What is Ananda?

SRI AUROBINDO, Letters on Yoga,
Volume 1, Section Four, REASON, SCIENCE AND YOGA

What is this Ananda, after all? The mind can see in it nothing but a pleasant psychological condition, — but if it were only that, it could not be the rapture which the bhaktas and the mystics find in it. When the Ananda comes into you, it is the Divine who comes into you, just as when the Peace flows into you, it is the Divine who is invading you, or when you are flooded with Light, it is the flood of the Divine himself that is around you. Of course, the Divine is something much more, many other things besides, and in them all a Presence, a Being, a Divine Person; for the Divine is Krishna, is Shiva, is the Supreme Mother.

But through the Ananda you can perceive the Anandamaya Krishna, for the Ananda is the subtle body and being of Krishna; through the Peace you can perceive the Shantimaya Shiva; in the Light, in the delivering Knowledge, the Love, the fulfilling and uplifting Power you can meet the presence of the Divine Mother. It is this perception that makes the experiences of the bhaktas and mystics so rapturous and enables them to pass more easily through the nights of anguish and separation; when there is this soul-perception, it gives to even a little or brief Ananda a force or value it could not otherwise have, and the Ananda itself gathers by it a growing power to stay, to return, to increase.

Raga grammar of music

One cannot forget to admire the dexterity and meticulousness of the Western people in furthering the human excellences. But, strangely enough, the elaborate Raga system practiced in India from ancient times has never received the attention and aesthetic curiosity it deserves. It is also difficult to imagine how such invigorating music has failed to stir the non-Indian listeners. Is culture such a dampener? musicindiaonline.com

Odets's 'Awake and Sing!'

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD NYTimes.com Homepage: April 18, 2006

Dreams and disappointments, hopes and fears, encouraging words and bitter put-downs clash by day and night in Odets's turbulent comedy-drama about a Jewish family struggling to stay afloat in the 1930's. Conflict suffuses the stale air with a tension that almost seems to have mottled the walls. Dinner becomes a simmering battle between factions, in which grievances and recriminations are passed around the table along with the salt and pepper.
In the stirring revival that opened last night at the Belasco Theater, where "Awake and Sing!" was first produced in 1935 during the brief but influential heyday of the Group Theater, the tension derives above all from the question marks on the faces of the younger characters onstage.
Ralph Berger (Pablo Schreiber), toiling away at 22 as a clerk for a measly salary, comes closest to putting it in so many words, articulating a query that Odets posed in much of his work, occasionally with a defiantly American bluntness: What's life for, anyway?
The answers proposed and debated in this vigorous, still pungently funny play sometimes emit the hissing sound of old radio transmissions. "If this life leads to a revolution, it's a good life," avows Ralph's grandfather Jacob, a Marx-worshiping barber. "Otherwise it's for nothing." But even for Jacob life is also for listening to Caruso sing of a paradise that no social upheaval could really bring about.
Odets was writing at the height of the Depression, when economic disorder had led to a sudden, urgent questioning of some fundamental tenets of American society. "Awake and Sing!" and his other early plays are fired by a belief that art could play a role in transforming the culture, creating a world in which life wouldn't be "printed on dollar bills."
But his impassioned desire to proselytize for a better future didn't obscure his sensitivity to the everyday despair that tinted American lives long before the stock market crashed, or the humble forms of solace available even to a guy without a dollar to his name, like the rush of joy in his heart at the gleam in his girl's eye.

Juan Goytisolo and Orhan Pamuk

By FERNANDA EBERSTADT Published: April 16, 2006 NYTimes.com Homepage

He sees "seeds of modernity" in the Arab world and even dares to hope that radical Islamist parties may be tempered and matured by partaking in national governments. This optimism perhaps accounts for why Goytisolo's work appears to have found a whole new generation eager to embrace his "Babelization" of language and cultures, his plea for ethnic, religious and sexual pluralism, his defense of the outsider. "What was appealing to me when I first came across Juan Goytisolo's books in the 1980's," the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk told me recently, "was that here was an experimental European novelist who had renounced the flat realism of the 19th-century novel and who was paying attention to my part of the world with an extraordinary humility, searching in his life and prose to create a different style enriched by what he's found in this culture."

The Café France, where Goytisolo goes every day, overlooks Jemaa el Fna, the centerpiece of Marrakesh's old quarter, a square where the open-air storytellers, snake charmers and witch doctors that enchanted writers like Bowles and Elias Canetti still ply their trade. Much of Goytisolo's organizational energies in the last years have gone into a campaign to preserve Jemaa el Fna from the Moroccan government's periodic efforts to sanitize it. At one point, there were plans to turn the medieval square into a parking lot. Thanks largely to Goytisolo's zeal, however, Jemaa el Fna has been classed by Unesco as a site preserving "the oral heritage of humanity."

"People ask, 'Why do you live in Marrakesh?' " Goytisolo told me with a chuckle. "I ask them, 'Have you seen it?' " In Jemaa el Fna, Goytisolo explained, he finds all the heterogeneity that is in danger of disappearing from Western cities. "In the 70's, when I was very poor, I was offered a permanent teaching post at Edmonton. I realized I would rather starve in Marrakesh than be a millionaire in Alberta."

Bharat Natyam lacks surprise

DÉJÀ VU? YOU, TOO? Cupid’s arrows always come at the lovelorn nayika at a pree-cise angle of 45 degrees Renuka Narayanan Hindustan Times Sunday, April 2, 2006

I ’VE BEEN watching dance from the womb because my mother was a dancer and I absolutely had to learn Bharata Natyam, like brushing my teeth. But even I, the mad classicist, find most performances one big yawn today, except for the few magic-leaguers. I’m sad but not surprised that girls now prefer the bumpand-grind of Shiamak Davar or Ashley Lobo. B’Nat lacks surprise. And I think these bad habits of the dance are why it’s so boring:

CUPID’S ARROWS They always come at the lovelorn nayika (heroine) at a pree-cise angle of 45 degrees. Rukmini Devi Arundale of Kalakshetra, the pioneering dance academy set up in Madras (not Chennai) back in the ’30s, decreed they should. And the nayika always gives a little twitch when it strikes, just so.

PINING PYTs Each item is explained in a fruity, breathless voice that makes you giggle. And just how often can you endure the plaint, “O Krishna, come to me! O Lord of the sacred temple of Appalam Swamy Pappadam Perumal, you are my hero, I pine for you.” Leaves me muttering, “Get a life, girl.”

TANTRIK FAN-FAN That fan-pleat in garish orange silk teamed with a screaming pink blouse. The obscene blouse-accents in gold. The ghastly sweat patches in the armpits after twenty minutes of stomping. The trailing threads from a tatty kunjalam (fake plait). The klutzy jewellery in loud green and red from Sukra Jewellers, North Mada Street, Mylapore, Chennai. Eeuh. Go away. You offend my eyes, vulgarian.

