Via: Aarti Sethi
[[FILM]]
=====================================
Film @ Sarai: February – March 2007
=====================================
Rabindranath Tagore
Satyajit Ray
1961, India. Documentary, 54 min, B/W
Producer: Films Division, Govt. of India
4:30 P.M., Friday 2 February 2007
Seminar Room, Sarai-CSDS
The film will be introduced by Prof. Ramin Jehanbegloo, Rajni Kothari
Professor of Democracy at the Centre for the Study of Developing
Societies, Delhi
The documentary details the life and work of Rabindranath Tagore
(1861-1941). The documentary was made to celebrate Tagore’s birth
centenary in May 1961. Ray was conscious that he was making an
official portrait of India’s celebrated poet and hence the film does
not include any controversial aspects of Tagore’s life. However, it
is far from being a propaganda film. The film comprises dramatized
episodes from the poet’s life and archived images and documents.
[Ramin Jahanbegloo was born in Tehran and studied at the Sorbonne
University, Paris. He is currently the Rajni Kothari Professor of
Democracy at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in
Delhi. Prior to this he was a post-doc at Harvard University and then
headed the department for contemporary studies at the Cultural
Research Bureau, Iran. Among his twenty books in English, French and
Persian are Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (Phoenix, 2000), and (as
editor) Iran: Between Tradition and Modernity (Lexington Books, 2004).
His intellectual work has featured, among other elements, a close
engagement with the life and work of Mohandas Gandhi and Rabindranath
Tagore.]
Via: Monica Narula
Call for Contributions to Sarai Reader 07: The Frontier
I. Introducing the Sarai Reader
Sarai (www.sarai.net), an interdisciplinary research and practice
programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies,
invites contributions to Sarai Reader 07: The Frontier
We also invite proposals to initiate and moderate discussions on the
themes of the Sarai Reader 06 on the Reader List (http://
mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list) with a view to the
moderator(s) editing the transcripts of these discussions for
publication in the Sarai Reader 07.
For an outline of the themes and concerns of Sarai Reader 07, see the
Concept Outline below (section II). To know about the format of the
articles that we invite, see 'Guidelines for Submissions' (sections
III and IV) below.
This year, like last year, the Sarai Reader has been invited to
participate in the 'Journal of Journals' magazine project of
Documenta 12. (see http://www.documenta12.de/magazine.html?&L=1).
Content from Sarai Reader 07 will be selected by the Sarai editorial
collective to be published online on the Documenta 12 Magazine webpage.
The Sarai Reader is an annual publication produced by Sarai/CSDS
(Delhi). Previous Readers have included 'The Public Domain: Sarai
Reader 01', 2001, 'The Cities of Everyday Life: Sarai Reader 02',
2002, 'Shaping Technologies: Sarai Reader 03', 2003, 'Crisis/Media:
Sarai Reader 04', 2004, 'Bare Acts: Sarai Reader 05', 2005 and
'Turbulence: Sarai Reader 06', 2006. All the Sarai Readers are
available for free download at http://www.sarai.net/journal/journal.htm
The Sarai Reader series aims at bringing together original,
thoughtful, critical, reflective, well researched and provocative
texts and essays by theorists, practitioners and activists, grouped
under a core theme that expresses the interests of Sarai in issues
that relate media, information and society in the contemporary world.
The Sarai Readers have a wide international readership.
Editorial Collective for Sarai Reader: Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula,
Ravi Sundaram, Ravi Vasudevan, Awadhendra Sharan, Shuddhabrata
Sengupta, (Sarai, Delhi) and Geert Lovink (Institute of Network
Cultures, Amsterdam)
II. Concepts and Questions for Sarai Reader 07: Frontiers
Frequently at frontiers we are asked, 'Anything to declare?' The
wisest thing to do when faced with the scrutiny of a border official
is to say that you have 'Nothing to declare', and quickly move on.
Crossing borders usually entails an effort not to say too much, or at
least to get by with saying very little. A degree of reticence is
the mark of the wise and experienced traveller.
Sarai Reader 07: The Frontier, seeks to turn this ethic of reticence
on arrival at a boundary, at any boundary, on its head. This time,
the Reader will consider limits, edges, borders and margins of all
kind to be sites for declarations, occasions for conversation,
settings for the staging of arguments, debates, recounting and
reflection. We invite you to consider the frontier as an open door, a
chute into something new, or the rediscovery of that which has been
obscured, a hidden tunnel that crosses under a mountain, a porous
membrane of liminal possibilities, a zone of contact and contagion.
