Musepaper

Day-long workshop on Shakespearean Cinema at SACAC

2012-01-20T23:03:00.001+05:30

Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts & Communication, Shaheed Jeet Singh Marg, Adhichini, New Delhi -110017, New Delhi, India

Saturday, 28 January 2012 By Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts & Communication

The one-day long workshop is designed to discuss Shakespearean films from a variety of perspectives to sensitize the participants regarding the various challenges involved in capturing the essence of Shakespeare’s drama through the medium of cinema.

Films by directors such as Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, Akira Kurosawa, Roman Polanski, Vishal Bhardwaj and others will be discussed in the day-long workshop.The opening session, which will explore cinematography, design, dialogue and performance, will be followed by a full-length screening of a path-breaking Shakespearean film to understand how one can read the film from multiple perspectives.

Download registration form from

http://www.scribd.com/doc/78298785/See-It-Feelingly-registration-Form

or call +91-11-26561986/ 99537 55245 - Workshop Fee: Rs. 250/-

Dr. Rahul Sapra, an Associate Professor of Shakespearean drama and films at Ryerson University, Toronto has taught courses on Shakespearean performances and presented papers on Shakespearean cinema at several international conferences. He also conducted a joint workshop on Shakespearean acting at St. Stephen’s college in 2007.

He was one of the invited speakers for the Shakespeare Association of India’s annual conference in 2011, where he presented a paper on the influence of Hollywood cinema on Indian film adaptations of Shakespearean Drama. His recent book, The Limits of Orientalism: Seventeenth-Century Representations of India which deals with the narratives of the East India Company, was praised by the eminent scholar Francis Robinson in The Times Literary Supplement. Dr. Sapra is also on the Editorial Board of the Film Section of Routledge’s digital Encyclopedia on Modernism (Forthcoming).

Boita Bandana Utsav at India Gate & Dilli Haat

2011-11-11T08:38:00.001+05:30

November 10, 2011

Savitri may be regarded as a sacred text, a contemporary Veda

2011-08-24T20:12:00.000+05:30

Home > E-Library > Magazines > Sraddha > February 2011 > Contents

On Savitri— A talk to a Young Disciple Mother 7

Savitri Sri Krishnaprem 11

To Savitri, the Wonderful Epic Ranajit Sarkar 14

Savitri : The Song of the Infinite Alok Pandey 17

Veda Vyasa’s Mahabharata in Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri Prema Nandakumar 39

Aswapati’s Yoga Srimat Anirvan 47

Love and Death Debashish Banerjee 53

Savitri—Book VI, Canto II: The Way of Fate and The Problem of Pain Makarand R. Paranjape 73

The Descent of Knowledge in Savitri Sonia Dyne 87

The Mother’s Savitri Translations Shraddhavan 105

Onward She Passed… Rejection As Described in Savitri Matthijs Cornelissen 118

An Analytical assessment of Death-Savitri Debate Usharanjan Chakraborty 131

Newness of Savitri: an Interpretation Asoka K Ganguli 139

Savitri – Book VI, Canto II: The Way of Fate and The Problem of Pain

Makarand R. Paranjape

Savitri, Sri Aurobindo’s magnum opus, a modern epic of nearly 24,000 lines, is akin to an ocean. It is difficult to fathom all at once, but every part of it shares its intrinsic nature. In that sense, where and how we plunge into it is of little consequence. We will glimpse its magnificence no matter what method we adopt. Provided, of course, we open ourselves to its magic. Though the whole of Savitri may be regarded as a sacred text, a contemporary Veda, it is a very long and complex composition. Therefore, we might actually single out some Cantos, perhaps half a dozen, which are so important that they encapsulate the whole structure, the whole methodology and also, if we might use that word, the whole “theology” of the epic. And this, Book VI, Canto II, is one of those crucial Cantos – “The Way of Fate and The problem of Pain.” What follows could be seen as a part of the age-old Indian tradition of commenting on major texts. Master texts had multiple commentaries over generations. Savitri is a poem that invites such treatment.

This Canto is important because it asks fundamental questions, the kind of questions, in fact, which all of us ask. Why do we suffer? Why is there so much pain in human life? Are we fated to suffer in this manner? Is there no cure, no solution? Because all of us have suffered at some point or the other as human beings, these questions go to the very heart of what it means to be embodied, what it means to be human. No doubt, many have also found great solace in this Canto, answers to these questions. As one person responded after this talk, “I went through an extremely difficult phase in my life. During that time, I must have read this Canto literally a hundred times. Each time I read it, it revealed something new about not just my problem but also about life.” Thus, not only does the Canto ask fundamental questions, it even answers them to the satisfaction of many readers and sadhaks.

Some 2500 years ago, the great Sakya Muni, Gautama Buddha, himself reflected on such questions, making them the bedrock of his teaching. He said there are four noble truths – cattari ariyasacca - ni in Pali or catvari arya satyani in Sanskrit. These are suffering, its cause, its elimination, and, finally, the way to this elimination. According to the Buddha, suffering is universal, its cause is craving; but it is also possible to end suffering, and suffering can be ended by the cessation of craving or tanha. This great teaching was offered in the very first sermon that the Buddha gave – Dharma chakra pravartana sermon – in Sarnath when he started preaching after becoming the Awakened One. Ultimately, the way to end suffering is to lead a right, or one might prefer to say, the righteous life. This is based on the eight-fold path – right view, right intention (prajña or wisdom), right speech, right action, right livelihood (´ila s or conduct), and right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration (samadhi or concentration). In a way, Sri Aurobindo also covers similar ground here, in this important Canto.

The Vadantic approach to suffering, in contrast, focuses not so much on the causes of the suffering but on the nature and identity of the sufferer. [1] The end of suffering is effected by the end of false indentification, which is the prelude to liberation or mukti. According to some schools, such liberation is available while being embodied, in which case it is called jivanmukti. For Sri Aurobindo, suffering becomes the aid, in fact the goad, to spiritual evolution. In a way, Sri Aurobindo also covers similar ground here, in this important Canto. We shall look at Sri Aurobindo’s approach in greater detail later.

In this first part of this exposition, let us look briefly at the action of the Canto. In the previous Canto, Narad, the heavenly singer, has descended into the marble halls of King Aswapati’s palace. Savitri, the Madra princess, the Divine Flame and Aswapati’s daughter, has just returned after finding her soul-mate in Satyavan. But Narad tells the shocked royal couple that if Savitri marries Satyavan, he will die in a year’s time. Having heard this dread sentence, Savitri instead of retracting, reaffirms her choice. This Canto records, to begin with, Queen Malawi’s, that is Savitri’s mother’s reaction to this shocking pronouncement. The queen, Sri Aurobindo tells us, is also a very evolved person, quite in control of her mind and sense, but when she hears this awful news she is disturbed. She loses her calm, her poise, her equanimity and plunges into a questioning which is somewhat angry. She is hurt, upset, and therefore asks, how and why is it that we who live on this earth, we enjoy some moments of joy, then we suffer, and we go through the same cycle again and again. Is this the law? If so, then why did God make this world? Why did he make us for this meaningless cycle of pain? Indeed, is something wrong with the creation itself, did all go wrong somewhere?

Narad then gives his reply at some length, which is a very important explanation about why it is so, why we suffer, and whether we are bound by law or Fate to this chain of causality. Again, we might briefly remember the Buddha when he saw those sights of suffering humanity which had been shielded from his eyes. He saw death, old age, sickness and things that his father, Prince Suddhodana, had wanted him never to see. The father wanted his son to be raised in the palace in happiness, shielded from all sorrow and suffering. But Gautama saw these things and realised that he was also going to grow old and die, that he would also know suffering and perhaps illness. That is why he determined to find the cause for suffering so that he could, once and for all, cure it and free all other sentient beings from it. What a noble resolve, how grand his ideal.

Onward She Passed… Rejection As Described in Savitri

Matthijs Cornelissen

One of the many marvellous things in Savitri is the completely uninterrupted progress in the sadhana of Aswapati and later of Savitri. Aswapati and Savitri always move on; they never stop; they never go back. Partly this may be due to the symbolic nature of the story. Aswapati and Savitri are, after all, at least to some extent typal figures. Their lives miss the many diluting and confusing side-plots that mar and delay our spiritual development. But this is only part of the explanation; there is also a more technical aspect to it. It appears to me that the secret of their quick progress rests in the perfect application of a specific yogic skill, the skill of rejection. Rejection is one of the three main skills or “inner gestures” that have to be used in Sadhana. The most powerful description of these three skills can be found in Sri Aurobindo’s collection of letters called The Mother.