SPEED KILLS Perhaps it’s because they know they’re up against Shiamak, Ashley and Saroj Khan. But dancers now whiz through slow, sensuous songs like how the Concorde used to break Mach 2. My fave example is actor-dancer Shobhana, the new Padmashri, whom I saw speeding madly through Kuru Yadu Nandana. It’s the sexiest song across the Big Six classical dance forms of India from Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda. Radha tells Krishna, “O Yadava hero, rub sandal paste on my burning breasts with your cooling hands.” But what we got was heartless wham-bam, with Krishna dumped unceremoniously in the kadambvan afterwards. Nooooo!

The other truly awful one was Kuchipudi guru Vempati Chinna Satyam trying to be Satyabhama. Now Satyabhama is the most fiery, wilful, imperious, luscious nayika ever invented by the Male Gaze. You need to build her up nuance by delicious nuance. To see her made to skip like a springbok in mating season…

THE WONDERBRA VERSE This one slays me each time. When they’ve done pining for the hero in the first two verses, the nayikas always get darshan in the last one. Do they show ecstasy with subtle, beautiful netra bhava (eye language)? Naah, that’s work. ‘Upliftment’ always means a cheap, easy pectoral leap. I call it the “Wonderbra Verse” and you can see it coming a mile away. Forget it. Let’s watch Indian Idol.

Nearly all of my entertainment choices are produced by people openly hostile to my worldview

Kahntheroad said... Just by having to deal with the frustrations you express from reading this site you are learning more than you know about what it has been like to hold a conservative viewpoint in this country for the last few decades. For most of my life your views - meaning left of center - was the default position. There was rarely any serious debate, or resources to even hear an alternative view (especially before the internet).

In school I was taught one side, in the media one side was clearly elevated, even in pop culture "Republican" was a punch line. In college I found myself reexamining the liberal orthodoxy and becoming more and more conservative. And, believe me, this was no whim. I had no choice but to do my homework. Not only did I have to know what I believed, I had to know why I believed it and I had to know, inside and out, what the other side believed. If I so much as raised certain questions in a class I had to be ready to defend myself against a professor armed with a PHD and mob of affirming students. If politics came up in a social setting and I opined I had to be ready to explain myself thoroughly.

As a conservative I have to be prepared to overlook the fact that nearly all of my entertainment choices - from music to books to film - are produced by people openly hostile to my worldview and will often include pointed insults to beliefs I take seriously. This is not to mention politics coming up on dates, jobs, etc. I'm confident in my views, and I'm happy to explain, but there are times I don't want feel like discussing it, but can't be silent when someone presumes that everyone thinks as they do.

And once I found myself on a spiritual quest? Forget about it! Trust me, I know how you feel as a liberal reading Bob - I've dealt with the same thing in reading or listening to just about every modern spiritual guru on the bookshelf. Fortunately many years of practice prepared me for the critical mind required to discern wisdom from politics. By none of this do I mean to portray myself as a victim - it's just an explanation of my experience and how it's something I simply deal with as a fact of life.

I'm secure enough in my views that I can enjoy a great film or album made by a liberal artist. Also, I understand why people are liberal; like many here I was once liberal myself. I also have many friends with a broad range of views with whom I disagree, yet have a deep respect, and i gain much from debating. I have not come to my conclusions lightly, and I'm not afraid to be challenged or even proven wrong, as I have had to reevaluate, and sometimes alter, convictions many times. So welcome to the arena of ideas. The first steps will be bumpy, but if you stay in the ring I guarantee you'll come out more enlightened - and, who knows, maybe you'll enlighten some of us know-it-alls.

Are We Having a Conversation Yet?

An Art Form Evolves By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN The New York Times: March 20, 2006

What is there to talk about? The question should be taken literally. We can talk about the weather — which means just making casual contact, assuring each other that we are temperate in nature and not about to erupt in torrential outbursts. We can talk about politics — if we can assume certain shared convictions that will prevent other kinds of storms and disruptions. We can talk about family — if we can assume that we take that kind of a personal interest in each other.
But whatever we choose, there's a certain amount of risk involved, a tentative guess made about what should be shared and what should not, what would please the other and what would not. La Rochefoucauld said, "We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those who find us boring." That is only the beginning.
Conversation is one of those acts that require subtle forms of social imagination: an ability to listen and interpret and imagine, an attentiveness to someone whose perspective is always essentially different, a responsiveness that both makes oneself known and allows the other to feel known — or else does none of this, but just keeps up appearances. It may be, then, one of the most fundamental political and social acts, indispensable to negotiating allegiances, establishing common ground, clearing tangled paths. Conversation may reflect not just the state of our selves, but the state of society.

O.K. But listen to "talk" radio, with its combative recruitment of allies; or "talk" shows in which guests are promoting themselves or their products and hosts are prepared with leading questions; or "talk" news shows in which conversation becomes a form of shouting. Look at our isolating iPods, at text messaging with its prepackaged formulas, or instant messaging with its iconic smilies, so necessary to make sure the telegraphic prose is not misunderstood. CUL8R.
This state of affairs helped inspire Stephen Miller's new book, "Conversation: A History of a Declining Art" (Yale, $27.50). Mr. Miller, who is a contributing editor to The Wilson Quarterly, finds countertrends, as well — Internet communities that lead to new forms of conversation, diverse gatherings in which disagreements become an expected aspect of conversation. But, he writes, the "forces sapping conversation seem stronger than the forces nourishing it." So Mr. Miller, in response, is recounting another kind of conversation that has taken place over the centuries, one whose subject is conversation itself.

Cicero gave advice about conversation (It ought "to be gentle and without a trace of intransigence; it should also be witty"). Montaigne hailed its pleasures ("I find the practice of it the most delightful activity in our lives"). Henry Fielding praised it ("This grand Business of our Lives, the Foundation of every Thing, either useful or pleasant"). Adam Smith prescribed it (calling it one of "the most powerful remedies for restoring the mind to its tranquillity").
There were also those who opposed it, or at least strongly declared other preferences. Rousseau sneered at the chatter in French salons. Wordsworth preferred nature and solitude. The writers of Romanticism shifted the emphasis, preferring to share feelings and perceptions rather than honor conversation for its own sake. Conversation became confessional — which in many ways, it still is. "Modern writers," Mr. Miller suggests, "tend to dwell on the emotional rewards that come from conversation."
In fact, in Mr. Miller's account, the United States may have played an important role in the evolution of the mode of non-conversation now developing. During the 19th century many European writers scorned American conversation, perhaps too much, Mr. Miller suggests, accusing it of excessive focus on money and commerce. There may have also been an American suspicion of conversation altogether: Thoreau couldn't be bothered with it, and Melville was wary.
Mr. Miller points out that in the 20th century, literary figures were also admired for being laconic. Was this an extension of early Romantic early suspicions? A democratic rebellion against the artifice and artfulness of 18th-century conversation? Did it even lead, perhaps, to the self-absorbed focus on self-fulfillment and self-expression that have, in Mr. Miller's view, extended from the years of the counterculture into the present?
Like a well-mannered host, Mr. Miller presents some hypotheses, but also leads the conversation along. For him, the powers and possibilities of conversation were most clearly revealed in the 18th century. Samuel Johnson praised the two key journals of the age, The Spectator and The Tattler; they were being published at a time, he said, "when two parties, loud, restless, and violent, each with plausible declarations, and each perhaps without any distinct termination of its views, were agitating the nation."