We want to think of the frontier as the skin of our time and our
world, and we invite you to get under the skin of contemporary
experience in order to generate a series of subcutaneous reflective
possibilities. For us, the frontier is a threshold waiting to be
crossed, a space rife with the possibility of seductive transgression.
The feeling of being on the edge of something has persisted for most
of our lifetimes. The twentieth century was an exhausting journey
into a receding future, and the first decade of the twenty-first
continues to entrance us with the seduction of what seems to be
forthcoming forever. We are all pioneers now, chasing and being
chased by the shifting border-posts of the frontiers given to us by
history. Yet our enterprises of pioneering do not necessarily carry
with them any longer the confidence of self proclaimed 'avant
gardes'. We are scouts sent in to scan the lay of the land of the
territory of uncertainty. Our reports are the dispatches that
chronicle, not our conquest of, but our continuing bewilderment
about, the times we inhabit.
We are not talking here only of actual, physical borders (though of
course we are interested in physical and political borders) which are
usually the residues of war, but also of the borders between
different temporal registers, between languages, between different
ways of doing things, between different bodies of thought and
conviction. Looked at this way, the frontier is more a condition than
a site, more a way of being and doing things, than a constellation of
border posts on the ground.
The DMZ of the present, straddling the recent past and the immediate
future, is the most striking frontier of all, inviting us to consider
the continuities and ruptures, revolutions and restorations that
litter the landscape of all our histories like bunkers and
watchtowers on either side.
We could also consider the borders between faith and doubt, between
technology and technique, between history and memory, between art and
science, between literature and reportage, between the empirical and
the speculative.
We are interested in all forms of expression that straddle these
spaces, especially in those that make forays into those zones of
exception, such as prisons, detention camps, sites of remand and
quarantine that maintain human beings at the edge.
Here we see the relentless production of states of exception by power
in a way that constantly redefines the boundaries of what might be
considered normal. With each passing day, the normal condition of the
world comes to resemble yesterday's state of exception, and today's
state of exception seeks to lay the foundations of tomorrow's
normality. This tension between the exception and the rule is another
kind of frontier, which we hope will provoke new investigations.
Today, we live in cities that expand by evacuating people from
centres and relocating them onto empty hinterlands. The shifting
locus of infrastructural renewal in megacities constantly generates
new urban frontiers. Here, in these liminal spaces which resemble
maps and grids more closely than they do actual spaces for
habitation, the question of what it is to be urban in the time of
evictions is asked with a violent, daily urgency.
A rough list of questions and concepts that Sarai Reader 07 wants to
take on could be as follows:
1. The tension between exceptions and rules as the necessary mark of
a frontier of the human condition today. Ways in which architectures,
instruments and devices to do with the regulation of social,
political and personal life, of ethics and politics, re-define the
boundaries of our being and consciousness. The tightening and
loosening of the armour of society and politics.
2. Reconsidering lines that cannot be crossed - in political, social,
ethical and aesthetic terms. The idea of taboos, transgressions and
the forbidden, especially in the light of what has come to be termed
as 'political correctness'.
3. The shifting frontiers and outposts of legality in everyday life.
4. The borders between practices - such as software and art, or
performance and contemporary social ritual, or between forms - such
as between cinema and the internet, between digital and analog
technologies, or between different registers of reflection - such as
history and literature.
5. Connections and contacts, especially between things and ideas that
would seem at first to be distant or adversarial in relation to each
other. Hybridities, Contagion and infections - between belief systems
(sometimes generating heresies), languages and ways of doing things
6. Reflections on the idea of the 'urban frontier' wherever it may be
found. Here by 'urban frontier' we mean those new and transforming
edges where the limits of the urban condition are being tried and
tested through eviction and resettlement.
7. Architectures of separation, exclusion, inclusion and connectivity.
8. Mobility and obstacles. Is the internet any longer a borderless
space?
9. The border between the real and the virtual, the physical and the
mental, role-playing and reality
10. Activities that involve unusual kinds of border crossing -
smuggling, immigration, illicit and unconscious trade, globalization
from below
11. The border as a feature of a fluid political geography - walls
(like at the Mexico US Border), fences (like on India-Bangladesh-
Pakistan borders), demilitarized zones (like in Korea), buffers,
enclaves, outposts and other unstable units of space.