Notes on Authors

( Beginning with this issue we shall include names of only those writers who have not figured previously in this section )

Asoka K Ganguli is a retired Reader of English, University of Delhi. His field of specialisation was the poetry of Milton and Walt Whitman and on the latter poet he was awarded Ph.D. in 1968. He taught English poetry to postgraduate students of the University of Agra for a decade and to students of the University of Delhi for almost three decades. A voracious reader of Sri Aurobindo’s poetry, specially Savitri since early fifties, his first publication Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri which was published by Sri Aurobindo Society in 2002 and his second book Sri Aurobindo: Poet of Nature and other writings on Savitri are the outcome of his labour and research in the field of Aurobindean literature.

Krishnaprem, Sri, known as Ronald Nixon in his early life, was a brilliant product of the University of Cambridge. In his early twenties he received an offer of appointment as a lecturer in English at the University of Lucknow and sailed for India, where he spent the rest of his life. One special contact was Dilip Kumar Roy, a musician par excellence, a great devotee of Lord Krishna and also a favourite disciple of Sri Aurobindo. Young Professor Nixon was a frequent guest in the house of the Vice-Chancellor, University of Lucknow where Nixon, on the insistence of Mrs. Chakravarty, the wife of the ViceChancellor, had taken up residence. As time passed, a close friendship grew up between the three of them— Nixon, Roy and Mrs. Chakravarty, a well-known and sophisticated socialite and a deeply devoted Krishna bhakta. Her relationship with Nixon developed into that of preceptor or guru, the latter being both a son and a disciple. It was at Uttar Vrindavana, that they established a beautiful ashram and a temple dedicated to Lord Krishna and Radha. Mrs. Chakravarty, now a full fledged sannyasini, adopted the name Yashoda Ma, and Ronald Nixon came to be known as Krishnaprem.

Through Dilip Sri Aurobindo developed a high regard for Krishnaprem, and always commended his views to Dilip. Krishnaprem gave the world two important books, ‘The Yoga of the Kathopanishad’ and ‘Yoga for the Westerner’. All of his writing displayed his impressive knowledge and grasp of highly spiritual and metaphysical subjects. He passed away in 1965. Ramana Maharshi commended Krishnaprem to his devotees with the words, ‘A wonderful blend of jñyani (knowledge) and bhakti (devotion) in one person.’

Makarand R Paranjape is a Professor of English at the Centre for English Studies,

School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, Jawaharlal University, New Delhi, 11067. A prolific writer, critic, poet and scholar his latest books include Altered Destinations: Self, Society and Nation in India and Another Canon: Indian Texts and Traditions in English.

Usharanjan Chakraborty (born 1931) did his MA in English, History and Philosophy and also PhD in Philosophy from Calcutta University. After serving in different colleges, he joined North Bengal University in 1982 and retired from there in 2000 as Reader in Philosophy. In addition to presenting papers at various seminars, his writings have appeared in several journals notably Calcutta University Philosophy Journal, The Advent, Mother India, World Union and Rtam

Each Shammi film was pure ambrosia

2011-08-20T07:23:00.000+05:30

Goodbye, Sir! MJ Akbar is the editor-in-chief of The Sunday Guardian.

Forty years later it is easy to be dismissive about that yell which rose from the belly, filled the throat and then knocked your head off: Yaaaahoooo! For me, sitting in a bug-infested cinema hall called Swapna, that cry from Junglee was a roar of liberation from the silly boredom of convention. Suddenly, lovers did not weep, as Dilip Kumar did by the bucketful; or go perpendicular with patriotism, as Raj Kapoor considered necessary; or adopt a stomach-ache face, which was Rajendra Kumar's speciality. Shammi Kapoor told us, when I was all of ten and had just been sentenced to boarding school, to go find our own voice, even if that turned into the occasional scream. Be brilliant, if you could; be a fool, if you had to; but be authentic in either case. There was fun to be had in both avatars.

The importance of not being earnest - The Times of India Srijana Mitra Das Aug 17, 2011, 12.00AM IST

Shammi's elder brother, Raj Kapoor, was typically the angst-ridden wanderer, an awara with a hard-luck story and blue-eyed charm, ill treated, then redeemed by the Nehruvian state. Dev Anand brought a happier face to the Nehruvian persona, playing fleet-footed characters knee-deep in mystery, modernity and mischief.

Eschewing modernity, Rajendra Kumar was an old-fashioned 'tragedy king' drawn from bards' tales and folklore, whose films framed three hours of perfect sorrow, expressed in shrieking shehnais, teary eyes and tragic accidents twisting lives out of shape. Dilip Kumar was a silken-voiced thespian around whose heavy talent epics had to be spun, extending from the splendour of Mughal India to the griminess of rural India, cowering before dacoits and moneylenders alike, finding respite in just a little jig by the waterfall.

Against this, Shammi's movies were an entirely new breeze blowing in from the four corners of the world. They carried to India the sexiness of Hollywood, the pulsations of pop, the verve of Italian fashion, the poutiness of French love-making. Dhotis, kurtas, guns and speeches went out of the window. Shammi shook the rafters with his gags and stormed the dance floor, sax in his mouth, babe by his side, shimmying and shaking before sophisticates in a nightclub seated at tables glimmering with cocktails. … Despite the rock and roll, there was little question of shaking the established order – Shammi's films only lightly, smilingly, suggested how much fun it would be if everyone chilled out a little.

In this frame, serious politics took a decided backseat. Despite embracing international culture in the form of Elvis, sunglasses, trousers and travel, Shammi kept his films free of overt politics, whether that of modernity or tradition. He personified the quirkiest combination of the 'swinging sixties' in India – the joyful energy of youth without its intense debates or demonstrations. …

In his own manner, thus, Shammi too was political. He took differences of class and creed in his hands and crumpled them up into a paper ball, making light of such pettiness under the clear skies of modern India. With a jazzy step and a smile on his face, he threw the ball high up in the air, to where few could see it anymore – and all with a great yahoo. Shammi taught a delighted nation that it was possible to be political without anger or angst. It was possible to not be earnest – and still be deadly serious. It was possible to say it with a song, not a speech. Few others made that point quite as wonderfully.

The Pioneer :: Home : >> He told an entire generation Cry Freedom ... Monday, August 15, 2011 Chandan Mitra

Shammi Kapoor celebrated entertainment. His films steered clear of social messages, forte of his elder brother Raj. Shammi Kapoor sang and danced into the hearts of a new generation of Indians straining at the leash to break away from the overdose of moralistic hype in the immediate aftermath of Gandhian puritanism and Nehruvian socialism.

To the generation stepping out of their teens in the mid-60s, each Shammi film was pure ambrosia. They transported you to a perfect world of make-believe where boy chased girl with gusto, bordering on behaviour that would today bring the Crime Against Women cell scurrying to the spot. The girl, needless to add, would eventually succumb to his irreverent, lusty courting and a long spell of bliss interspersed with half-a-dozen melodious songs would follow. Then the villain would appear, convince the girl’s stentorian father that his daughter’s lover was a wayward, good-for-nothing waster. Much drama would happen till the obstacles evaporated in the face of truth. Boy and girl would live happily ever after. Shammi Kapoor’s films became the epitome of this so-called formula. Almost every film had the same story line, give or take the occasional unexpected twist or turn. …

Again, Shammi wouldn’t be Shammi without Mohammad Rafi, who was literally his voice. From the soulful Ehsan tera hoga mujhpar (Junglee) to the erotic Dilruba dil pe tu (Raj Kumar), lilting Jawaniyan ye mast mast bin piye (Tumsa Nahin Dekha) and the sheer abandon of Taarif karoon kya uski (Kashmir ki Kali) melancholy Yeh duniya usi ki zamana uki ka and the romantic Deewana hua badal from the same film, it was Rafi who modulated his voice and style to match Shammi’s every mood.

Hindi cinema has come a long way since Shammi eased himself out, playing occasional character roles, the most memorable being in Manoranjan. The formula has run its course and rise of the multiplex has altered cultural preferences significantly. Maybe a surging India doesn’t need to escape drudgery any more. But in the era that produced Shammi Kapoor, India needed him as a soothing balm, someone who comforted you while egging on to assert and stake claim as a young man who had aspirations to go beyond the straitjacket that Indira Gandhi’s socialist society kept ready for you. The generation that woke up to the freedom of ear-shattering Yahoo! will always remember him as one of the shapers of modern India.