The journals, Johnson said, "adjusted" conversation with their "propriety and politeness." That character also helped define London coffeehouses, in which political debate and conversation between varied classes took place. Andrew Marvell wrote: "It is wine and strong drinks make tumults increase/ Choc'late, tea, and coffee are liquors of peace."
But Hume may be the patron saint of conversation here, for though he noted that politeness "runs often into affectation and foppery, disguise and insincerity," he also saw a necessary connection between politeness and freedom. Hume suggested that politeness was not, in fact, "natural to the human mind," but "presumption and arrogance" were. Society depends on artifice. Conversation is an art.
As Mr. Miller suggests, American conversation now prides itself on angry authenticity or on being kind and "nonjudgmental"; it is meant to be "natural" and full of "self-expression." This does not make for great conversation or a vital political life.
Hume, in contrast, welcomed the necessary artifice of manners, through which, he argued, "a mutual deference is affected; contempt of others disguised; authority concealed; attention given to each in his turn; and an easy stream of conversation maintained, without vehemence, without interruption, without eagerness for victory, and without any airs of superiority."

It is an ideal worth talking about.

A Resurgence for the Humble Lecture

In the Age of the Overamplified, a Resurgence for the Humble Lecture

By DINITIA SMITH New York Times: March 17, 2006

"My purpose is not only to make the lions roar," he cries. Bounce. "But to trigger people's imagination." Bounce. Bounce. "It's not only sex that's exciting," Mr. Holdengräber says, "but the life of the mind. When you come into contact with a great idea, it can change your life." Mr. Holdengräber is riding the crest of a renewed interest in spoken-word events, lectures, debates, readings and panel discussions, in many corners of the city, from university auditoriums to the 92nd Street Y and bookstores and bars.

A spokesman for the library said that attendance at public events had doubled since Mr. Holdengräber, the founder and former director of the Institute for Arts and Culture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, arrived a year and a half ago. Dr. Paul LeClerc, the library's president, added that since Mr. Holdengräber, 45, began making his imprint on public programming, the audiences had "a different energy." "They tend to be much younger," he noted.

In January, Mr. Holdengräber said, when the French writer and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy was interviewed at the library by Tina Brown, "900 people showed up." "Diane Von Furstenberg and Lauren Bacall were there," he continued. "There was a line 150 meters long of people who couldn't get in. It went around the corridors of the library." In October, similar numbers lined up to see Bill Clinton interview the historian John Hope Franklin about race relations and to see the song-cycle version of "The Elements of Style," by Maira Kalman and Nico Muhly. "Several hundred non-ticket holders had to be turned away from all the events," Mr. Holdengräber said.

To be sure, some of the increase in attendance can be attributed to Mr. Holdengräber's efforts to liven up the programming. One of the first things he did when he arrived was to change the name from the Public Education Program to Live From the N.Y.P.L. It also helped that he changed the time most lectures began, to 7 p.m. or later, from 6 or 6:30, to make it easier for people with jobs to attend. And he increased the library's e-mail database of potential attendees to 7,000 from about 500. He says he relies on e-mail messages now to publicize events rather than brochures, a change that enables him to program more spontaneously.

But the library is not the only place that has seen an increase in attendance at spoken-word events. Uptown at the 92nd Street Y, Helaine Geismar Katz, the associate executive director who is in charge of public programs, said she had seen "a big change" in the size of audiences at the Y's lectures and panels. Like the library, the Y has increased the number of its lectures, debates and forums to feed the public appetite. "We have had poetry for over 60 years, every Monday night," Ms. Geismar Katz pointed out. "Now we have programs almost every single day and night."

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has always had good crowds at its panels and lectures, said Hilde Limondjian, general manager of concerts and lectures. Its musical performances are often accompanied by talks as well. Smaller outlets have seen a steady increase in attendance. Denis Woychuk, the principal owner of KGB Bar at 85 East Fourth Street, which is a center for readings by authors, said: "We set up our first in 1994 on Sundays because Sundays were slow. Things were dead. I said, 'Let's do something that's going to be fun.' The business was secondary, but there was certainly that." Every eager young writer attending a reading means, of course, that at least one drink is bought at the bar.

Sri Aurobindo and Sartre

I think Aurobindo's "Future Poetry" represents a rather good example, in riveting language and style, of an atypical Indian view of literary criticism of English poetry.

Sartre's "What is Literature?" is a great essay, extremely well-written and illustrated like many of his other work. It attempts to be persuasive in every line and paragraph, and may even succeed at times but for the narrow view of literature espoused, particularly with the role of literature in modern society. I am forced to agree with Sartre when he says that literature needs to serve today's world; but it would again be a limited idea, inherently defective and contradictory to Sartre's advocacy of the primacy of free thought and expression. All literature written today cannot serve today's world, some need to and can, but others should exist in equal terms, whether accepted by today's world or not.

Literature can be a tool for societal change but its primary role may not be this Marxian view at all, particularly in today's globalised world. The essay has a great line on critics, comparing them to cemetery watchmen, the cemetery being a library - thus implying that literature was probably dead when the essay was written! When Sartre famously declined the Nobel Prize in 1964, one of the reasons he gave was that literature was dead!!! This disowning of literature was rather sensational and controversial because it was uncommon and unusual, but that apart I am not sure whether it carried much substance away from a Sarteran world view. Thejaswi Shivanand Location: Bangalore, India posted by Dumaketu Saturday, October 29, 2005 @ 11:43 AM 14 comments

Wallace Steven: never "true to life"

Language and Poetry Norman D. Livergood

A transformative poem such as Wallace Steven's Analysis of a Theme, is only actualized and consummated by its being appreciated, understood, and enjoyed by a discerning reader. A reader who merely passes over the words of a transformative poem by Stevens, without genuine comprehension, leaves the poem in an unfinished state in regards to his own experience. If the reader, out of egotism or scholastic puffery, injects spurious, extraneous meanings into the poem, he creates a perversion of his own design totally unrelated to the real poem which Stevens created. The essential poem, containing multiple meanings, cascading associations, and profound metaphysical dimensions, is available to the appreciative, discerning reader who has prepared himself to discover what Stevens deposited in his artistic creation.

From Wallace Stevens' perspective, "poetry has to do with reality in its most individual aspect." Only poetry deals with the singular element of reality, "science does not cover 'particularity here and now.'" Stevens claims that "there is in reality, whether we think of it as animate or inanimate, human or sub-human, an aspect of individuality at which many forms of rational explanation stop short." Humans, he claims, dismiss "individual and particular facts of experience as of no importance in themselves."

"The aim of our lives," Stevens claims, "should be to draw ourselves away as much as possible from the insubstantial fluctuating facts of the world about us and establish some communion with the objects which are apprehended by thought and not sense." Stevens believes that "Plato would describe himself as a realist in the sense that it is by breaking away from the world of facts that we make contact with reality." What we're after is "contact with reality as it impinges on us from the outside, the sense that we can touch and feel a solid reality which does not wholly dissolve itself into the conception of our own minds."

