On Seclusion Day, which marks the arrival of New Year 1937 in the Saka calendar, Hindus turn lights off, stop all activities, including traveling, refrain from any kind of entertainment, and stay indoors to contemplate.

This annual seclusion day was celebrated in Bali, Indonesia on Saturday, and tourists from around the world got a taste of it. The resort island of Bali remained dark on Saturday evening with Hindus, who constitute a majority of the population there, observing Seclusion Day.

All lights on streets and in houses were turned off, while hotels had been urged to block any light peeking out of their premises. Furthermore, the thousands of temples on the island remained dark and quiet on Saturday evening to make it appear as “an island without dwellers.”

Chief of the Bali chapter of the Indonesian Hindus Council (PHDI), Professor Dr. Gusti Ngurah Sudiana, said that the observation of Seclusion Day was aimed at making people control lust (greed).

Hindus are obligated to observe the event, while non-Hindus on the island are expected to do the same. However, if they are unable to turn the lights of their establishments off, they are urged to prevent light from coming out of their homes.

It is these individual customers who refrained from using electricity the whole day on Saturday to commemorate Seclusion Day. Hotels and the Ngurah Rai Airport still needed power to carry out their operations and services.

The more sober tourism stakeholders on both sides of the border of Kenya and Tanzania earlier today expressed their exasperation, disappointment, and often outright anger over the fact that the long-overdue tourism talks between the two countries had stalled and ended in a stalemate of massive proportions.

Information was earlier with complaints on gender balance in the talks, which, going by the track record of the women in the tourism industry in East Africa, may well have provided for a different outcome as the ladies are known to be pragmatic and result oriented. The Kenyan delegation was made up entirely of men.

The Tanzanian delegation did have ladies on the team but only perhaps a third of their team were of the female gender, again raising questions if not enough competent women could be found to be part of the negotiating teams.

The two days of talks on March 18 and 19, in retrospect, achieved little else but to bring the two protagonists into one room, where, after what has been described as only cursory niceties at the start, cast in concrete positions were repeated over and over again.

Coinciding with this long-expected meeting, the Tanzanian government had also pulled the plug on some 60 percent of air connections between the two countries over an equally long-simmering aviation dispute arising from the Bilateral Air Services Agreement in place. The Kenyan Civil Aviation Authority (KCAA) refused to grant landing rights to Tanzania’s Fastjet, which for all intents and purpose meets the nationality requirements to be considered a Tanzanian airline but was blocked nevertheless.

“We now know that the escalation of the aviation dispute, which even us in Kenya lay squarely on the doorstep of our own regulators, was no accident to come on the very day when the two delegations were due to meet in Arusha. Someone somewhere, in fact let me be blunt, the man at the top with an anti-Kenyan agenda since he took office 9 ½ years ago, orchestrated this. He is a very unhappy man that his delaying tactics in the EAC [East African Community] failed and that Rwanda, Kenya, and Uganda broke loose from his shackles and started to fast-track things. The results for the three are very substantial, dropping work permit requirements for citizens, a common tourist visa, visa-free travel for expatriates, mutual financial participation in mega projects like the standard gauge railway from Mombasa all the way to Kigali, and the refinery in Uganda to name just a few.

“The timing of this dispute is bad, because as long as the campaign towards the next general election is on, the chances to reach a viable and workable compromise are hanging in the balance. The real losers will be tourists and business travelers who already now have problems to get seats in and out of Dar es Salaam. And when I hear ‘give traffic rights to those and them to teach the Kenyans a lesson,’ they forget that airlines will take months and months to plan for new routes and to raise capacity for more flights. Reducing the number of flights so drastically will only hit business on both sides, so both loose out. But as you kept saying, it is the fools at the KCAA who are responsible for this development. Now they try to hide behind that obscure word of government but we in Rwanda in particular know the individuals who were responsible for blocking RwandAir for so long from the Entebbe to Nairobi flights. They even tried to defy a Head of State directive that tells you that there is something very wrong at KCAA and surely heads should roll. Not that approving the Fastjet landing rights now will bring an immediate resolution to the problems. These issues will be milked for all they are worth, because Tanzania is going into election mode, and CCM is fighting for their dear life this time. Very bad timing and very bad attitudes.”

Perhaps the East African Community Secretariat and in particular the East African Business Council and the East African Tourism Platform should now step up and provide a forum where the controversial issues can be discussed in a calmer atmosphere than the confrontational spirit which seems to have prevailed in the room in Arusha over the past three days. Moderation, and perhaps even arbitration, could provide a way forward and out of the deadlock.

Starting tomorrow, Reunion Island Tourism (IRT), supported by six private-sector participants, will showcase the island’s attractions at the Salon Mondial in Paris, which is taking place at the Porte de Versailles Exhibition Park.

Visitors to the stand can learn all about the great outdoors, adventure activities, hiking, mountain biking, horseback riding, and more, and of course the more traditional forms of a vacation, just laying on a beach and getting pampered by the staff of one of the island’s top hotels.

Among the companies present are Gites de France, the hotel group Exsel Authentic Hotels, Saint Alexis Hotel & Spa, Rando Mafate Indian Ocean, West Intercommunal Tourist Office, and also one of Reunion Island’s mountain guides, od A’Rand’O, Mr. Arnaud Carle.

The trade show will continue until the end of the day on March 22. For more details about Reunion Island, visit their award-winning website

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) in New York will organize “Encountering Vishnu: The Lion Avatar in Indian Temple Drama” exhibition from December 19, 2015 to June five, 2016.

“Dramas presented during religious festivals in southern India are an important aspect of popular Hindu celebration. This exhibition highlights five rare wooden sculptural masks that represent a largely unrecorded category of late medieval Indian devotional art. The masks depict the protagonists in a deadly battle between Vishnu in his man-lion avatar, Narasimha, and an evil king whose destruction was essential for the restoration of order in the universe,” a Met announcement says.

Applauding Met for showcasing Hinduism focused exhibition, Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada today, said that art had a long and rich tradition in Hinduism and ancient Sanskrit literature talked about religious paintings of deities on wood or cloth.

Founded in 1870, Met, one of the top art museums of the world, has large collections of ancient art; including Greek, Roman and Near Eastern. The Met’s mission includes art that “collectively represent the broadest spectrum of human achievement”. Thomas P. Campbell is Met’s Director and CEO, while Daniel Brodsky is Trustees Chairman.

Hinduism, oldest and third largest religion of the world, has about one billion adherents and moksh (liberation) is its ultimate goal. There are about three million Hindus in USA.