Antonin Artaud & Pierre Klossowski

2011-08-18T21:15:00.000+05:30

Antonin Artaud Criticism 1896-1948

(Full name Antoine-Marie-Joseph Artaud; also wrote under the pseudonym Le Révélé) French essayist, dramatist, poet, novelist, screenwriter, and actor.

INTRODUCTION

Poet and theorist of revolutionary theater, avant-garde novelist and surrealist screenwriter, actor, drug addict, and madman, Antonin Artaud is famous for the influence he exerted through his writings and performances—especially after death—on the way writers, directors, actors, and communal theater companies conceive of theater, its production, and its function. Progenitor of a form of theater whose aim is to unsettle and radically transform its audience and its culture, such as happenings, theater of the absurd, or experimental theater, Artaud called for an end to a drama of rationality, masterpieces, and psychological exploration. Artaud advocated a “theatre of cruelty”—a probing, goading, and provocative theater drawing on Symbolist sensory derangement, psychoanalytic theory, and the Balinese theater. Such a theater, according to Artaud, should employ expressive breathing, animal sounds, uninhibited gestures, huge masks, puppets, and an architecture that destroys the barrier between actors and audience in order to turn spectators into participants, and bring them to a level of visceral experience Artaud deemed more profound than any experience accessible through passive understanding or absorption of language, plot, or coherently structured action. Artaud's aim was to unblock repression and to purge violence, hypocrisy, and the malaise he saw as endemic to society. …

Major Works

Les Cenci, Artaud's play about a man who rapes his own daughter and is then murdered by men the girl hires to eliminate him, typifies Artaud's theater of cruelty. Les Cenci was produced in Paris in 1935 but was closed after seventeen dismal performances. Another illustration of Artaud's work is Le jet de sang or The Fountain of Blood (1925), a farce about the creation of the world and its destruction by humans, especially women. Like many of Artaud's other plays, scenarios, and prose, Les Cenci and The Fountain of Blood were designed to challenge conventional, civilized values and bring out the natural, barbaric instincts Artaud felt lurked beneath the refined, human facade. Of The Fountain of Blood, Albert Bermel wrote in Artaud's Theater of Cruelty: “All in all,The Fountain of Blood is a tragic, repulsive, impassioned farce, a marvelous wellspring for speculation, and a unique contribution to the history of the drama.” More than for any particular work, Artaud is remembered more for his tormented life, for having turned himself inside out in the attempt to discover a way to transform theater and society, and for the concepts he developed for effectuating transformation. Le Théâtre de la cruauté (1933) and Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theater and Its Double)—Artaud's most famous works—along with the novel Héliogabale (1934; Heliogabalus) and his blasphemous play Le jet de sang, rather than having an independent artistic existence, stand as manifestos and vehicles for approaching, if not achieving, the transformations Artaud proclaimed. According to author Susan Sontag: “Not until the great outburst of writing in the period between 1945 and 1948 … did Artaud, by then indifferent to the idea of poetry as a closed lyric statement, find a long-breathed voice that was adequate to the range of his imaginative needs—a voice that was free of established forms and open-ended, like the poetry of [Ezra] Pound.”

Critical Reception

In Antonin Artaud: Man of Vision, Bettina Knapp offered an explanation of Artaud's popularity long after his death: “In his time, he was a man alienated from his society, divided within himself, a victim of inner and outer forces beyond his control. … The tidal force of his imagination and the urgency of his therapeutic quest were disregarded and cast aside as the ravings of a madman. … Modern man can respond to Artaud now because they share so many psychological similarities and affinities.” Artaud's individual works, throughout his lifetime, were often received badly. However, the body of his work—seen as a call for the creation of a new theater—and his life—seen as the forge upon which his theories were fashioned—gained in the latter part of the twentieth century a numinous force, and a celebrated following.

Pierre Klossowski - Obituaries, News - The Independent Tuesday, 14 August 2001 – Ian James

The novelist, essayist, painter and translator Pierre Klossowski was one of the most original and influential intellectual figures in 20th-century French thought and writing. Brother of the painter Balthus and a close associate of Georges Bataille, Klossowski wrote novels, philosophical essays and translations which made a decisive contribution to the development of thought and aesthetics in France from the 1950s onwards. …

As a translator and interpreter of Friedrich Nietzsche, Klossowski also had an enormous impact on the emergence of philosophies of difference in France in the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, his readings of the Nietzschean doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, and the emphasis he gave to the motifs of parody and simulacrum, exerted a key influence on philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard and, arguably, Jacques Derrida.

In a French philosophical scene dominated largely by phenomenology in the 1930s and by Sartrian existentialism in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, Klossowski's writings on Nietzsche helped to found a way of thinking which allowed certain, subsequently very famous, philosophers to counter the humanised Heideggerianism of Sartre, and also to challenge dominant structuralist modes of thought. It is from these philosophical displacements and critical re-inscriptions that what, in the English speaking world, became known as post-structuralism emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.

Klossowski's novels constitute by far the most challenging and enigmatic part of his work. Partly because of their difficulty and apparent inaccessibility (they abound with references to theology, scholastic philosophy, as well as Gnostic heresy, and are written in a highly Latinate style and syntax), these novels are perhaps less well known than Klossowski's other work, although they have always attracted something of a cult following and offer endless literary and intellectual pleasure to the initiated reader. Le Baphomet, Klossowski's last novel, won the 1965 Prix des Critiques.

P. Valsala & Manoj Das

2011-08-17T16:56:00.000+05:30

The Pioneer :: Home : >> Manoj Das now on website Wednesday, August 17, 2011 PNS Bhubaneswar - A website of eminent storyteller Manoj Das has been launched, www.worldofmanojdas.in

Blessed by Sri Aurobindo, Prof Das has been effortlessly and spontaneously writing beautiful pieces which have been unique among present generation of writers.

With 40 plus books in English and an equal number of books in Odia to his credit, he is a recipient of a number of awards, including Padma Shri, Saraswati Samman, Uktal Sahitya Samaj, Sarala Puraskar and Utkal Ratna and DLitt from various universities.

Born in Balasore district in 1934, Prof Das has been inspiring his fellow writers over decades. He is the country's foremost bi-lingual writer with a lucid and crisp style.
He is acknowledged as one of the ablest interpreters of the Indian literary and cultural heritage. The writer teaches English literature as well as works on Sri Aurobindo at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education at Puducherry.

The Hindu : NATIONAL / KERALA : Aurobindo's poetry unmatched, says Valsala: SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

Novelist and the former president of Kerala Sahithya Academy P. Valsala said that Keralites must study the poetry of Sri Aurobindo which “was unmatched in sublimity of thought.” She was speaking after releasing “Concept of Man in Sri Aurobindo's Poetry” authored by Jitendra Sharma on Saturday.

On ‘Savitri'

Though Malayalam poets had been prolific, there was nothing in Malayalam poetry that could measure up to the greatness of ‘Savithri,' Sri Aurobindo's epic poem, she said. The novelist added that Sri Aurobindo's poetry was comparable to the best in English literature.

In Malayalam

Ms. Valsala said she was so moved by the spirituality in Sri Aurobindo's poems, reproduced in Mr. Sharma's book, that she translated a few of them into Malayalam so that these could be read by lovers of Malayalam poetry also. These poems were read out at the function by the novelist. She added that she would be translating more poems by Sri Aurobindo into Malayalam soon.

She presented a copy of the book to Venu Maruthayi, writer and retired Hindi teacher.

Mr. Sharma, who teaches French at St. Joseph's College, Devagiri, and did his undergraduate studies at Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education Centre, Puducherry, also spoke at the function held at Kozhikode Press Club.

Sports is a serious tool for holistic development | SpeakingTree Sports can create a stronger and more energetic nation

In the words of Sri Aurobindo, sports and games are very effective ways to develop valuable qualities like courage, capacity to take initiatives and rapid ...

Today’s children hardly have any time to play. They and their parents are fully convinced that this is wastage of time. Their teachers are no different. That is why they don’t encourage students to play. The teachers are .. More By: Nirjhar Majumdar on Aug 16, 2011 | 0 Likes | 1 Response About the Author The author is a Research Associate of a reputed PSU. He has penned numerous articles on management, strategies and insurance. He is currently posted at Kolkata. He is a long time devotee of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry

Sri Aurobindo believes that man's suffering and death have a purpose

2011-07-11T19:25:00.000+05:30

CONCEPT OF MAN IN SRI AUROBINDO'S POETRY

Jitendra Sharma

Sri Aurobindo considered himself firstly to be a poet. His profound and spiritual outpourings of poetic inspiration chart a new course for Man, heralding the emergence of a new species of Superman. His verses describe beautifully, with an aroma of the spirituality of India, the appearance of Man on earth and the stages of evolution. He believes that man's travails, sufferings and death have a purpose in the scheme of evolution of human consciousness. Man is a transitional being constantly driven by an impulse to exceed himself and evolve towards divine consciousness, harmony and joy.