Histories and accounts of frontier areas, and of shifting borders.
12. Frontiers of the imagination. Space Travel, Science Fiction,
Utopias, Alternative Realities and their continuing presence in our
lives.
We want to invite practitioners and others, some of whom may be
audacious even as others may be tentative, wherever in the world they
may be located, whether in the domains of theory, research,
contemporary art, media, information and software design, politics or
commentary to join us in the making of Sarai Reader 07.
You are invited to contribute through essays, dialogues, arguments,
interviews, photographs, image-text combinations, comics, art-works,
diary entries, research reports, commentaries and manifestos that can
evoke the idea of the frontier in all its myriad dimensions.
SARAI READER 07 and documenta 12
This year (like last year) the Sarai Reader has been invited to
participate in the 'Journal of Journals' magazine project of
documenta 12. "documenta (with a lower-case 'd') is an exhibition of
modern and contemporary art which now takes place every 5 years in
Kassel, Germany. It was founded by Arnold Bode in 1955 .The more
recent documentas feature art from all continents and are perceived
to have been some of the most significant contemporary art
exhibitions to have taken place internationally. documenta 12
features a ‘journal of journals’ project that invites leading
critical and reflective publications from all over the world to
participate in a collaborative curatorial and editorial exercise to
generate a global frame of contemporary discourse."
For details, see http://www.documenta12.de/magazine.html?&L=1
III. Guidelines for Submissions
Word Limit: 1500 - 4000 words
1. Submissions may be scholarly, journalistic or literary - or a mix
of these, in the form of essays, papers, interviews, online
discussions or diary entries. All submission, unless specifically
solicited, must be in English only. Submissions may also be only
images or images and text. The Reader is printed in black and white.
2. Text submissions must be sent by email as .rtf, or as word
document or open office attachments. Articles may be accompanied by
black and white photographs or drawings submitted in the first in
the .jpeg format accompanying the text (if any) and then in .tif
format if there is decision to print. Ftp server details will be made
available if needed.
3. We urge all writers to follow the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) in
terms of footnotes, annotations and references. For more details
about the CMS and an updated list of Frequently Asked Questions, see
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/cmosfaq/cmosfaq.html
For a 'Quick Reference Guide to the Chicago Manual of Style',
especially relevant for citation style, see http://
www.library.wwu.edu/ref/Refhome/chicago.html
4. All contributions should be accompanied by a three/four line text
introducing the author, and an email address they are willing to make
public.
5. All submissions will be read by the editorial collective of the
Sarai Reader before the final selection is made. The editorial
collective reserves the right not to publish any material sent to it
for publication in the Sarai Reader on stylistic or editorial
grounds. All contributors will be informed of the final decisions of
the editorial collective vis a vis their contribution.
6. Copyright for all accepted contributions will remain with the
authors. Sarai reserves indefinitely the right to place any of the
material accepted for publication on the public domain in print or
electronic forms, and on the internet.
7. Accepted submissions will not be paid for, but authors are
guaranteed a wide international readership. The Reader will be
published in print, distributed in India and internationally, and
will also be uploaded in a pdf form on to the Sarai website. All
contributors whose work has been accepted for publication will
receive two copies of the Reader.
IV. Where and When to send your Contributions
Last date for submission: 15th May 2007. Please write and send as
soon as possible, preferably, latest by the 30th of March, 2007, a
brief outline/abstract, not more than one page, of what you want to
write about. This helps in designing the content of the reader. We
expect to have the reader published by August 2007.
Please send in your outlines and abstracts, and images/graphic
material, to reader@sarai.net
Monica Narula
Raqs Media Collective
Sarai-CSDS
29 Rajpur Road
Delhi 110054
www.raqsmediacollective.net
www.sarai.net
Via: aasim khan
Hi,
Perhaps the emotion here find a resonance in the
hearts of scribes on the list.
I want to add my own bit of reflection; a lot now
comes out in form of narratives published as
non-fiction. So is the Publishing cashing on the
talent made redundent by the Press? Non-fiction mostly
but even fiction .
Will be interesting to find out how many chinese
scribes are now rummaging through the streets of the
globe? And have they already outnumbered the Yankee
Corps?
One things is for sure; the TIMES they are changing.