"The wonder and mystery of art," Stevens believes, "is the revelation of something 'wholly other' by which the inexpressible loneliness of thinking is broken and enriched." He claims that there is a "unity rooted in the individuality of objects," and that this individuality is "discovered in a different way from the apprehension of rational connections."

The genuine artist, Stevens claimed, is never "true to life." "He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it." "The poet sees with a poignancy and penetration that is altogether unique." "Meaning is an awareness and a communication. But it is no ordinary awareness, no ordinary communication." In genuine poetry, Stevens believed, there is an "authentic note; it is the insistence on a reality that forces itself upon our consciousness and refuses to be managed and mastered." The poet mediates for us a reality not of ourselves. The supreme virtue of a poet "is humility, for the humble are they that move about the world with the love of the real in their hearts."

Stevens believed that for a genuine poet, "the faithful poem is an act of conscience." "What a modern poet desires, above everything else, is to be nothing more than a poet of the present time." The genuine poet attempts "to find, by means of his own thought and feeling, what seems to him to be the poetry of his time as distinguished from the poetry of . . . any other time, and to state it in a manner that effectively discloses it to his readers." Wallace Stevens' Poems

"So poetry arrives at the indication of infinite meanings beyond the finite intellectual meaning the word carries. It expresses not only the life-soul of man as did the primitive word, not only the ideas of his intelligence for which speech now usually serves, but the experience, the vision, the ideas, as we may say, of the higher and wider soul in him. Making them real to our life-soul as well as present to our intellect, it opens to us by the word the doors of the Spirit." Sri Aurobindo, "The Essence of Poetry"

Truer Than Fact

Why have we forsaken the novel for the memoir?

JULIA GLASS NYTimes.com: February 11, 2006

Fiction writers work tremendously hard to make things that are patently untrue seem as true as possible. "Let me tell you a story that isn't true," beckons the fiction writer, "and I will show you some of the truest things you'll ever know." A good novel is an out-of-self experience. It lifts you off the ground so that you have the sensation of flying. It says, Look at the world around you; learn from the people in these pages, neither quite me nor quite you, how life is lived in so many different ways.

A memoir says, Look at me; learn from me how one life has been lived. That solipsistic focus has its place; it, too, can move and inspire, but only fiction can give us faith that we all have the imaginative capability to understand any number of stories not our own, especially the stories of people who never would or could write a memoir. 2Next Page > Julia Glass, author of the forthcoming novel "The Whole World Over," won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2002.

What’s So Bad About Doing Good?

An Essay Review of "The Rainmaker" Mickel Adzema

MusePapers December 17th, 1997 Primal Spirit Home Page

Last night my wife and I went to see "The Rainmaker"—the hit new movie based upon the blockbuster novel of the same name by John Grisham. While it was an extremely well-produced, acted, and directed movie, I didn’t feel very good when I left the theater afterwards. Uncovering the layers of feelings that were in me then, I realized that I was not satisfied at all with the ending. The movie had a triumphal and climactic courtroom scene, a delightfully sweet love story, and was totally engaging throughout—so much so that I was surprised, upon checking in with my body, occasionally, at how tense and "in suspense" I was because of my involvement with the movie: Caring and pulling for the events to turn one way as opposed to another—just as if these were real events in people’s lives instead of mere fictional events played out by actors with lives totally unlike the characters they portrayed.

Nevertheless, I noticed my body being in suspense, as well as my wet cheeks, replenished continuously by tears flowing freely during love scenes of caring and compassion, and scenes of tragedy and sadness.

So why did I leave the theater feeling so dissatisfied? Beneath the more superficial layers of feelings—the disappointment that the "victory" was only a pyrrhic one—i.e., it did not reap the expected benefits and was almost as good as a loss; and the fact that the romantic element was left undertermined—you weren’t sure that there was going to be a "happily ever after" for this couple—I realized there was the larger disappointment that the "heroic" main character, after this first and only case as a lawyer, and despite his huge (though prryhic) victory, was considering quitting the legal profession. This, because of the corruption and injustice in it.

I realized that this part was disappointing because it fit with a pattern of numerous stories of the Nineties whose message was largely that corruption and injustice (or downright evil) was everywhere and that it is hopeless to resist . . . and that heroic responses, by contrast, were stupid, or naïve, or—worst of all—too . . . well, "Sixty-ish." (I was beginning here to notice the generational tie-in --> deeper depressing feelings still!)

Photoroman

Living away from Delhi and returning there from time to time made me look at the city differently. Hanging out at Safdarjung, Aurobindo Place and Green Park I was struck by the rambling and dilapidated ruins of monuments lying amidst the urban space of markets and colonies. I realized that I had taken them for granted to such an extent that I didn't even know what these structures looked like from within. A few trips made were enough to get my juices flowing and soonthe germ of an idea took place in my mind.

Delhi unlike Bombay was an urban city with space for clandestine love. Mosques and mausoleums, tombs and temples dotted the city and in turn were dotted by names of anonymous lovers etched forever on stone and granite. Who were these secret lovers, what was their story, for surely they had a story to tell, and by extension, there must be countless such myths and folk tales surrounding these various heritage sites...I decided to weave a contemporary clandestine love story among the ruins of Delhi - a love story where the young man and girl in question become influenced by the past to such an extent that it starts overtaking their conscious waking life...

As a filmmaker I also took a conscious decision to treat the proposed film differently. Some years ago I had the good fortune of seeing Chris Marker's legendary film "La Jetee" a sci-fi film comprised entirely of still images with voice-over narration and sound design -Marker called the film a photoroman. The film was so influential thatnot only did Hollywood make an ugly remake (12 monkeys) but a La Jetee Bar also exists in Tokyo! I came up with the decision to make my film in a similar fashion albeit do away with voice over narrative and in its stead have many voices of both the present and the past imbue thesound design. Best, SIDHARTH SRINIVASAN by reader @ 31.01.2006 09:04 CET

The words bring moisture to one's eyes

Words of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother Hindusthan Records and Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust Vol. I 3719-C- 559 - Songs and hymns in Sanskrit - Various artistes - Price Rs. 50.

SRI AUROBINDO was a political activist, Indian Yogi, and spiritual master who first came into prominence during India's struggle for independence. He gradually withdrew from politics and shifted to Pondicherry to evolve a new method of spiritual practice or internal Yoga with the help of his spiritual collaborator, the Mother. He founded the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1926. Sri Aurobindo shed his mortal coils on December 5, 1950, and the Mother passed away in 1973.

Beginning with the chanting of the primordial sound 'Om', this audio album features songs and hymns in Sanskrit with recitation in English from the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. A delightful musical composition by Shobha Mitra on India and her future as visualised by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is flooded with melody. The choral singing and the individual renditions do invoke a spirit of emotional ecstasy.

The words of Sri Aurobindo pledging his love for India and professing his affection for her as one would his mother bring moisture to one's eyes. The narrator says that the Mother asks us for no schemes, no plans, no methods, she will herself provide them better than anyone can devise. She asks us for our hearts, our lives, nothing less nothing more. The narration, as perfect as the Queen's English, is an aural joy.