Sri Aurobindo, the most radical spiritual poet, points out rich potentialities of Man beyond normal imaginations. The poet prophetically describes the transcendence of man as the consummation of earthly evolution and the emergence of a supramental race on earth. In this illuminating doctoral thesis, the author brings out Sri Aurobindo's concept of Man in his poetry.

Dr. Jitendra Sharma graduated from the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry. As a student, he had the privilege of corresponding regularly with the Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram. He obtained the Master's Degree in French from Karnatak University Dharwar and had M.Phil. in French from the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad. For one year, he studied in the Stendhal University of Grenoble in France. He has contributed numerous articles to various journals and participated in more than 80 national/international Seminars, Workshops and Conferences. He heads the Department of French at St. Joseph's College, Devagiri, Calicut (Kerala) where he tries to implement Sri Aurobindo's education methodology in his teaching profession.

Old Odia song selection

2011-06-17T20:58:00.000+05:30

old oriya classic

abhimanini ye!!s

akashara buku chiri!!s

hrudayara ei sunyataku

toro uri uri jaye

mun_paradeshi_chadhei

mana_mora_aeka

aeje_banalata_pahada

kahana_a_phoola_kahana

emiti rati eje abhula_01

Nidabhara Raati Madhujhara Jahna

Saathire Ei Baula Abhula Sathi

E Duniaa Bukure Banchibaku Hele

Nijhum Raati Ra saathi

Chandrama Eka Chandana Bindu

Ei tara bhara jahna rati

Pari Tie

Dharitri (Odia Movie: 1973)

2011-06-11T13:10:00.000+05:30

Dharitri (Odia Movie: 1973)

Director: Nitai Palit

Cast: Sharad Pujari, Shriram Panda, Prashanta Nanda, Dhir Biswal, Sandhya Acharya, Bhanumati Devi

Voice: Tusar N. Mohapatra

2011-05-28T09:55:00.000+05:30

Kie Dakere - Odia Movie Song (Jeeban Sathi 1963)

229 views

Eka Eka Mane Mane - Odia Movie Song (Ghara Bahuda 1973)

139 views

Aakhi Bhula E Suaga - Odia Movie Song (Manika Jodi 1963)

110 views

Khili Khili Nali (Odisha Smiles)

55 views (Folk number)

Tume Jana Na - Odia Movie Song (Kaa 1966)

2 views

Old Odia movie brochure-covers

2011-05-26T16:37:00.000+05:30

http://petlinks.blogspot.com/2005/07/old-oriya-film-songs-odia-katha-chitra.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Oriya_films
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriya_Movie

[The first Odia talkie Sita Bibaha was made by Mohan Sunder Deb Goswami in 1936. Drawn from the great Indian epic Ramayana, the story tells about the marriage of Sita with Ram. The actual plot was made from a drama written by Kamala Mishra. Prepared with a purse of only Rs 30,000, the film has 14 song sequences.]
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ghara Bahuda (Odia Movie: 1973)

2011-04-22T15:20:00.005+05:30

Ghara Bahuda (Odia Movie: 1973)

Director: Sona Mukherjee

Music Director: Akshaya Mohanty

Cast: Sujit, Sujata, Niranjan

Eka Eka Mane Mane

Singer: Nirmala Mishra

Lyricist: Narasingha Mohapatra

Manika Jodi (Odia Movie: 1963)

2011-04-17T16:51:00.002+05:30

Manika Jodi (Odia Movie: 1963)

Director: Prabhat Mukherjee
Music Director: Balakrishna Das
Cast: Babi, Jatin Das, Ananta, Akshaya, Pratihari, Tima, Dhira, Sukhalata, Leela, Gitarani

Aakhi Bhula E Suaaga Au Kaha Kahinki

Singer(s): Sikandar Alam & Sipra Bose

Lyricist: Narayan Prasad Singh

http://themusepaper.blogspot.com/2006/12/top-ten-oriya-songs.html

http://petlinks.blogspot.com/2005/07/old-oriya-film-songs-odia-katha-chitra.html

Jeeban Sathi (Odia Movie: 1963)

2011-04-17T02:06:00.006+05:30

Jeeban Sathi (Odia Movie: 1963)

Director: Prabhat Mukherjee

Music Director: Balakrishna Das
Cast: Geetanjali, Meenati, Sarat Pujari, Sahu Samuel, Srinibasa

http://themusepaper.blogspot.com/2006/12/top-ten-oriya-songs.html

http://petlinks.blogspot.com/2005/07/old-oriya-film-songs-odia-katha-chitra.htm

75 Years of Odia Cinema

2011-04-17T00:32:00.001+05:30

Directorate of Film Festivals and

Institute for Promotion and Research on Odisha Culture and Heritage present Odia Film Festival 2011 celebrating 75 years of Odia Cinema.
Special Attraction : Odia Cuisines, Handicrafts and Handlooms by Utkalika and Boyanika

Schedule (All Odia films carry English Subtitles)

16th April
12 noon : Jatra Jeevan Jeevan Yatra (Dir: Kapilas Bhuyan/50/Col) (Documentary)
1:30 pm : Klanta Aparahna (Dir: Manmohan Mahapatra/93/Col)
4:00 pm : Dhare Alua (Dir: Saghir Ahmed/140/Col)
7:15 pm : Indradhanura Chhai (Dir: Susant Misra/10/Col)

17th April
12 noon : Nilamadhab (Dir:Dilip Patnaik/53/Col) (Documentary)
1:30pm : Dhauli Express (Dir: Chittaranjan Tripathy/160/Col)
4:00 pm : Jianta Bhuta (Dir: Prashant Nanda/130 / Col)
7:30 pm : Adi Mimansa (Dir: A.K. Bir/130/Col)
...and many more interesting films.

http://themusepaper.blogspot.com/2006/12/top-ten-oriya-songs.html

http://petlinks.blogspot.com/2005/07/old-oriya-film-songs-odia-katha-chitra.html

Learning arts of adult life from novels

2011-02-15T14:39:00.000+05:30

Talk with Chandrahas Choudhury: The Indian novelist and literary critic Chandrahas Choudhury will give a one-hour talk on the subject ‘Ten Ways To Change Your Life By Reading Novels’ on Saturday, the 19th of February, at 5pm at the Alliance Francaise, Lodhi Road.

In an age of self-help literature or the literature of ‘fact and analysis’, novels are sometimes thought of as dispensable books, to be read either to pass the time or perhaps to learn something about a country or a culture.

But what novels can most powerfully do for you, far more than any other kind of literature, is open up your own sense of yourself. More than any other form of writing, novels offer a vivid and complex education in all the arts of adult life, offering us ways to understand the range and depth of human choice, the possibilities and limitations Talk Ten Ways You Can Change Your Life By Reading Novels of various individual and communal ways of living, and the importance of the private and the sexual life of individuals to the health of society.

Novels teach us to respect language, showing us how better language leads to better thought. They allow us to develop a more complex understanding of time, by showing us the ways in which memory works in human beings, and how our decisions are always contingent on particular constellations of circumstances.

They demonstrate to us how doubt is just as useful a human virtue as certainty, and that the good life must respect both rationality and strong emotion. And by never offering any explicit advice, they in fact offer the best kind of help – the confidence that trusts the reader, as an adult, to make up his or her mind after considering all the evidence. The wisdom of the novel is not the wisdom of answers, but that of questions.

Choudhury will make his points with concrete examples from novels by a wide range of writers, including Orhan Pamuk, Irene Nemirovsky, Vikram Chandra, and Kazuo Ishiguro. For more information, please call us at 11 43 500 222 / 218 or send an email at culture@afdelhi.org.

Smith, Nietzsche, Shaw, Wells, Wilde, Orwell, Lucas, & Sri Aurobindo

2010-11-02T10:28:00.001+05:30

Art, Faith, and The Koko Lion: Tales: Backtrack to Aurobindo on ... By rjk MONDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2010

Backtracking a little bit to the earlier posts concerning meditation, I came across these quotes from the Super-Guru, Sri Aurobindo. Have you ever heard of him? This Aurobindo Wiki entry is a good introduction, but needless to say, he seemed to know just about everything about everything, and wrote prolifically about it with such amazing acuity, insight, wisdom, and supreme knowledge, that one wonders whether one might possibly overcome his propensity for sentences that run-on in the extreme, in a prosaic style which could only be described as dated, beyond what any reasonable reader may be willing to continue concentrating upon, or even caring about, so that one (in this case the aforementioned reader) might eventually have to give up to the simple fact, arising from the intricate convolutions of his grammatical style and intensely profound and esoteric subject matter, that one has forgotten what he (being The Super-Guru Aurobindo) was talking about in the first place.