Regards
Aasim
Via: Rana Dasgupta
cross-posted from Undercurrents.
R
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [undercurrents] another video: we. featuring the words of
arundhati roy
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 12:25:57 -0500
From: Gita Hashemi
Reply-To: undercurrents@bbs.thing.net
To: Undercurrents
i've only seen a few clips of this video an am looking forward to seeing
the whole thing particularly for some of the very interesting historical
footage in it... i find the remix concept, the form of circulation, the
network created around it, and the 'anonymous' status of the artist all
refreshing... meanwhile, one of the questions of documenta 12 is "what
is to be done?"
be well.
gita
Via: "Felipe Fonseca"
Indeed, a great deal of the connected elite tought
it was for real. Arnaldo Jabor is an idiot, but this
time he got it right. Marcola exists, and he does
read in prison, but his organization, PCC, is not
interested in revolutions or social justice (if the
prisoners were well-treated, PCC would cease to
exist).
f,
from Brasil
On 1/30/07, Rana Dasgupta wrote:
> THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL (from Harper's Magazine, December 2006)
>
> From a column by Arnaldo Jabor, in the form of an imagined interview
> with an unnamed Brazilian prisoner, published May 23 in the newspaper "0
> Globo". The interview was believed genuine by some readers, and the
> interviewee was widely assumed to be Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho,
> known as Marcola, or "Playboy," an inmate in a penitentiary outside Sao
> Paulo and the leader since 2002 of the Primeiro Comando da Capital, a
> prison gang founded in 1993. Brazil's prisons house approximately
> 360,000 inmates, the fourth largest total in the world. Over four days
> in May, the PCC staged riots in Sao Paulo resulting in more than one
> hundred deaths. Translated from the Portuguese by Valeria Mogilevich.
>
> Do you belong to the PCC?
>
> I'm more than that: I'm a sign of the times. I was poor and invisible.
> For decades you never bothered to look at me. It used to be easy to deal
> with poverty. The diagnosis was obvious: rural migration, income
> inequality, a few slums. But the solution never arrived. What did they
> do? Nothing. Did the federal government ever allocate funds for us?
> People only heard about us when the slums collapsed, or from romantic
> music about "the beauty of the favelas at sunrise," stuff like that. Now
> we're rich, thanks to the multinational cocaine trade. And you guys are
> scared to death. Weare the late blooming 'of your social conscience. You
> see? I'm well read. I read Dante in prison.
>
> But the solution would be ...
>
> There's no solution, man. Even the idea of a "solution" is a mistake.
> Have you seen the size of the 560 slums in Rio? Have you flown over Sao
> Paulo's outskirts in a helicopter? A solution would require economic
> growth, a revolution in education, general urbanization - all executed
> by an "enlightened tyranny" that would leap over the paralyzed secular
> bureaucracy, its legislative accomplice, and the judiciary that
> obstructs punishment. This would cost billions of dollars and imply a
> deep psychosocial change in the country's political structure. Which is
> to say, it's impossible.
>
> Aren't you scared of dying?
>
> It's you who's scared of dying, not me. In fact, you can't come and kill
> me here in jail, but I can send people to kill you out there. We're
> man-bombs. In the slums there are a hundred thousand man-bombs. We're at
> the core of what is beyond solution. You guys are in the right, and I'm
> in the wrong, and in the middle is the frontier of death, the only
> frontier. We're already a new species, a wholly different animal from you.
> For you, death is a Christian drama: you die in a bed from a heart
> attack. For us, death is commonplace: we're tossed into a ditch. Didn't
> you intellectuals speak of "class wars"-"Be an outlaw, be a hero"?
> That's right: here we are! Ha, ha. You never expected these cocaine
> soldiers, did you?
> My soldiers are anomalies, products of this country's twisted
> development. There's no more proletariat, no pitiful or exploited
> masses. There's a third thing growing out there, cultivated from the
> mud, schooled on absolute illiteracy, graduating from prisons, like an
> alien monster hidden in the city's cracks. A new language has emerged.
> We're on the edge of a kind of postmisery that has begotten a new
> murderous culture, propped up by technology, satellites, cell phones,
> the Internet, modern weapons. It's shit with chips and megabytes. My
> soldiers are a mutated social species, they're the fungus grow¬ing on a
> big dirty mistake.
>
> What changed in the margins?