Hindustan Musical Products and Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 3725- C-558 Vol II - Words of Sri Aurobindo - Nalini Kanta Gupta - Price Rs. 40.

WORDS OF Sri Aurobindo have been read by Nalini Kanta Gupta in an audio volume released by Hindustan Musical Products and the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Pondicherry. Aurobindo's thoughts on physical sadhana, yoga, the purpose of avatarhood, and the importance of the Guru. In another album Sri Aurobindo expresses his views and attitude towards integral yoga, the supramental evolution, spiritual life, renunciation, the fundamental attitude, Sadhana and work, and education both physical and aesthetic.

The concluding sentences in the cassette get etched in one's memory: "Make the mind quiet so that what we call the opening is rendered possible. A quieted mind not necessarily motionless or silent, is good if one can have that at will and the persistent aspiration in the heart are the two main keys of yoga.'' - S.P. The Hindu Friday, September 21, 2001

Not be so bothered about making pretty gestures

The 1st Dec Programme: A conversation with Priti Ghosh ’64 , conducted in mid-November, on the intricacies of staging the 1st December Programme

Can you tell us briefly what is the subject of this year’s programme?
The subject which was suggested to me at the beginning of the year was ‘The Hour of God.’ I started working on it right away. Then, a few months later, I realised that it was getting a bit too intellectual and leading me nowhere. So I recast it in a completely different way. ‘The Hour of God’ is the theme, but the actual script is based on lines taken from Savitri and parts of the ‘The Hour of God’. Now the new script is titled ‘A Light There Is That Leads.’
I tried to find a way of expressing this idea in a simple way. The script is divided into five or six parts. First, we start with the Creation, then we show the Awakening of the Earth. After this there is the Emergence of the Ego, then Release from Ego. Earth is then ready to hear the voice cautioning her that this is the Hour of God. And finally, the Supreme Mother’s coming down to uplift mankind. That, in short, is the theme of the programme.
What will actually happen on the stage?
On stage there will be the performers, and on one side, facing the stage, the chorus, which will recite the lines. In fact we have decided to chant some of the lines rather than recite them in the usual way. And the dance movements will be in a free style, choreographed to Sunil-da’s music.
Right from its inception I had selected Sunil-da’s music for the choreography because it meant that at least one element was already fixed. That way it gave me the freedom to concentrate on the dancers and the recitations. Also, Sunil-da’s music carries an atmosphere which is very very elevating.
The interesting fact about the annual programme is that so much labour goes into the preparation of this one single performance. So many different kinds of skills are woven together before the programme can be presented. Can you tell us something about the details of the preparation of your programme?
When I started working on the script I realised that it was a colossal task. Directing one-act entertainment in the School Courtyard is one thing, and directing a programme on such a vast and abstract theme, and that too in the Theatre, is another – it is just stupendous. So I asked several people to help me, specially for the choreography.
As I told you, the music was already there. Now, for the dances, I wanted them to be choreographed in such a way that there would be no allusions to any of the classical forms. I wanted something different, something very expressive. It is impressive to see how Vimala (Molly), Shraddha, and Datta have put in their best efforts and hard work, and almost spent sleepless nights in trying to find something fresh and different and beautiful. Veenapani (Chawla) and Vinay too have put in a herculean effort to choreograph a scene for boys, which I wanted to be completely different from the others. I cannot leave out Ashok (Acharya) who has been perfectionist in taping the several pieces of music in our programme umpteen times. I have been lucky in the selection of my helpers.
And how did the dancers respond to this different choreography, since no one actually has any base in contemporary modern dance style?
Yes, that has been a problem. Our students are very gifted and graceful but the girls all have a background of either Kathak or Odissi. It is very difficult for them to break away from that mould into which they have been cast for several years. Their body automatically reverts to classical poses. We have actually had to work very hard to get them to express themselves freely and not be so bothered about making pretty gestures, to get into the feel of the text rather than execute a perfect, but flat, movement.
And what about the recitation part?
Here the person who has helped me most is Maurice. He is the perfectionist and relentless in his efforts. The only innovation he has tried is, as I told you, chanting, where Shilpa worked miracles with her suggestions.
As a director, you have an advantage in that you are also an artist. Your strong visual sense must have guided you for the lighting, décor, and the position of actors on the stage.
This is only partially true. Although I can visualise two-dimensionally, visualising for the stage has not been so easy. I have already prepared the colour schemes of the lighting by actually painting the scenes on paper. But visualising the position of the chorus has been complicated. Firstly, there is the technical factor which limits the possibilities of where the chorus can stand. Every time I chose a position for it, Mahi would point out the disadvantage it posed for the mikes. So finally the chorus will stand outside the stage to one side. As for the colours, all the costumes of the dancers are white so that the colours of the light remain very pure.
What has this work meant personally to you?
Thanks to this programme I have realised that so many of my capacities left unoperational had just gone to sleep. I have been concentrating so much on my paintings over the past long years that I have let myself get intellectually mouldy. At one point Maurice asked me to join the chorus, and I realised how difficult it was for me to memorise even a few lines, and yet it used to be so easy not so long ago. This programme has helped me to be conscious of so many other parts in myself.
How did you choose your cast? Did you face any difficulties?
Actually, the cast has changed in the course of the preparation. We had set off with a different conception so we had a different group of people. Then, as we changed our script I realised we needed more people. We have a group of dancers and another group, forming the chorus which will recite the lines. The best thing to have happened is that, apart from the selected few, some students themselves came forward and asked me if they could participate. So, in fact, leaving aside veterans, nearly the entire cast is made up of students. Some of the 3rd year Knowledge students who are passing out this year decided to stay back during the holidays and participate in the programme.
After we had started rehearsing with the final script some performers suddenly dropped out because of personal reasons, so we had to find substitutes. This did cause some difficulties. But we had decided not to get disheartened by them.
We are in a strange situation now. So few students stay back in Pondicherry after finishing their studies that we cannot any more have a group of actors who by participating in a number of performances gain experience and form a ‘talent pool’ from which you can actually choose a cast. Either you can take very young and inexperienced students or you can take ex-students, teachers and other adults who are experienced but not so young. And when they are together on stage the contrast is very striking. So how do you see the future of the annual programmes? How are you going to find the participants?
The 1st December programme is actually supposed to be a programme of the School, and so students ought to participate in it. In my opinion, students should be asked to stay here during the holidays. It should be made compulsory. They can then go out after the 2nd and come back by the 15th. The School holidays were started only so that students could prepare for the 1st and 2nd December programmes. Since most of them go away every year there are some who have never watched a 1st December programme! If one has not participated in these annual programmes then one has really missed something very special in life. They are a unique feature of our Institution. Once the students pass out of the School and leave Pondy they will never get that chance again. These programmes give the students an opportunity to ‘offer’ something creative and artistic, so it would be in their interest if they could take full advantage of this.
Once upon a time people would have considered themselves lucky if they were given the role of even a soldier who did not have any lines to say. But now one has to beg and plead with people to even play the part of the hero or heroine. If they accept they make you feel as if they are doing you a great favour and you have to consider yourself very fortunate if they don’t leave the programme half way through. Why is there this lack of enthusiasm? Why have people forgotten the importance of the 1st December programme?
Not all are indifferent. There are still some who do consider it a privilege to participate. Some of them have confessed to me that when one of their classmates was chosen to participate they did feel a sting of disappointment.
It is true that things are not like before. There seems to be this wave of media culture which has taken everyone in its sweep. For children it starts much before they come to Knowledge, they are so deeply influenced by it. But I know our students also are a part of general humanity and cannot remain ‘untouched’. To be so deeply engrossed in the entertainment media that one cannot perceive the value of anything aesthetic is an alarming signal.
But I believe strongly that this is only a passing phase. The Benevolent Power which is protecting us will see to it that our students once again become aware of the difference between what is refined and what is gross and cheap. People have suggested to me that we explain to the children the importance that Mother gave to the 1st December programme. It is true. It is our responsibility. The present generation is really not informed about the significance of the 1st and 2nd December programmes.
The 1st December programme is always based on something written by Mother or Sri Aurobindo, and yet it is often very difficult to choose the theme or the text. Putting on a play by Sri Aurobindo has become nearly impossible for practical reasons. The actors are simply not available, it is a formidable task to direct a play when you have to develop characters and maintain a continuity. So increasingly directors are turning to abstract themes where only dance and recitation are involved. However this also is not something easy. The text is often lines from Savitri which are so charged with mantric power that they cannot be recited just anyhow. How do you prepare young students to be ready inwardly to express these lines on stage?
Yes, a preparation is necessary. The only way in which this can be done is to start preparing the students and other members of the cast very gently from July or August itself. Perhaps once a week they could familiarise themselves with the text on which they are going to work. They could work on a little at a time so that when they start the regular rehearsals in October they would have been sufficiently in the spirit and the mood of the lines to feel them truly.
During some rehearsals I noticed that some students would complain that they were being made to do preparatory exercises for too long. But they don’t realise that everything counts, even the time that they spend waiting, watching others work. The one hour that they spend working on Sri Aurobindo’s lines is like spending one hour in His presence.
Nowadays a lot of plays are put up during the year so we have quite a large batch of students who get some exposure on stage, but the inner preparation is something we, the directors, have to work upon; perhaps we must help the children to understand the difference between merely ‘acting’ on the stage and ‘offering’.

