Syed Mustafa Zaidi, a warehouse supervisor, told the boys, aged 13 and 15, to beat themselves with a zanjeer zani, a wooden-handled implement containing five curved blades used when commemorating the death of Hussain, grandson of Muhammad and one of the most important figures in Shia Islam.
It is, among other things, the month for genocide remembrance — the month when Rwanda was convulsed, when the Khmer Rouge conquered Cambodia, when Armenians commemorate what they call the Great Catastrophe, when Yom HaShoah, Holocaust memorial day, almost always falls.
Cubans and officials interviewed Monday said they could not recall an occasion when either Mr. Castro, 79, or his brother, Fidel, 83, did not speak on July 26, when Cubans commemorate the 1953 rebel assault on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba, an event often celebrated here as the birth of the revolution against President Fulgencio Batista.
Mr. Bush's presidency and his prospects for re-election have become largely defined by the war in Iraq, which will be his main topic when he delivers a graduation address at the Air Force Academy on Wednesday and again on Sunday when he commemorates the 60th anniversary of D-Day at the American Cemetery in Normandy.
(It is "Nimrod" that is played on Remembrance Day, when we commemorate our war dead).
Heroes Day is when Uganda commemorates fighters who perished to bring the current regime to power.
I arrived in August, just after "marching season," when Unionists commemorate the Battle of the Boyne and other bygone victories by lighting bonfires and staging belligerent marches.
Last week marked Israel's 64th year of independence; it is also when Palestinians commemorate the Nakba, or "catastrophe," during which many of Palestine's native inhabitants were turned into refugees.
Whatever his technical problems in the past, though, his playing was in fine shape on the evening of Feb. 10 when he commemorated the 50th anniversary of his Carnegie Hall debut with a recital on the same stage.
In a year when we commemorate the first world war, Kate McLoughlin's book Authoring war shows how the literary form is uniquely "sensitive to the fragmenting effects that war has on individual lives, communities, the body, and the environment".
Even when they commemorate tragedies like the great Irish famine, memorials could be our way of grieving over the "perpetual war for perpetual peace" that still shadows us at home.
