Presenting my photo journal of August 2025.

Independence Day is celebrated on August 15. Narali Pournima, Raksha-Bandhan and Gokul Ashtami fall in August and this year even Ganapati Festival too.

My home was getting a coat of paint. And I realized that painters remain faceless persons for us. Our focus is only on the paint brush in his hands. Why blame capitalists for thinking of a workman only as a pair of hands?

The painter ignored me and kept working. He bent backwards standing on a ladder. His bodyline and the ladder lines created a wonderful symmetry if you imagine a horizontal line cutting the two.

I noticed that there was dew on the money plant leaves. This has been happening for many years, but I never noticed it! We miss so many beautiful things around us.

At the airport again. I queued up to board a flight to Delhi. When I looked to my right, I saw this and clicked it.

I camped at Gandhi Smriti in Delhi. This statue is in its garden. “Vanar Sena is a team of children who came together to end the practice of defecation in their village. Using whistles to warn people heading into the fields they do no shy away from these mischievous tactics. They have played a significant role in the swatch Bharat mission.”

Gandhi Smriti is adjacent to Rajghat. On my way to the Rajghat I clicked this photograph.

I visited Hiroshima seven years ago. Visiting its museum is heart wrenching experience. The 80th anniversary of Hiroshima destruction by Atom Bomb fell on Aug 6, 2025.

Sadako Sasaki who was exposed to the A-Bomb at the age of two but escaped without apparent injury. She grew into a strong and healthy girl. Nine years later, in the fall of her sixth year in elementary school, she suddenly contracted leukaemia and was hospitalized in February the following year.

She folded paper cranes continuously hoping they would help her recover; her classmates also folded paper cranes believing that it will help her survive. But she finally succumbed!

I picked up this folded paper crane there, and have preserved it, it makes me so emotional. It is a constant reminder that destruction and violence must be abjured.

This Shiva temple hidden in Banyan tree is over a hundred years old. And it is in right in the heart of the Thane city. The botanist in me woke up noticing huge prop roots.

Eighty years ago, man created unprecedented destruction at Hiroshima. The man who created the bomb, and the man who ordered the huge destruction are remembered.

A hundred years ago a banyan tree started growing and we can only see the huge prop roots and its canopy where birds chirp and nest. And we do not know where lies the main tree which started this huge growth.

The difference between destruction and creation, Hiroshima and the Banyan Tree, was never starker.

It is time for us to make a choice, Violence and Destruction, or Peace and Growth.

Vivek S Patwardhan

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” All matter copyrighted.