Waltz of poetry, story and drama !

Collected Plays & Short Stories (2 Vol.set) by Sri Aurobindo Amazon.com Home

June 26, 2004 Reviewer: Samesh Braroo (foster city, ca United States) - See all my reviews

Having read some of the greatest playwrights, from Shakespeare to Miller to Kalidasa to Chekov, I assumed I had seen it all, or at least summed a good some of it, but not. Welcome to the dramatic world of publicity shy Sri Aurobindo ! His poetic plays are a treat of humor, tragedy, language and understandings of our world. Sadly his dramas have been buried by his own more dominant works on Yoga. If he hadn't been approached by philosophy, that drove people into making more attention for his yoga and divine elaboration, he would have been recalled as a great dramatist. Sri Aurobindo is one of the greatest and rarest of poets, philosophers, story tellers and a spiritualist of the divine caliber - indeed one of the most virtuous sons that Heaven spared for mankind's love and respect, and if I may so add - joy's best tears will not be shed reading anything else!

Bringing history back

Stephen Jay Greenblatt talks about New Historicism, its genesis and future and his current concerns in Cultural Studies. SACHIDANANDA MOHANTY The Hindu Literary Review Sunday, Jun 05, 2005

Known as the founder of one of the most influential schools of literary theory and criticism today called New Historicism (or cultural poetics), Stephen Jay Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor at Harvard University, where he teaches English. With the publication of his Renaissance Self-Fashioning in 1984, Greenblatt's ideas revolutionised literary studies. He is also the editor of Norton Shakespeare. The new insights in "contextual" reading that he developed are widely applicable in various disciplines today. Excerpts from an interview.

On the genealogy of New Historicism

and his role in founding the movement

The formal education which I had received, and was grateful for, did not allow for certain questions to be asked, about society, culture, anthropology, gender and race. In the 1970s, Women's Studies played an important role as a catalytic agent. You began to ask what the rules of the discourse were, who was being allowed to speak and who was not. Berkeley, California, in the 1970s is also associated in my mind with the smell of tear gas. In a variety of ways, Berkeley then was in a ferment of rebellion. It was a time for change. I do not wish to claim that New Historicism was mine alone. Like so many things in the 1970s, it depended on a collective enterprise. We were sitting together, reading and arguing about Althusser, Marx, Freud late into the night. The immediate genealogy of New Historicism was not German historicism but the Marxism of the mid-20th Century. In my case, studying with Raymond Williams was very significant in Cambridge. In early 1970s, I used to teach Marxist aesthetics in Berkeley. In addition to being a way of rebelling against New Criticism, it was also an attempt to try to think about how to reintroduce history into cultural studies.

How different is New Historicism vis-à-vis

Bateson, Caudwell and Raymond Williams?

Raymond Williams is trying to hold on to the model which in Christopher Caudwell (of Illusion and Reality fame) is very strong — the idea that literature is part of the superstructure and economics is the base. We wanted to make the context not simply a safe background but actually a part of the enterprise. In an older historicism, you adduced a context in order to secure the meaning of a work of art. We wanted to say that what was being described as the context, was itself open to interpretation. It was not the stable background. We wanted to have the interpretive struggle shared by what used to be called the background.

On his interest in Shakespeare

and Renaissance Studies

If you are interested in Renaissance studies, it is hard not to be interested in Shakespeare. I became interested in Renaissance while studying for the tripos in Cambridge. I read at that time Sir Walter Raleigh's "Ocean's Love to Cynthia" and I remember being powerfully struck. I thought it was a fantastic poem. In fact, I thought that it was a poem strikingly modernist, a sort of poem written by T.S. Eliot. My sense of literature holds on to a strong aesthetic dimension, an encounter with something that seems to reach you only because Raleigh sounded like Whitman. It was a work that wasn't written in the 1920s. It was written in the 1590s. How does this work seem so contemporary? In other words, historicism for me arose from an aesthetic engagement of feeling that you have been spoken to. It rises from a contemporary encounter. It is not antiquarian. In that sense it is existential.

Some want to dislodge the Western Canon completely.

Others like Harold Bloom and Cleanth Brooks

have made a qualified response. Is he defensive?

No, I am not defensive. I am actually quite interested in the range of works from different parts of the world that have now been put in play in literary studies. It is a large world and it is appropriate that there should be many things read and studied. But, there are practical problems in anthology making. The Norton Anthology, for instance, is 6000 pages long and we can't make it longer. The question is, for every Anita Desai, Naipaul or Achebe that we bring in, what is it that we take out? As an editor you have to figure out where the centres of interest might be now. But this is an ongoing problem.

On the relationship between

literary production and social production

The idea that imagination is only the possession of specialists, that language is the possession of specialists is undemocratic and unjust: We know from our daily experience that language and imagination are universal possessions of humanity and they don't belong to particular classes, groups of specialists, particular races and religions. They are part of the apparatus of human life. There is something constricting and absurd in the counter position that only cultural production will be beside the imagination.