But bear with him and you'll find he really knew everything about everything. It's best to tackle his small, edited collections first, like: The Future Evolution of Man, and Bases of Yoga. What was I talking about again? Oh yes- Aurobindo"s observations on meditation...Dig how concise and amazing these bits from Bases of Yoga:[…]

He continues on (and on) in the generous and helpful manner that was his trademark. His teachings on the spiritual evolution of humankind are truly profound and essential. As you see from the above quote, he may very well have influenced George Lucas, and definitely others including Ram Dass, Sri Chinmoy, and Michael Murphy, founder of the Esalen Institute, and author of Golf in the Kingdom. POSTED BY RJK AT 12:40 PM

H.G. Wells and Adam Smith. [This article is chapter 6 of Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture.] Mises Daily: Friday, September 17, 2010 by Paul A. Cantor

[3] It is surprising how few critics have explored the economic dimension of The Invisible Man. The only one I have been able to find is Roslynn D. Haynes, who, in her H.G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future: The Influence of Science on His Thought (London: Macmillan, 1980), makes a passing comment on Griffin's "bourgeois mania for financial gain" (p. 203).

[4] The phrase "invisible hand" actually occurs four times in Wells's narrative (see pp. 76, 84, 85, and 90). Given the situation Wells was dealing with, this may have been inevitable, but it might be a covert reference to what is after all Adam Smith's most famous phrase. That Wells was familiar with Smith is evident from the fact that he mentions him in his A Modern Utopia (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1905), p. 85. The only critic I have found who mentions Smith in connection with The Invisible Man is Frank McConnell, The Science Fiction of H.G. Wells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 114, but he is simply making a general point about the nineteenth-century novel "as capitalist fable." A precedent for using invisibility to symbolize the power of capitalism can be found in Richard Wagner's opera Das Rheingold. There the villain Alberich uses the magic of the Tarn-helm to make himself invisible and tyrannize over his fellow dwarves in Nibelheim, forcing them to amass treasure for him. Alberich thus becomes a symbol of the capitalist boss enslaving and exploiting the working class. That this interpretation of Wagner was circulating in Wells's England is evident from George Bernard Shaw's The Perfect Wagnerite, first published in 1898. [...]

[80] See Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, Life, Illustration 12 (discussed on p. 63), for a remarkable cartoon Wells drew when he was twenty of himself "meditating on his future," which includes placards proclaiming: "How I Could Save The Nation" and "Wells's Design for a New Framework for Society."

[81] I analyze these developments in the specific case of Oscar Wilde in "Man of Soul," pp. 74–93. For the connection between Wilde and Wells, see McConnell, Science Fiction, pp. 42–43.

[82] See Haynes, Wells, p. 83. That is why Wells defines his samurai in A Modern Utopia as an order of "voluntary noblemen" (p. 121). Wells stresses the openness of his aristocratic order, and yet eventually he comes around to admitting that the samurai will become "something of a hereditary class" (p. 299). This is just one more sign that Wells's socialism would take us out of capitalism only to return us to medieval conditions.

[83] On Nietzsche and Wells, see Sutherland's "Introduction" in Luke, ed., Invisible Man, p. xxv, Carey, Intellectuals, p. 140, Bergonzi, Wells, pp. 9–12, 153, Vallentin, Wells, p. 124, John Reed, The Natural History of H.G. Wells (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982), pp. 238–39, and John Batchelor, H.G. Wells (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 5. In In the Days of the Comet, Wells's narrator, who in many respects is an autobiographical figure, proclaims: "I'm a disciple of Nietzsche" (Seven Science Fiction Novels of H.G. Wells [New York: Dover, 1934], p. 909; bk. I, chap. 4, sec. 4).

[84] Wells's attraction to supermen as leaders of the common herd often gives a fascist cast to his socialism. Although Wells opposed National Socialism as it developed in Germany, the liberal socialist George Orwell detected affinities between Wells's vision of the perfect state and Hitler's: "Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there." See "Wells, Hitler and the World State" in George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), vol. 2, p. 143.

What is Unseen from Cafe Hayek by Don Boudreaux

Each American, as both consumer and producer, is connected to hundreds of millions of other persons across the nation and the globe in a web of commercial relationships so vast, intricate, and nuanced that it is impossible to trace out and quantify in detail how changes in one part of this web affect other parts of the web.

Moreover, changes within this global web of commercial relationships are incessant, with changes in consumers’ demands for imports being simply one among a gazillion changes that occur each year. […]

It bears repeating again and again: there is nothing economically special about international trade as compared to intranational trade – save, of course, for the sorry fact that politicians and rent-seeking producers find it easy to demagogue for their own greedy, narrow purposes.

Agonda & Malta

2010-09-12T21:57:00.000+05:30

a small taste of Malta from Object-Oriented Philosophy - Sep 10, 2010

The built-in MacBook camera simply isn’t very good, and for various reasons I’m not in the habit of traveling with a real camera. However, this will at least get you in the ballpark of what the view from this room looks like. The sea is a lot more beautiful than that right now, however. It’s sparkling with different shades of green and blue at vari...

waves from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman)

The waves were really crashing tonight, at least in a few places. Malta is better when it’s like that.

Agonda - or Why I Stress ROADS from ANTIDOTE by Sauvik

There are many lovely beaches in South Goa - and Agonda is one of them. This evening, we drove there. Truly a beautiful place, with green hills bordering both sides. … However, today, we did not walk along the beach as we have always done. We ended up walking along an internal road, parallel to the beach - a road on which there were at least a hundred homes, just metres from the beach, a beach that tourists really enjoy staying on. The road was tarred for just a 200 yards or so, and for the rest, a couple of kilometres, it did not exist!

It took about half-an-hour to cover the entire length of the non-road - and it ended at a narrow bridge about 10 yards long. On the other side was the "main road." But the bridge was too narrow for cars - only scooters and motorcycles could cross. All along, I saw signs of POVERTY - so rare in Goa.

Now, think of what happens to the prices of Property right upon a beautiful beach if there is no road. Obviously, these prices would shoot if a road was built - and a new bridge installed. Within no time, poverty would vanish. This is, in reality, PRIME REAL ESTATE! [Antidote: For Liberal Governance Sauvik Chakraverti (Hardcover - Jan 2003)]

Harmony of Virtue & Rose of God

2010-08-20T11:51:00.000+05:30

Volume 1	PDF last updated: 15 Aug 09 Early Cultural Writings Early essays and other prose writings on literature, education, art and other cultural subjects. The volume includes The Harmony of Virtue, Bankim Chandra Chat terji, essays on Kalidasa and the Mahabharata, The National Value of Art, Conversations of the Dead, the "Chandernagore Manuscript", book reviews, "Epistles from Abroad", Bankim – Tilak – Dayananda, and Baroda speeches and reports. Most of these pieces were written between 1890 and 1910, a few between 1910 and 1920. (Much of this material was formerly published under the title The Harmony of Virtue.)	2.79MB
Volume 2	PDF last updated: 15 Aug 09 Collected Poems All short poems and narrative poems in English. This volume consists of sonnets, lyrical poems, narrative poems, and metrical experiments in various forms. All such poems pub lished by Sri Aurobindo during his lifetime are included here, as well as poems found among his manuscripts after his passing. Sri Aurobindo worked on these poems over the course of seven decades. The first one was published in 1883 when he was ten; a number of poems were written or revised more than sixty years later, in the late 1940s.	1.93MB
Volumes 3-4	PDF last updated: 15 Aug 09 Collected Plays and Stories — I–II All original dramatic works and works of prose fiction. Volume 1: The Viziers of Bassora, Rodogune, and Perseus the Deliverer. Volume II: Eric and Vasavadutta; seven incomplete or fragmentary plays; and six stories, two of them complete.	1.94MB
Volume 5	PDF last updated: 15 Aug 09 Translations All translations from Sanskrit, Bengali, Tamil, Greek and Latin into English, with the exception of translations of Vedic and Upanishadic literature. The volume includes translations from Sanskrit of parts of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and works of Kalidasa and Bhartri hari; translations from Bengali of Vaishnava devotional poetry and works of Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Chittaranjan Das and others; translations from Tamil of poems of Andal, Nammalwar, Kulesekhara Alwar and Tiruvalluvar; and translations from Greek and Latin. Sri Aurobindo made most of these translations while living in Baroda and Bengal; some were done later in Pondicherry.	1.59MB

Sri Aurobindo’s critical ideas come from Matthew Arnold, Keats and Coleridge

2010-08-06T18:51:00.000+05:30

Sri Aurobindo and the Indian Critical Tradition
Vivek Kumar Dwivedi

Professor of English, University of Allahabad, India

IRWLE VOL. 6 No. II, July 2010

Matthew Arnold is one of those rare English critics whose humanistic and cultural ideas have scarcely been surpassed. Fortunately, he has not been ignored by critics and theorists coming

after him. In the age of Derrida, Foucault and Lacan it may seem unfashionable and unnecessary to pay attention to such early critical ideas as Arnold’s, but it was the views represented by critics like Arnold along with Coleridge, Keats and Eliot that the post-structuralists largely stood against. The Western philosophical tradition that grew out of Rousseau, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, etc. and from which the English critical tradition emerged and to which it must have contributed, however indirectly, must be connected with or opposed to the humanistic strain of thought that Arnold upheld.

