Holi Festival in India - Welcoming Flowers with Colours

My choice of car interiors and dash kits

The interiors of your SUV, cars, trucks or other automobiles must essentially reflect your personal style statement. So to do up the interiors with a classy and colorful dash kit, the best place to shop for is CARiD.com that offers the best wood dash kits for most models. Additionally, you get dash kits in a very wide choice of genuine real wood veneers, synthetic woods, factory-match woods, real carbon fiber, and other materials and finishes and your favorite color schemes. They also come with a lifetime warranty.

In modern times most people are always on the move, commuting to work places, to meet business contacts, and going on occasional vacations to the most exotic of the locations on the globe. If all the distances traveled are categorized and classified, you can find that the maximum number of hours spent traveling is in each individual’s personal vehicles.

That means, as we like to be in plush interiors at homes, offices, hotels, etc., the car, SUV or truck that we use most often also needs to have equally attractive, stylish and functional interiors. Most people agree that the portion of the car interior that is most viewed and taken note of is the dash board. But I find that most vehicles, however, modern they may be, come with the same dash kit and other interiors. It otherwise means, trying to live up with the repetitive, dampening look of the automated factory-finish. The more popular your vehicle, the more the look is repeated to the extent of extreme boredom.

While sourcing for car accessories to reflect the style statement I wanted to make, what struck me the most is the modern styles, materials, comfort and a luxurious and aesthetic feel their car and automobile accessories ensured to today’s upscale customers.

Apart from the vast variety of choices, I like the fine finish and cozy looks of the real, right wood dash kits. Stylish and functionally superior car interiors can make your travels dramatically different and make your vehicle stand out even in a crowd. This is especially so, as not all cars and trucks come with the dash boards or interiors of your liking, unless you order them custom-made for you.

River Narmada: Omkareshwar Island

While flowing through Handia and Nemawar, and up to Hiran fall (the deer's leap), Narmada river is overlooked by hills from both the banks. The Omkareshwar island, sacred to the Lord Shiva, is the most important river island in Madhya Pradesh. Omkareshwar temple is situated on this island.

Omkareshwar Shiva Jyotirlinga Shrine

The Hindu temple Omkareshwar, located in Khandwa district of Madhya Pradesh State in India, is on a river island called Mandhata or Shivapuri in the Narmada River. The shape of the island resembles the Om symbol. It is one of the 12 Jyotirlinga shrines of Lord Shiva. There are two temples here, one of Omkareshwar and the other of Amareshwar. A lot of pilgrims and tourists from India and other countries visit Omkareshwar throughout the year.

Omkareshwar is about 77 km (48 miles) from Indore on the Indore-Khandwa highway. It is about 12 km (7 miles) from the Omkareshwar Road railway station. There are steamboats across the Narmada River and also two connecting bridges.

Omkareshwar is about 72 km from Khandwa and about 77 km (48 miles) from Indore. You can travel by road or train. Khandwa is connected to all the major cities of India by railways and it is on the New Delhi-Mumbai railway route. You can also reach Omkareshwar from Ujjain via Indore. Buses and trains are available from Ujjain to Indore.

Omkareshwar

Omkareshwar, originally uploaded by Soumitra Agnihotri.

Omkareshwar, an island in the course of the River Narmada in Madhya Pradesh, is home to the Omkareshwar Jyotirlinga shrine and the Amareshwar temple.

Temple of Omkareshwar at night

Temple d'Omkareshwar, India, originally uploaded by mafate69.

Evolution: White Tiger

Photo: sleeping white tiger at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, Louisiana (April, 2003).

White tigers are neither albino, nor do they constitute a separate subspecies and they can breed with orange or brown ones, although approximately half of the resulting offspring will be heterozygous for the recessive white gene and their fur will be orange. But if the orange parent was itself already a heterozygous tiger, which would give each cub a 50 per cent chance of being either double recessive white or heterozygous orange. If two heterozygous tigers or heterozygote breed, on average, 25 per cent of their offspring will be white, 50 per cent will be heterozygous orange (with white genes) and 25 per cent will be homozygous orange (with no white genes).

