The Romani Hindu Faith/Dharma, Culture & History

This story is mine.  I woke around 7 a.m. up to prepare for school but I later decided to skip it that day. Instead, I tuned my TV to ČT2, the Czech public broadcaster, which regularly rebroadcasted news from STV1, its Slovak counterpart. As a native Slovak speaker (beside Czech and Romani), I relished these opportunities to hear the news in my language. We had not a satellite TV back then The bulletin proceeded normally until its conclusion. Suddenly, the moderators; a woman, a man, and a sports presenter, veered into unscripted territory. They adopted a hard anti-American stance, declaring something along the lines of: "This is a message for all viewers: the elites are not telling you the truth, not about the war that the Americans started, but also about finance—after all, America just prints dollars." They extended their diatribe to criticisms of War on Iraq, transforming the segment into an impromptu debate. A caller even joined, prolonging the broadcast beyond its sched...

This story is mine. Back then I was l iving on the first floor of our family house, I slept with windows and balcony doors open to combat the heat. Around dawn, I was awakened by unmistakable sounds of someone -or something- rummaging through scrap metal piled beneath my window. Peering down, I beheld a tall, thin figure shrouded in what appeared to be white cloth. Despite staring for a minute or two, I couldn't fully focus on it. So, I decided to move stealthily to the balcony for a better view. I observed it for at least five minutes more. It resembled a massive, slender dog standing on hind legs, using forepaws that looked somewhat like hands with finger-like appendages to sift through the metal. Yet, it also bore humanoid traits, methodically searching as if for a specific item. When it noticed me, it locked eyes with me for five to seven seconds, appearing startled or frightened. It then fled; first on two legs, then dropping to all fours. I dashed downstairs to the yard, spot...

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...