>
> Dough. We have it now. Do you think someone with $40 million doesn't run
> things? With that kind of money, prison is like a ho¬tel, an office. We
> are a modern company, we're rich. You guys are a bankrupt state,
> dominated by incompetent people. We have agile management methods. You
> are slow and bureaucratic. We fight on our own turf. You're on foreign
> soil. We don't fear death. You're dying of fear. We are well armed. You
> have a .38 caliber revolver. We're on the attack. You are on the
> defensive. You are obsessed with human rights. We are cruel and
> merciless. You have transformed us into superstars of crime. We have
> made clowns of you. The people in the slums help us, out of fear or out
> of love. You are hated. You are provincial. Our arms and drugs come from
> abroad-we're global. We don't forget you - you're our clients. You
> forget about us as soon as an outbreak of violence subsides.
>
> But what should we do?
>
> I'm going to let you in on something, even if it's not in my best
> interest. Hit the coke barons! There are representatives, senators,
> generals, even former presidents from Paraguay involved in cocaine and
> weapons traffic. But who will catch them? The army? With what money?
> They don't even have money to feed the recruits.
> I'm reading Clausewitz's On War. There's no success in sight. We are
> ravenous ants with access to antitank missiles. The only way to finish
> us is to drop an atomic bomb on the slums. Can you imagine, a
> radioactive Ipanema?
> You can succeed only if you give up defending normality. There is no
> normality anymore. You must be critical of your own incompetence. But,
> to be frank, you don't have an out. Just shit. And we already deal in
> shit. Listen, brother, there's no solution. As the divine Dante wrote,
> "Abandon every hope." We are all in hell.
>
> --
> Rana Dasgupta
> www.ranadasgupta.com
> _________________________________________
> reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city.
> Critiques & Collaborations
> To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request@sarai.net with subscribe in the subject header.
> To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list
> List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>
Via: Rana Dasgupta
THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL (from Harper's Magazine, December 2006)
From a column by Arnaldo Jabor, in the form of an imagined interview
with an unnamed Brazilian prisoner, published May 23 in the newspaper "0
Globo". The interview was believed genuine by some readers, and the
interviewee was widely assumed to be Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho,
known as Marcola, or "Playboy," an inmate in a penitentiary outside Sao
Paulo and the leader since 2002 of the Primeiro Comando da Capital, a
prison gang founded in 1993. Brazil's prisons house approximately
360,000 inmates, the fourth largest total in the world. Over four days
in May, the PCC staged riots in Sao Paulo resulting in more than one
hundred deaths. Translated from the Portuguese by Valeria Mogilevich.
Do you belong to the PCC?
I'm more than that: I'm a sign of the times. I was poor and invisible.
For decades you never bothered to look at me. It used to be easy to deal
with poverty. The diagnosis was obvious: rural migration, income
inequality, a few slums. But the solution never arrived. What did they
do? Nothing. Did the federal government ever allocate funds for us?
People only heard about us when the slums collapsed, or from romantic
music about "the beauty of the favelas at sunrise," stuff like that. Now
we're rich, thanks to the multinational cocaine trade. And you guys are
scared to death. Weare the late blooming 'of your social conscience. You
see? I'm well read. I read Dante in prison.
But the solution would be ...
There's no solution, man. Even the idea of a "solution" is a mistake.
Have you seen the size of the 560 slums in Rio? Have you flown over Sao
Paulo's outskirts in a helicopter? A solution would require economic
growth, a revolution in education, general urbanization - all executed
by an "enlightened tyranny" that would leap over the paralyzed secular
bureaucracy, its legislative accomplice, and the judiciary that
obstructs punishment. This would cost billions of dollars and imply a
deep psychosocial change in the country's political structure. Which is
to say, it's impossible.
Aren't you scared of dying?
It's you who's scared of dying, not me. In fact, you can't come and kill
me here in jail, but I can send people to kill you out there. We're
man-bombs. In the slums there are a hundred thousand man-bombs. We're at
the core of what is beyond solution. You guys are in the right, and I'm
in the wrong, and in the middle is the frontier of death, the only
frontier. We're already a new species, a wholly different animal from you.
For you, death is a Christian drama: you die in a bed from a heart
attack. For us, death is commonplace: we're tossed into a ditch. Didn't
you intellectuals speak of "class wars"-"Be an outlaw, be a hero"?
That's right: here we are! Ha, ha. You never expected these cocaine
soldiers, did you?
