time of commencement of the new biology classes it is the rainy season around in our part of the world.Frogs were common with the rain. Most of the time they become a nuisance at night with their never ending sounds they create. In the dark of the night in our small village the only audible sound is the frogs sound in the thick filled mud on the road and with out a trace of light, when e used to move form one house to the other to fetch some bare necessities for the home kitchen. It is costomery in those days to ask for something or the other to the neighbour invariably everyday and we the childern were ordered to perform that part.Now at this ripe age I am away from the village life and presumably away form the menacing frogs. It is the town life? Everything is almost the same, but the rain without the usual frogs. Where all the frogs have gone? Is it one example of environmental degradation?

No Moon's Day of Jyesta(Jun 3, 2008)

The day broke with some clouds , I mean cloudy sky, after a long wait to lose ones forbearance of the scorching Sun in this pick month of summer. Little to say some other parts of the state mainly in coastal belt, a good rain has cooled the sunny atmosphere for the last fortnight. The temperature in this region is so high that the mercury touched almost 47 degree Celsius. Today happens to be the day of a main festival in Orissa, a state in eastern region of India. The two most celebrated festivities that concern women and girls in Orissa are Savitri and Raja in local languages. And to-day is Savitri.
The festival is celebrated to commemorate one princess who has shown much courage and val ore in being loyal to her in-laws and husband as well as her strong resolve not to deviate from her vow once made to marry a prince in exile while he was in forest engaged with cutting a tree. ( It was strange for Savitri to select such a person to be her spouse, when she was given freedom to choose her own). After marrying him ( Satyaban) she was so devoted to him and his father and family that the King of Death Yama gave her a boon, appearing in person in front of her, on her husband's death. When the boon was approved by Yama, Savitri asked to be the mother of hundred sons, which is possible only if her husband come alive again, and Yama ultimately gave her husband the life.
This is only a legend, so to say impossible. Perhaps the story has been framed to perpetuate the system of subjugation of woman. She has to be loyal to her husband come what may is the only dictate the legend portrays. The woman celebrates it with joy by re-reading the story from the scriptures in front of the congregation of married women taking part in the puja in the mid day wit some offerings of flowers etc to Savitri to be of a Savitri to serve her husband and his family. This is a yearly ritual which renews the sentiment year after year.