In the 1970s a pair of heterozygous orange tigers produced 13 cubs in Alipore Zoo, India, out of which 3 were white tiger cubs. If two white tigers breed 100 per cent of their cubs will be homozygous white tigers. A tiger which is homozygous for the white gene may also be heterozygous or homozygous for many different genes. The question whether a tiger is heterozygous (a heterozygote) or homozygous (a homozygote) depends on which gene is being discussed. Inbreeding promotes homozygosis and this fact has been used as a strategy to breed white tigers in captivity.

From the casual way that Jim Corbett makes reference to a white tigress, which he filmed with two orange cubs, in his ‘Man-Eaters of Kumaon’ (1946), it is suggested that white tigers were nothing out of the ordinary to him. Corbett's black and white film footage is probably the only film in existence of a white tiger in the wild. It illustrates again that white tigers survived and reproduced in the wild. The film was used in a National Geographic documentary ‘Man-eaters of India’ (1984), about Corbett's life, based on his 1957 book by the same title.

White tigers with dark stripes were recorded as living in the wild in India during the Mughal Empire (1556-1605). A painting from 1590 of Akbar while hunting near Gwalior depicts four tigers, two of which appear white.

The Journal of The Bombay Natural History Society reported 17 white tigers shot between 1907 and 1933: in several separate locations in Orissa, Bilaspur, Sohagpur and Rewa.

On January 22, 1939, the Prime Minister of Nepal shot a white tiger at Barda camp in Terai, Nepal. The last observed wild white tiger was shot in 1958, and the mutation is believed to be extinct in the wild.

Arthur Locke mentions white tigers in ‘The Tigers Of Trengganu’ (1954).

E.P. Gee collected accounts of 35 white tigers from the wild up to 1959, with still more uncounted from Assam where he had his tea plantation. Some white tigers in the wild had reddish stripes known as ‘red tigers’. The Boga-bagh, or ‘white tiger’, Tea Estate in upper Assam, was named that after two white tigers that were shot there in the early 1900s.

In India, the Rewa hunters' diaries recorded 9 white tigers in the fifty years prior to 1960.

One theory of white tigers holds that they were symptomatic of inbreeding as a consequence of over hunting and habitat loss, as tiger populations became isolated.

White Tiger in Miami Metrozoo

Miami Metrozoo -White Tiger, originally uploaded by b-a-boop.

Watch this white tiger found in captivity, in Miami MetroZoo, spread over 740 acres (3.0 squire km), is the largest and oldest zoological garden in Florida. It is located in southern unincorporated Miami-Dade County southwest of the city of Miami and west of the village of Palmetto Bay. It houses over 1,200 wild animals and is the only subtropical zoo in the continental United States.

Sweet pea flowers of Meghalaya

Sweet Peas never look so sweet., originally uploaded by ner_luv.

Though the flowers of sweet pea are very beautiful as found in Meghalaya, seeds of many varieties of plants of the genus Lathyrus, including sweet pea, are toxic if eaten in quantity, unlike edible pea. A related pea species, Lathyrus sativus, is grown for human consumption but when it forms a major part of the diet it causes symptoms of toxicity called lathyrism. Sweet pea ingestion, it is believed, causes similar symptoms called odoratism or sweet pea lathyrism due to formation of collagen. The symptoms are similar to scurvy and copper deficiency which share the common feature of inhibiting proper formation of collagen fibrils. Seeds of the sweet pea contain beta-aminopropionitrile that prevents the cross linking of collagen by inhibiting lysyl oxidase, leading to loose skin. Recent experiments have attempted to develop this chemical as a treatment to avoid disfiguring skin contractions after skin grafting.

Sweet pea flower

Another shot of Sweet pea, originally uploaded by ner_luv.

Sweet pea (Lathyrus odoratus), an annual climbing plant, growing to a height of 1-2 meter, is a flowering plant belonging to the genus Lathyrus in the family Fabaceae (legumes). It is originally native to the eastern Mediterranean region from Sicily east to Crete. The leaves are pinnate with two leaflets and a terminal tendril which twines around supporting plants and structures helping the sweet pea to climb. The flowers are generally purple, 2 cm to 3.5 cm broad in the wild plant and larger and very variable in colour in the many cultivated plants. They are often grown by gardeners for their bright colours and the sweet fragrance that gives the name ‘sweet pea’. Watch this variety from the Indian state of Meghalaya.