For Matthew Arnold the future of poetry was immense (Arnold 11) because it based everything on ideas rather than on facts (which are the bases of science). Hence poetry had a tremendous future for Arnold and would even serve as a substitute for religion (Arnold 11). In Sri Aurobindo’s criticism there is reference to “The Future Poetry” which is the title of his treatise on poetic theory. The bringing together of poetry and the future seems to be something Aurobindo learnt from Arnold. “Future” and “Poetry” are words that Arnold puts into the very first sentence of his essay, “The Study of Poetry”, quoting from his own earlier writing:

The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, nor a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry (Arnold 11).

Sri Aurobindo’s critical ideas come not only from Matthew Arnold, to whom he owes much, but also from the British Romantics. He imbibed literary ideas from the British literary world, of the nineteenth and earlier centuries, to complement and complete his own theory of poetry and then gave back to it what he considered necessary to complement and complete the knowledge of the West.

A very significant feature of Sri Aurobindo’s criticism is that in it there is the co-existence of a spiritual and romantic strain. The influence of Matthew Arnold on Sri Aurobindo is obvious. But this influence can be traced back to writings of earlier romantic poet-critics like Keats and Coleridge. For Sri Aurobindo “beauty” and “truth” are criteria with great relevance. To scholars of our times, such criteria are somewhat vague.

But for Sri Aurobindo these are valid criteria deserving our serious attention. Coleridge-like, Sri Aurobindo also speaks about the relevance of the imagination in the creative process. He speaks with a sense of authority as though what he says is the final truth. This could be a result of his study of Sanskrit poetics and otherwise spiritual concerns which often grapple with a sense of right and wrong and sometimes deal in absolutes.

Sri Aurobindo seems to have taken certain literary concepts from Coleridge. The passage that follows contains echoes from Coleridge: [...] It could be a concern of the post-colonial critic today to investigate reasons for why the Western critic becomes well known and the Indian, who anticipates him, less known. It cannot be denied that Sri Aurobindo’s contribution to literary criticism was phenomenal and needs greater attention. One of the few Indians who worked hard in this direction is C. D. Narasimhaiah.

Bankim was fond of female protagonists

2010-07-26T15:29:00.000+05:30

Bankimchandra Chatterji's Debi Chaudhurani, Hindu nationalism, and Hinduism in the Indian novel from The Middle Stage by Chandrahas

The political rise of Hindu nationalism over the last three decades has generated many persuasive ideologues, but the movement does not, in English at any rate, have a house novelist, someone to turn ideas and abstractions into characters and plots.

This is a shame. Firstly, it allows Indian novelists of a certain ideological disposition a free run of the land. The result is often a facile secularism, a kind of reflexive celebration of India’s diversity, that borrows its vocabulary and its tropes from well-worn ideas, and thus has no linguistic or narrative energy to call its own. Tellingly, when Hindu nationalists appear in such novels, they are condemned from first sight by the narrator as zealots, driven by anger, hate, and lust (Arya in Manil Suri’s The Age of Shiva, or the cartoonish Minister Prasad in Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay).

Secondly, it would appear that there is a want of serious engagement in the Indian novel in English not just with Hindu nationalism, but with the immense weight of Hinduism itself. Not only is Hindu nationalism artistically unfashionable (except as a convenient source of villainy and conflict), its absence points to a deeper failing that ironically might be seen as lending credence to the Hindu nationalists’ complaint about the falling away of Hinduism from the wellsprings of culture. Barring exceptions such as Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, Hinduism itself is rarely explored or interrogated in an extended way in modern Indian novels in English.

This suggests a narrative orientation in the Indian novel in English that is not just politically centrist or left-of-centre, but which engages with religion more at the level of observation and backdrop than of sympathetic immersion or experience. Hinduism’s massive repository of ideas, fables, images, exemplars, proverbs, aphorisms and narrative structures have left an impression on the Indian novel in English far smaller than the one that it exerts on public and private life in India. One might say that, while Hinduism should be part of the Indian novelist’s wealth, the challenges of realising a mainly Sanskritic worldview persuasively in English are such that it is usually treated as a tax.

This background makes all the more significant the appearance of an English translation of Debi Chaudhurani, a late work by the Bengali writer Bankimchandra Chatterji (1838-1894), India’s first major novelist. One of the earliest recruits of the Indian Civil Service established in the middle of the 19th century by the British, Bankim – so familiar a name in Indian letters, across linguistic traditions, that he is usually referred to by his first name – spent his working life as a deputy magistrate in the colonial administration. But, even though he represented the vanguard of a new class of anglicised Indians (going so far as to write his first novel, Rajmohan’s Wife, in a sonorous English), Bankim’s ear remained close to the ground.

His novels, particularly those of his late “nationalist” phase, are preoccupied with contemplating the future (and reprising and sometimes reimagining the past) of a predominantly Hindu Bengali society hobbled, from without, by the martial superiority first of Muslim rulers and then the British, and from within, by a stagnation of thought, social structure and gender roles. Debi Chaudhurani (1884), loosely based on the story of a real-life female bandit in 18th-century Bengal, offers the reader a deeply felt vision of “the Hindu way of life” – one that celebrates but also interrogates Hindu tradition. If one were to imagine contemporary Hindu nationalism as its best and most intellectually coherent (something it is mostly not), this might be the kind of reading of Hinduism it would offer.

Like many 19th-century realists (Hardy, Flaubert, Zola), Bankim was fond of female protagonists, the better to portray the constraints and inquities of the patriarchal society that was, as much as the individual, the subject of his enquiry. When we first see his heroine, a young woman called Prafulla, it is as the victim of the neglect of society and “the pinchings of poverty” (this is one of Bankim’s lovely phrases from his one and only English novel).

Hasan, Sliema, Marseille, Rishikesh

2010-07-11T19:51:00.001+05:30

On The Road, Again from ANTIDOTE by Sauvik

Hasan should be on the tourist map. It is the closest city to Halebid, Belur and Sravanabelagola. Nestled in the hills of the Western Ghats, "the weather here suits my clothes." I love the monsoon, anyway.

I took the Konkan Railway to Mangalore and then the bus to Hasan. The railway urgently needs competition from buses - for which a Coastal Expressway is a must. The seats were hard and horrible. The bus had excellent reclining seats but I couldn't sleep a wink because of the bumpy road. It was a government bus from a government bus station 10 kms from the rail station. The auto-rickshaw from the railway station to the bus station cost more than double the railfare. Guess our government hasn't heard too much about "multi-modal transport." It has been a tragedy that wee the sheeple handed all transport over to The State. Everything needs to be privatized.

The highway from Mangalore to Hasan is terrible. Our Tata bus groaned and moaned all the way, not possessing the power to take on the climb. The road was jam-packed with heavy vehicles and progress was excruciatingly slow. [Antidote: For Liberal Governance Sauvik Chakraverti - Jan 2003]

philosophy trips from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman)

Nietzsche thinks the value of places varies widely from person to person, but there is no longer any question that I myself need seaside, sea air, and long seaside walks to do my best thinking. (And I was cruelly deprived of these things well into adulthood– having grown up in Iowa, nearly as far from any sea as one can get.)

… I mentioned in January, that stretch of corniche west of the capital, running between Sliema and Paceville, though only a few miles long and heavily developed with quasi-suburban residential property, is about as intellectually stimulating a stretch of pavement as I have ever encountered. I think I had 15-20 good new ideas in 3 or 4 days there the last time. It’s almost hard to manage the flood of thoughts that can be generated by that sort of atmosphere.