On New Historicism

as a network of signs

New historicists feel that they can use their hermeneutical skills on all aspects of culture. We understand that most of literature is signs of systems, but sign systems do not stop on the boundary of books. They are networks and dense textures that embrace all other fields as well. I myself have been greatly interested in anthropology, in history of art, and more recently, in the history of science and philosophy. There are no a priori limits.

On Marvelous Possessions and

the discovery of the new world and the genesis of this project

Towards 1998, the U.S. was in an elaborate multi-year build-up for the 500th anniversary of Columbus' landfall. That enterprise led to what I thought was a particularly repellent burst of American/ European chauvinism — a fantasy that there was nothing there before the Europeans arrived. For many years, I was teaching in the San Francisco Bay area and there was a remarkable statue of Columbus looking out into the Pacific, suggesting somehow that Columbus had been to California and was now setting his sights on Asia. The uncritical circulation of such ideas in the 1990s served the need of an answer, a response.

On the main insights of Marvelous Possessions

with regard to the history of ideas

In Columbus' diary, there is a chilling reference to a native who touches one of Columbus' swords and cuts his finger because he had not seen this kind of sharp metal object. But what fascinated me was the way in which the dream of possession was enacted through speeches, declarations and announcements. It was the idea that you could claim to own huge tracts of the globe and human beings who lived therein, through the performance of certain words — that seemed to be compelling and fascinating. In Columbus' speech acts, there is the emptying of the other as if the other had been erased, the other had no language. He was going to kidnap some of these people and bring them back so that they could learn how to speak. As the ancient principle aptly says, to be human is to have language.

On the crucial role storytelling plays

for the practitioner of New Historicism

The idea that you could somehow escape from a narrative, that you could find your way into some kind of scientific and analytical language, could only be done at an enormously high cost. In writing recently a popular biography of Shakespeare, I saw the attraction of doing this by tapping into the popular fascinations with the literary biography. And this fascination is entirely bound up with the desire to tell a story.

On connecting with the Indian cultural universe

while traveling to South Asia

India made an overwhelming impression. I was there for several weeks. I had the feeling of encountering a world rich and complex, dense and bursting with life, intellectual and cultural energy.

On the future of

New Historicism

At least in the American cultural scene, a lot of the work of New Historicism has been absorbed. It is no longer new. It is well established. It is being absorbed into ordinary works of literary studies. New Historicism is moving, at least in one direction, towards a trust in mobility, not only in travel narratives but in the idea that culture itself is always moving from one place to another. And it is that extraordinary mobility of which India is a sublime example. That seemed to be one of the challenges in the years ahead. Sachidananda Mohanty is Professor of English at the University of Hyderabad and a recipient of the 1992 Katha Award for outstanding translation.

Premchand a rare voice against social exploitation: PM

New Delhi: The Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh, has said that Premchand's writings belong to that unique category of literature which have deeply influenced progressive forces all over the world. Calling his literature, a rare voice against the social exploitation, the Prime Minister said that Premchand used literature as a powerful weapon for the cause of the people riddled with social and economic deprivation. Dr. Manmohan Singh was releasing Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi versions of Seva Sadan and Hindi, Urdu versions of Rangbhumi on the occasion of 125th birth anniversary of Munshi Premchand, here today. Chairman, National Book Trust, Shri Bipin Chandra, renowned Hindi critic, Prof. Namwar Singh and Urdu scholar Prof. Mohammad Hasan also addressed the gathering. newsletter@indiaedunews.net

A rich veneer of subversion

Subaltern soliloquy Utpal Banerjee The Pioneer July 09, 2005

In Shakespeare's Othello, the Moor of Venice fell for and married Desdemona, but is the Moor's conversion to Christianity not a hidden agenda in the turmoil-ridden manoeuvres in the play? Our own epic poet Kalidasa may not be the Indian syllabus-makers' choice, yet his prototype of a jilted and discarded woman who finally walks out on her abhorrent lover-king in Abhijnanam Shakuntalam, is a familiar one. Parnab Mukherjee, who presented Kalidasa's Kumarsambhava, at the India International Centre besides carrying the burden of soliloquy on his sturdy shoulders, passionately believes that both Kalidasa and Shakespeare, in their own times, have left a rich veneer of subversion in their otherwise main text - raising questions on ethics, morality, sexuality, body and body-politics.

Using the superbly lyrical transcreation by Rishi Aurobindo, as well as the part rendering by Ritwik Ghatak, he keeps the story-line fairly linear, namely, the disturbances created by demons like Tarakasura; Kamadeva's efforts to tempt Shiva to fall in love with Parvati resulting in fiasco; Parvati's resolve to stick it out alone; Shiva's disguised encounter with Parvati culminating in the marriage; the much-awaited birth of Kumara; the latter's heroism as he takes on the demons; and annihilation of the evil forces after a marathon battle. "I feel Kalidasa has a powerful undertone of protest in his writings.

I consider him great for the extraordinary lyricism of his verses, but beyond that sublimity lies a very strong matrix of protest literature, which is relatively unexplored. I'm working on my fellowship on 'Alternative Approaches to Theatre and Media'. This brought me close to 'café theatre' in Kolkata and Darjeeling. I'm particularly connected with the jute-mill lockouts on the Hoogly river-stretch and the closed tea gardens in the Doors, apart from conducting programmes in Delhi and Benaras."

Mukherjee adds, "My production combines installation techniques, Purulia Chhau (in the battle sequences), hand shadowgraphs, multi-media exploration and interplay of modern symbols to create a memory scape. I've used video clippings of 9\11, I think the event shares striking similarities with the war among gods and demons." According to this young director, Kumarasambhava upholds two modern traits. Firstly, Shiva decides to marry when he wants to. This conveys male-domination. Second, only he can endorse the war and allow Kumara to fight. This is not different from dynastic pattern, as evident in Bush, Senior and Bush, Junior! Looking at Kalidasa's subaltern theatre, I was inspired by Badal Sircar's 'Third Theatre. I, too, am using spaces which are non-proscenium but, unlike Badalda, my performance is spread out."

Bride of the fire

Bride of the fire, clasp me now close,

Bride of the fire!

I’ve shed the bloom of the earthly rose,

I have slain desire.

Beauty of the light, surround my life,

Beauty of the light!

I have sacrificed longing and parted from grief,

I can bear thy delight.

Image of ecstasy, thrill and enlace,

Image of bliss!

I would see only thy marvelous face,

Feel only thy kiss.

Voice of infinity, sound in my heart,

Call of the one!

Stamp there thy radiance, never to part,

O living sun.

— Sri Aurobindo

DNA Sunday, October 16, 2005 20:30 IST

Music and the Soul

The Rautavaara Connection: In the second to last chapter of Music and the Soul, I wrote a lengthy essay on the music of the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara (b. 1928), whom I consider to be an "evolving mystic." Rautavaara's music, considered as a whole, records his spiritual evolution beyond the level of thinking mind that most composers work from.