My soldiers are anomalies, products of this country's twisted
development. There's no more proletariat, no pitiful or exploited
masses. There's a third thing growing out there, cultivated from the
mud, schooled on absolute illiteracy, graduating from prisons, like an
alien monster hidden in the city's cracks. A new language has emerged.
We're on the edge of a kind of postmisery that has begotten a new
murderous culture, propped up by technology, satellites, cell phones,
the Internet, modern weapons. It's shit with chips and megabytes. My
soldiers are a mutated social species, they're the fungus grow¬ing on a
big dirty mistake.
What changed in the margins?
Dough. We have it now. Do you think someone with $40 million doesn't run
things? With that kind of money, prison is like a ho¬tel, an office. We
are a modern company, we're rich. You guys are a bankrupt state,
dominated by incompetent people. We have agile management methods. You
are slow and bureaucratic. We fight on our own turf. You're on foreign
soil. We don't fear death. You're dying of fear. We are well armed. You
have a .38 caliber revolver. We're on the attack. You are on the
defensive. You are obsessed with human rights. We are cruel and
merciless. You have transformed us into superstars of crime. We have
made clowns of you. The people in the slums help us, out of fear or out
of love. You are hated. You are provincial. Our arms and drugs come from
abroad-we're global. We don't forget you - you're our clients. You
forget about us as soon as an outbreak of violence subsides.
But what should we do?
I'm going to let you in on something, even if it's not in my best
interest. Hit the coke barons! There are representatives, senators,
generals, even former presidents from Paraguay involved in cocaine and
weapons traffic. But who will catch them? The army? With what money?
They don't even have money to feed the recruits.
I'm reading Clausewitz's On War. There's no success in sight. We are
ravenous ants with access to antitank missiles. The only way to finish
us is to drop an atomic bomb on the slums. Can you imagine, a
radioactive Ipanema?
You can succeed only if you give up defending normality. There is no
normality anymore. You must be critical of your own incompetence. But,
to be frank, you don't have an out. Just shit. And we already deal in
shit. Listen, brother, there's no solution. As the divine Dante wrote,
"Abandon every hope." We are all in hell.
Via: Rana Dasgupta
cross-posted from Undercurrents.
R
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [undercurrents] another video: we. featuring the words of
arundhati roy
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 12:25:57 -0500
From: Gita Hashemi
Reply-To: undercurrents@bbs.thing.net
To: Undercurrents
i've only seen a few clips of this video an am looking forward to seeing
the whole thing particularly for some of the very interesting historical
footage in it... i find the remix concept, the form of circulation, the
network created around it, and the 'anonymous' status of the artist all
refreshing... meanwhile, one of the questions of documenta 12 is "what
is to be done?"
be well.
gita
Via: Jeebesh Bagchi
This is an blog written by Sebastian Rodrigues
http://www.openspaceforum.net/twiki/tiki-view_blog.php?blogId=17
He has been traveling extensively and writing. His notes on Jharkhand
are worth looking at.
best
jeebesh
Via: "S.Shashidhar"
Dear Tapas,
There are only few in this world that can create a nuclear bomb, that does nt mean that the science behind a boms is fake or irrelavant. Most of the knowledge of yoga is copied from the nature itself, there are trees which grow without water for ages, and spring back to life. There are animals who hibernate in the winter months and their heart beats only 30 times during the entire period. There are examples of many himalayan squirrels who do so. a winter for a squirrel is like a life time for a human.
The essence of yoga is never suppression, but that of realisation. The goal of yoga is never to live without food or water for days to gether, but it is a by product of the acts undertaken.
My friend if people flew planes in the ancient days, why are we still being pulled in bullock carts. They must have been stories of fantasy...
As far as condeming something, or allowing something, the scriptures have never done it, they have never even suggested anything. They mearly speak of experiences. What you are talking of especially the Aghora thing, had a very different settting in Bengal. There was a cult called as Thuggis, They were something else..
Regards,
Shashi
----- Original Message ----
From: Tapas Ray
To: S.Shashidhar
Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2007 2:22:33 PM
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Buff or beef?
Shashi,
I can see that you have a deep regard for these people, and are upset by my
flippant remark. Please accept my sincere apologies.
But I fail to understand how one can survive without food and water for many
years. Certain indigenous peoples know the use of plants - such as coca and
hoodia - for hunger and thirst suppression. But even these have their
limits. As for yoga, I am sure it can do a lot of things, but cannot
overturn the laws of nature whereby your body needs nutrition and water to
survive.