The map below doesn’t quite explain what I’m talking about, but at least it sketches the physical geography well enough. If you find Sliema Point on this map, and go westward all the way to where it says Spinola Palace, that’s just about the most charming and captivating walk of several miles that can be imagined. Powerful ocean waves crash beneath you most of the time, but there’s still a comfortable domestic feel to the route: sublimity to your right, and a nice cup of coffee to your left whenever you need one.

Walter Benjamin & Travel as Collecting

Benjamin writes in Unpacking my Library, about the relationship between a collector and the things he or she collects, figuring that relationship as an extreme intimacy. This figuration extends into much of his other writing. His massive Arcades Project is in part an accounting that turns Paris into a collection, numbered, categorized, recorded and kept permanent. The same intimacy between a collector and his things characterizes Benjamin’s relationship to the places he visits and then describes. [...]

Conquest of one kind or another has forever been one human answer to the looming truths of impermanence. Collection, particularly as Benjamin figures collection, is a sort of small-scale conquest. If you collect shoes or books or records, you want to conquer shoes or books or records by having the most of them, by having enough of them (though, of course, there’s never such thing as enough). Benjamin’s pieces recounting Marseille or

Spain

or Naples have always seemed to me reminiscent of early American explorers’ journals, in which trees and birds and animals and everything else are written down in minute detail. JUNE 24, 2010, 9:14PM

The Shatabdi: A metaphor for the new middle class India Rama Bijapurkar, leader on market strategy, and consumer related issues ... Economic Times - March 30, 2009

Many of us have trouble picturing exactly who the members of the Great Indian urban middle class are. Though we talk about them all the time, it still is like pornography “know it when I see it but can’t exactly describe it”. When visiting western businessmen talk, with a gleam in their eye, of investing in

India

because of the growing middle class, one is a bit worried about what images they carry in their heads about this group. The trouble is that our consumer base is so variegated, that even field research, away from meeting rooms, provides every kind of anecdotal evidence, to confirm any kind of mental picture that anyone might have, on any count.

A recent trip from Delhi to Rishikesh on the Shatabdi was a “eureka” moment. The Shatabdi is definitely the perfect metaphor for the middle class. Santosh Desai of Future Brands wrote once that the autoricksha is a metaphor for

India

. It can weave its way in and out of utter confusion, is ugly, noisy and inconvenient, but it serves the purpose quite well, at an incredible low price. …

The chair car is definitely like an upper middle class drawing room, and though the air conditioning works well, there is a cocktail of many strong smells in the air. Some of them you soon get used to, even welcome, partly because the strong smell of the cleaner assures you that cleaning has actually been done. Having not been on a Shatabdi for many years, one was struck by how “upwardly mobile” it had gradually become. And yet, how it has stayed the same on many counts too.

Looking at the overhead baggage racks (open racks still), it is clear that a luggage revolution has happened. Smart suitcases (when compared to what we used to see earlier), lots of soft luggage, nylon backpacks - but the same old coolie system, even their uniforms unchanged! The luggage rack definitely made a statement about what progress Consumer India has made and the attitude it now sported, based on what luggage they were ‘wearing’. No uniformity here, no herd mentality, lots of individualism. No boring single brand here, this was the full blown variety of the gray market, importing from around the world! (The same, by the way, can be said for the winter wear of the passengers. No more aunt knitted hand made sweaters. Wind cheaters of all hues, and machine made sweaters and caps. And also of the closed footwear. No cumbersome heavy leather shoes in sight anymore.) [We Are Like That Only: Understanding the Logic of Consumer India Rama Bijapurkar - Jan 2007]

Dr. V.M. Madge came down heavily upon unjust criticism of Sri Aurobindo

2010-07-07T20:13:00.000+05:30

The Literary criterion 2002
Speaking on "Contemporary Indian Poetry" Dr. VM Madge not only came down heavily upon some contemporary poets like Ezekiel, Parthasarathy and others for their unjust criticism of Aurobindo but also felt that our contemporary poetry can...

The perennial quest for a psychology with a soul: an inquiry into ... - Page 337 Joseph Vrinte - 2002 - 568 pages
Actually, Ken Wilber's criticism of Sri Aurobindo is not a repudiation of Sri Aurobindo's vision but a refinement. Ken Wilber states that Sri Aurobindo's 'individual' integral Yoga and practice is "especially focused on integrating the ...

Sri Aurobindo Ghose: the dweller in the lands of silence William Kluback, Michael Finkenthal - 2001 - 167 pages
I wonder if this awakening spirit is anything more than a child of goodness and beauty. It does not create them. It is a child of their nurture, of their power over chaos. I saw in my words a potential criticism of Sri Aurobindo. ...

Tradition and the rhetoric of right: popular political argument in ... - Page 85 David J. Lorenzo - 1999 - 339 pages
... the Ashram's program was the abolition of religious, caste, and gender disabilities, achievements for which traditional Hindus and even some conservative members of the movement criticized Aurobindo and the Mother.66 The structured...

Continuities in Indian English poetry: nation language form G. J. V. Prasad - 1999 - 198 pages
... poetry echoes the post-Independence criticism of Aurobindo-like mystical poetry! Sarang praises Daruwalla for precisely these qualities. Daruwalla stands out amongst Indian English poets for bringing to poetry a range of experience ...

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research Indian Council of Philosophical Research - 1995
Though he rejects root-based study as unsound on page 9, he very quickly reverses his position on page 15, while criticizing Sri Aurobindo, and speaks as if that study is a sound method of interpreting the Vedic terms. ...

Mao Zedong and the Communist Policies 1927-1978 - Page 137 B.E. Shinde - 1993 - 183 pages
Man has always oscillated between the extremes, the fabric of the mind itself is of such peculiar composition. The Gita does not merely deal with the mind as thecriticism of Aurobindo Ghosh would suggest. It is as well not wholly the ...

Nissim Ezekiel, poet of human balance Harish Raizada - 1992 - 196 pages
He is highly critical of Sri Aurobindo both as a poet and critic. He dislikes his "Asiatic vague immensities" or mighty abstractions and finds his magnum opus Savitri "embarrassingly bad." He criticizes Sri Aurobindo's The Future of ...

The Political Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo - Page 323 V. P. Varma - 1990 - 494 pages
This second criticism of Aurobindo reminds us of the attacks made by TH Green on utilitarianism. Green led the idealist attack against the ethics of utilitarianism. He candidly admitted that the utilitarian creed aims to improve the ... Modern Indian political thought Vishwanath Prasad Varma - 1971 - 640 pages
In 1928, however, while criticizing the political ideas and technics of Gandhi (the thought of the Ashram of Sabarmati), Bose also criticized Aurobindo (the thought of the Pondi- cherry Ashram). 4 Subhas Chandra Bose, Tarun ke Swapna ...

Seven studies in Sri Aurobindo V. Madhusudan Reddy - 1989 - 239 pages
... in the study of the creative and multi-dimensional use of language and its mystical and metaphysical implications one aspect of the literary criticism of Sri Aurobindo which has a direct bearing on their concerns and conclusions. ...

The politics of philosophy: a Marxian analysis A. Pampapathy Rao - 1983 - 118 pages
... Marxist criticism of Sri Aurobindo? "The conceptual affinity between Hegel and Sri Aurobindo is much closer than that between Marx and any one of them", p. 208. One of whom? "Of all forms of justice perhaps the most important one is ...

The Heritage of India: L. N. Mishra commemoration volume 1978 - 616 pages
Yoga and Literary Criticism Dr. S. K. Prasad Department of English, Magadh University On the publication of my book on the literary criticism of Sri Aurobindosome months back, a quite pertinent question was raised by a distinguished ...

Indian literature Sāhitya Akademi - 1977
SK Prasad's The Literary Criticism of Sri Aurobindo (Bharati Bhavan, Patna) is an exhaustive study of Sri Aurobindo the literary critic, and there are comparative glances at Western critics like TS Eliot, Middleton Murry and Herbert ...

The Journal of Asian studies Far Eastern Association (

U.S.

), Association ... - 1976
The essayists in this volume are not judgmental or critical of Aurobindo from an out-of-context perspective. But this is not to suggest that they avoid questions of comparison or relevance in Aurobindo's writings. ...

The quest for political and spiritual liberation: a study in the ... June O'Connor - 1977 - 153 pages
... criticizes Aurobindo on this issue, naming the problem of evil to be "the most questionable element" in his system (World, pp. 270-71). In The Political Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1960), p. ...

