Are marriages made in heaven or do you have to put in a great deal of effort to make your relationship work? What is the basis of a happy marriage? Leo Tolstoy wrote: “What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.” Problems are bound to confront you but your mutual readiness to handle both an apparently insurmountable difficulty and a minor snag will eventually bring you long-awaited harmony and you will join the ranks of happy families who are ‘all alike’, according to Tolstoy, because a happy marriage is a flawless marriage with every single problem solved and settled. The basis of a happy marriage… Can we use ‘base’ instead of ‘basis’? A language purist, who has very strong ideas about what is correct or acceptable, would say: ‘Definitely not! ‘Base’ is physical. You use ‘base’ to describe the lowest part of a column or a staircase. You can make a cocktail with a whiskey base and murderesses in crime...
Even if art leaves you cold and you have little or no interest in fashion, you must have heard of Piet Mondrian, a Dutch pioneer of abstract art. He saw art as pursuit of truth and believed that 'to approach truth as closely as possible' an artist should abstract everything and thus arrive at the fundamental quality of objects. To apply this idea in practice Mondrian developed a new style of abstract painting, which he termed Neo-Plasticism. It is characterized by the use of horizontal and vertical lines (no diagonals) and primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) and black and white. The painter thought that clearly defined colours and perfectly straight lines, which formed colour blocks, were enough to convey spiritual harmony and order; anything else was apparently superfluous and only distracted the viewer from the truth.“ Piet Mondrian Composition No. II 1920 Mondrian's quest for what is real was prompted by Modern Theosophy, a spiritual movement founded by Rus...