Of course there are yogis - the ones you know, for instance - who have
nothing to do with substances that are called drugs in secular society (such
as marijuana and datura) or alcohol. But there are others who do. In fact,
the use of these things is part of their religious practice. I am just
stating facts and not making a value judgement here. Whether one can call
them yogis or has to call them something else - say, sadhus - is another
matter. Maybe there are rules/conventions about these things within the
relevant religious tradition. I do not know.
Claiming miracles by reference to ancient Indian texts would seem to play
into the hands of the most obscurantist elements, don't you think? I have
heard people say that we had aeroplanes in Puranic times. Or that a certain
sadhu is a thousand years old. I don't think that sort of claim merits any
serious discussion.
Just a qualification - claims like these have nothing to do with local,
native knowledge, which modernist science discounts but has a strong
validity, having been tried and tested over thousands of years.
Tapas
> Tapas,
There guys are never stoned, they have learnt it from ardent study of
eastern texts the good beginig fo ryou would be in seach of secret india by
paul brunton, if you knoew, telugu i would have suggested many more, my
knowledge of hindi is very limited but i am sure that there are many texts
available.
The practice of Yoga, primarily means no intake of any substance which
alters the state of mind, and none of the yogis that i know of consume any
form of a drug. I have my self seen people who live on just a fruit a day,
there are examples in the modern day of jains who go into a fast unto death
and they last for about 1 year easily, before their will power caves in. I
know that the jain thing was a stupid example.
My entire contention was that food, is no longer visualised as a source of
enery, but that of comfort, good food that people speak of is not good food
according any of the manuals of either science or spirituality. As far as
any being a joker, I am the biggest, if not for me they would stiil have
been practising their art witout being mocked at, a small verse penned by
vemana in telugu.
Uppu Kappurambu nokka polika nundu
Chooda chooda ruchulu jaada veru
Purushulandu Punya purushulu veraya
Viswadhaabhiraama, Vinura Vema
Salt and camphor look alike
With familiarity, the paths of their taste is different
Among men, virtuous people stand apart
Beloved of the Bounteous, Vema, listen!
Poem courtesy wikipedia!.
Regards,
Shashi
----- Original Message ----
From: Tapas Ray
To: S.Shashidhar
Sent: Monday, January 22, 2007 6:36:40 PM
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Buff or beef?
Shashi,
I would give an arm and a leg to learn their secret. But are you sure that
secret doesn't consist in being stoned out of one's mind most of the time,
so as not to notice that one is eating or drinking anything, or even that
one has a body?
Sorry, Shashi, your German pals sound too much like our Indian jokers.
Tapas
> Looks like the joke turned on me!
> I was at the Ardh Kumbh, where i met people who eat all kinds of things,
> some of them true other so
> much like me. But BOSS Tapas, there was this whole crowd of people from
> Germany , who live on
> only an apple a day and there was a certain head of the congregation who
> had not consumed any food
> or water in the last so many years. And these were not like the indian
> joker fakir's they lead very
> productive capitalist lives. Working in factories and schools.
> It is possible to live without many things, least of all food... untill we
> find the way let us all hunt and
> gather
> Getting a little fatter by the day
> Shashi
----- Original Message ----
From: Tapas Ray
To: sarai list
Sent: Friday, January 5, 2007 6:35:34 PM
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Buff or beef?
You are forgetting field rats. I have seen their meat hung out to dry from
clotheslines in certain villages. As for human blood, before trying it,
remember what Idi Amin is supposed to have said about human flesh - that he
doesn't eat it, because it's too salty. Better still, ask oldtimers in a
certain part of our country where, I believe, ritual cannibalism was
practised in the past.
I suppose most people eat to live, not live to eat ... hence consumption (in
the narrow, literal sense of eating) is for life, not the other way round.
If there is a way to live without eating any living thing, whether plant or
animal, I am sure many of us will gladly do so. Meanwhile, let us carry on
joking or, even better, killing one another, over what we eat or do not eat.
From: "S.Shashidhar"
> life is ment for consumption, let us all eat meat and drink human blood, A
> cow is holy so it should be > spared but a poor goat can and will be
> eaten, there are a lucy few in the south who can eat cows.. Man > thi was
> one grose thread