The literary criticism of Sri Aurobindo, with special reference to ... Shree Krishna Prasad, Aurobindo Ghose - 1974 - 487 pages
Hazlitt, it appears, only echoes them when he calls poetry "the language of the imagination and the passions".1 The typical Romantic critical standard for poets is well expressed by Leigh Hunt, who, like Shelley, calls poetry ...

age. of. the soul of man in Odysseus".1 The. same is true of the Iliad. It is "not merely the action and stir of battle" in it which explains its greatness but "the clash of great and strong spirits with the gods leaning down to …

falls are,— when the needed energy is within, — an obscure condition for unprecedented elevations".1 "In the recoil", continues Sri Aurobindo, "....some discovery is made which would otherwise have been long postponed or not at all have ...

Nissim Ezekiel Chetan Karnani, Nissim Ezekiel - 1974 - 192 pages
Ezekiel has courageously exposed the pretensions in poetry and criticism of Aurobindo Ghosh. It is curious that Ezekiel himself did not escape the stranglehold of this tradition. He has too often lapsed into ...

Contemporary relevance of Sri Aurobindo Kishor Gandhi - 1973 - 343 pages
It was with thoughts and feelings of this sort that I came to read the literarycriticism of Sri Aurobindo. That criticism is to be found for the most part in The Future Poetry, (published originally as a series of articles in the Arya, ...

Literature east & west Modern Language Association of America ... - 1969
... the Age," helped to demonstrate the close relationships which even the writer in English has with the old and meaningful traditions. Professor S. Nagarajan, of Poona University, in discussing the literary criticism of Sri Aurobindo, ...

Contemporary Indian literature: a symposium Sahitya Akademi - 1968 - 338 pages
The literary criticism of Sri Aurobindo (The Future Poetry) and the art criticism of Ananda Coomaraswamy (History of Indian and Indonesian Art, The Dance of Shiva and An Introduction to Indian Art) are in a category apart. ...

Main currents of social & political thought in modern India Jyoti Prasad Suda - 1963
The criticism of Sri Aurobindo •was motivated by two considerations. Firstly, he wanted to undermine the faith of the Indians in the superiority of the British political organisation. ...

Sri Aurobindo succeeds in showing the logical necessity of supramental or integral consciousness

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Indian writing in English: critical appraisals - Page 45

Amar Nath Prasad - 2005 - 327 pages
If through his characters 'Kalidasa excels in depicting the emotions of love, from the first suggestion in an innocent mind to the perfection of passion'.27 Sri Aurobindo succeeds in catching 'the whole of love's inner heart — the ...

Mother India: monthly review of culture

Sri Aurobindo Ashram - 2004
and he concluded by affirming, "My quantitative system... is based on the natural movement of the English tongue, the same in prose and poetry, not on any artificial theory."3 It is not in the hexameter alone that Sri Aurobindo succeeds ...

Knowledge, consciousness and religious conversion in Lonergan and ... - Page 190

Michael T. McLaughlin - 2003 - 318 pages

... movement of 61 After repeated readings, I am not convinced that Aurobindo succeeds in reconciling all of these models. It seems to be more a question of attacking the same problems from different standpoints in different chapters. ...

Guide to Hindu religion

David J. Dell - 1981 - 461 pages

Concepts of reason and intuition: with special reference to Sri ...

Ramesh Chandra Sinha - 1981 - 234 pages
Sri Aurobindo succeeds in showing the logical necessity of supramental or integral consciousness by his analysis and criticism of the other sources of knowledge. Reason and intuition, according to him, find their fulfilment in the ...

Journal of religious studies

Punjabi University. Dept. of Religious Studies - 1979
Aurobindo succeeds Ram Mohan Roy, Debendranath Tagore, Keshab Chandra Sen, Ramakrishna and Vivekananda as a Bengali leader in the Hindu reformation sequence. But he does it with a difference. For he is in a sense the climax of ...

The dramatic art of Sri Aurobindo

Avanindra Kumar Sinha - 1979 - 227 pages
If through his characters 'Kalidasa excels in depicting the emotions of love, from the first suggestion in an innocent mind to the perfection of passion'," Sri Aurobindo succeeds in catching 'the whole of love's inner heart — the ...

The yogi and the mystic: a study in the spirituality of Sri ...
Jan Feys - 1977 - 371 pages
Yet, while thus respecting the Gita's general line of development, Sri Aurobindo succeeds in orderly grouping its sections into a sequence of some three or four ...

The yogi and the mystic: a study in the spirituality of Sri ...

Jan Feys - 1977 - 371 pages
Thus Sri Aurobindo succeeds in giving a new impetus to a movement which seemed to have reached a dead end. Krishna, the prototype of yogic siddhi, is asked to reveal the secret of the universal unity he has attained : "this Yoga by ...

The poetic genius of Sri Aurobindo

Kaikhushru Dhunjibhoy Sethna - 1974 - 141 pages
... breath of inspiration with a wide-eyed artistry that is attuned to the soul both of classical and English poetics. It is not in the hexameter alone that Sri Aurobindo succeeds. Many kinds of quantitative verse he has revived in ...

The literary criticism of Sri Aurobindo, with special reference to ...

Shree Krishna Prasad, Aurobindo Ghose - 1974 - 487 pages
The two works are like the legislative and executive aspects of the same living body politic, as it were; the soul and body of a single, though highly complex, creative activity or genius. And thus Sri Aurobindo succeeds in demonstrating without any shadow of a doubt that his theories of poetry are not just theories, ie, mere ideas and visions in an unrealisable, insubstantial form, but living practical idealities ...

Sri Aurobindo
Aurobindo Ghose - 1970

The vision and work of Sri Aurobindo

Kaikhushru Dḥunjibhoy Sethna - 1968 - 217 pages
Sri Aurobindo succeeds everywhere because he not only is familiar both as mystic and artist with the magnitudes and intensities of our subliminal and supraliminal being, but has also endeavoured to lay on the poor dust of the outer self ...

The Advent

Sri Aurobindo Ashram - 1968
The two works are like the legislative and executive aspects of the same living body politic, as it were; the soul and body of a single, though highly complex creative activity or genius. And thus, Sri Aurobindo succeeds in ...

The integral philosophy of Sri Aurobindo: a commemorative symposium
Haridas Chaudhuri, Frederic Spiegelberg - 1960 - 350 pages
Sri Aurobindo succeeds everywhere because he not only is familiar both as mystic and artist with ...

The poetic genius of Sri Aurobindo

Kaikhushru Dhunjibhoy Sethna - 1947 - 156 pages
... with a wide-eyed artistry that is attuned to the soul both of classical and English poetics. It is not in the hexameter alone that Sri Aurobindo succeeds. Many kinds of quantitative verse he has revived in forms natural to English. ...

Musepaper

Day-long workshop on Shakespearean Cinema at SACAC

Boita Bandana Utsav at India Gate & Dilli Haat

Savitri may be regarded as a sacred text, a contemporary Veda

Each Shammi film was pure ambrosia

Antonin Artaud & Pierre Klossowski

P. Valsala & Manoj Das

Sri Aurobindo believes that man's suffering and death have a purpose

Old Odia song selection

Dharitri (Odia Movie: 1973)

Voice: Tusar N. Mohapatra

Old Odia movie brochure-covers

Ghara Bahuda (Odia Movie: 1973)

Manika Jodi (Odia Movie: 1963)

Jeeban Sathi (Odia Movie: 1963)

75 Years of Odia Cinema

Learning arts of adult life from novels

Smith, Nietzsche, Shaw, Wells, Wilde, Orwell, Lucas, & Sri Aurobindo

Agonda & Malta

Harmony of Virtue & Rose of God

Sri Aurobindo’s critical ideas come from Matthew Arnold, Keats and Coleridge

Sri Aurobindo and the Indian Critical Tradition

Bankim was fond of female protagonists

Bankimchandra Chatterji's Debi Chaudhurani, Hindu nationalism, and Hinduism in the Indian novel from The Middle Stage by Chandrahas

Hasan, Sliema, Marseille, Rishikesh

Dr. V.M. Madge came down heavily upon unjust criticism of Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo succeeds in showing the logical necessity of supramental or integral consciousness

Indian writing in English: critical appraisals - Page 45

Journal of religious studies

The dramatic art of Sri Aurobindo

The yogi and the mystic: a study in the spirituality of Sri ...

The yogi and the mystic: a study in the spirituality of Sri ...

The poetic genius of Sri Aurobindo

The literary criticism of Sri Aurobindo, with special reference to ...

Sri Aurobindo

The Advent

The integral philosophy of Sri Aurobindo: a commemorative symposium

The poetic genius of Sri Aurobindo