The Romani Hindu Faith/Dharma, Culture & History

This is a story of mine.  As a child of five, in the summer or late summer of 1997, I ventured out on my bicycle to the edge of our village. The road was ending abruptly behind the last house back then, giving way to open fields. It was there, amidst the tall grass, that I spotted an extraordinary creature. At first, it resembled a kiwi bird, familiar from the documentary shows on the TV but upon closer inspection, it was somewhat thinner and noticeably larger, perhaps the size of a young specimen of some bigger bird. I am an villager, so I know the species of birds around quite well and this was different than anything I've see before and after. I now believe it was a juvenile Gastornis, an extinct genus of large, flightless birds that roamed Europe during the Paleocene to Eocene epochs, some 56 to 34 million years ago. Fossils of this prehistoric avian have been unearthed across Europe, North America, and Asia, with some species historically synonymised under names like Diatryma,...

This is mine story. One summer day, I experimented with an analogue television set outdoors, fashioning a makeshift very own antenna to tune in signals. The antenna I placed on the iron structure for the swing, which is in the yard of our family house.  Our yard earlier used to be a road, before our house was built there. To my surprise, I locked onto a channel broadcasting in Cyrillic script, but in a language utterly unfamiliar to me, despite my fluency in Russian and all Slavic tongues, along with the ability to read and write Cyrillic proficiently. The programme featured Europoid individuals, it were the people with distinctly European features, unlike the Asian appearances common in Central Asian or Siberian broadcasts. There was no audio, but the visuals were crystal clear, devoid of any interference. It appeared to be a news segment, which then transitioned to a weather forecast presented by a blonde woman clad in a greyish fur coat adorned with enormous thorns. The temperat...