I believe that the higher levels of creative achievement are related to higher levels of consciousness experienced by longtime meditators. Beyond the thinking mind comes higher mind, illumined mind, intuitive mind, and overmind. (These terms come from the Integral Yoga developed by the early twentieth-century spiritual teacher Sri Aurobindo.)

An evolving mystic is one who is progressing through these states with each stylistic period. Bach represents the highest level of development, as an overmind composer. At this level, the cosmic or God consciousness works directly through the composer with no interference from the ego. On the other extreme, thinking mind composers are bound by the ego.

The determining factor is where one's music originates from. The easier it is for a composer to access the seventh (expanded consciousness) and eighth (cosmic consciousness) centers in his or her music, the higher the level of spiritual evolution, and the greater the likelihood of producing a transcendent musical experience in a listener. Rautavaara seems to me to have achieved the level of illumined mind, a rare distinction. Illumined mind composers write music from middle or upper 7. posted by Kurt Leland Saturday, December 17, 2005 at 9:22 AM

Art contributes to enlightenment and spiritual renewal

Cecilia Suhr's Vision Artist's Vision

A man is a transitional being. -Sri Aurobindo

Most artists are guided by a vision, regardless of whether or not they openly share it with others. Some artists may feel that explicating one's own work defeats the purpose of creation, for creating artwork in and of itself is a means of communication, a silent communication between separate souls. In my artistic endeavors, a handful of authors has influenced and reaffirmed my artistic vision and philosophy of artistry.

However, first and foremost, I owe a large debt to the great composers of the past; in my life, the most prominent are Ravel, Stravinsky, Brahms, Shostakovich, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Ysaye, Wieniawski, Tchaikovsky, Bruch, Sibelius, Bach, Paganini, Bartok, Schumann, Barber, Bloch, Vieuxetemp, Arensky, Scriabin, Chopin, Saint-Saens, Sarasate, and Accolay.

Through their music, I heard their invisible outcry as it rang out in between each note and pause. More than a mere attempt to create beauty, their music contained messages filled with encouragement and love for the subsequent generations' creators. These new artists' mission is to uplift and refresh the ailing spirit of a society in desperate need of transformation. To be an artist in today's society is, indeed, a difficult task. Nevertheless, countless struggling artists continue to create their works, seeking audiences for their creations and hoping for appreciation. This virtual space is thus a blessing and an outlet for my work. I am comforted by the knowledge that my inner voices will be heard by the few who may stumble upon this site.

My music does not only reflect life itself. In my mind, it builds a transitory bridge between life and the beyond. My hope is that whoever listens to my music will proceed on his or her journey with a richer understanding of the way in which art contributes to enlightenment and spiritual renewal. The end does not exist, and perfection never ceases. Only in the process of "perfecting" can my breath be rejuvenated. Cecilia Suhr Thursday, January 05, 2006

"My hope is that whoever listens to my music will proceed on his or her journey with a richer understanding of the way in which art contributes to enlightenment and spiritual renewal."Very well put. Posted by Mike Barber on Sunday, January 08, 2006 at 2:27 PM

Emergence of some common language

> > > > Hindi Nationalism Author: Alok Rai 129 pgs., Orient Longman, 2000 — Sundaram

As a young boy from a south Indian family being brought up in north India I still remember my puzzlement at what exactly the ‘Hindi’ language was all about. While on one hand much of the local population spoke its own lingo — Bundelkhandi – the ‘Hindi’ that was taught in my school was quite different from the ‘Hindi’ I heard in the Bollywood movies. Adding to the confusion was that learning ‘Hindi’ was easier for me with my Sanskritised Tamil background than for many of my classmates from the northern Indian states! And then of course was the conundrum of what exactly was Urdu — was it really a different language or was it invented to sing ghazals, and organize mushairas ?

In his very absorbing and important work of cultural analysis titled ‘Hindi Nationalism’, Alok Rai not only clears up such confusions but also explains the pernicious politics of defining, redefining, refining and ultimately defiling Hindi as played out in the cow belt states over the last century and a half. At another level Rai, who just happens to be the legendary Premchand’s grandson, neatly links up the history of linguistic battles in northern India with the contemporary rise of political Hindutva and points out the reasons why English-speaking, westernised, Nehruvian ‘secularists’ fail to contain this menace.

To begin with, Rai goes back in history to the days prior to the carefully contrived debate between ‘Hindi’ and ‘Urdu’ when the two had not yet acquired distinct ‘identities’ and were indistinguishable as the most popularly spoken language of the northern Indian states. Born out of a long process of fusion of cultures, local and foreign influences as well as the daily creative talents of the common citizen, Hindi and Urdu were but two names of the same language. In tracing the ‘original sin’ that led to the schizophrenic split in the Hindi-Urdu unity, Rai’s research naturally goes back to the early days of British colonial rule around the turn of the eighteenth century when a British surgeon and self-styled linguist named John Borthwick Gilchrist took up the task of teaching ‘Hindoostanee’ to newly appointed officers of the East India Company. The College of Fort William set up in 1800, where Gilchrist was appointed Professor of Hindustani, brought together a staff of Indian scholars and translators who took upon themselves the onerous task of defining what the language was really all about.

Avoiding the cliched charge of adopting a deliberate ‘divide and rule’ policy against Gilchrist, Rai nevertheless points out how his attempts (aided by local zealots) to restore the language to its imagined ‘pre-Mughal’ form ended up in turning out all the Arabic and Persian words in Hindustani and substituting Sanskrit ones. In the words of one historian quoted in Rai’s monograph, “The British — set out to ‘discover’ something which science told them had to be there; not surprisingly, they ‘succeeded’ and soon generated a vast and consequential literature of grammars, dictionaries and lexicographies”.

Once initiated, this construction of a ‘pure’ Hindustani, like a predictable science-fiction monster, took a life of its own. Aided, abetted and fiercely nurtured by self-appointed guardians of the language from the savarna castes of Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, this process finally laid the foundations of the unintelligible, highly Sanskritised ‘Hindi’ that has mistakenly been foisted on the Indian people as their ‘national language’. (While still marginally better than contemporary ‘Zee TV Hindi’ which uses phrases like “Pradhaan Mantri ney Parliament mey Vote of Thanks present kiya” or the notorious “Hamey banana hey” of Rajiv Gandhi, there are few – familiar with the living languages of northern India – who would not throw up when our Deputy Prime Minister LK Advani starts off in his ultra-puritanical ‘Hindi’.)

Tragically enough, in a classic example of how one fundamentalism feeds off another, the systematic attempts to de-Persianise and de-Arabicise Hindustani also provoked similar efforts to de-Sanskritise Urdu within sections of the Muslim elites. Ironically, it is this highly Arabicised and incomprehensible ‘Urdu’, that has become the national language of Pakistan and is a mirror image of the highly Sanskritised ‘Hindi’ in the Indian context.

Rai very interestingly points out that in its early stages, in the first half of the nineteenth century, not all of the emerging competition between ‘Hindi’ and ‘Urdu’ was about zealotry. There was, intertwined within this emerging lingusitic battle, also the valid struggle to replace the Persian script– used by the old Mughal rulers and understood only by a minority of both Muslims and Hindus– by the more widely used Nagari (Devanagari) as the language of administration and courts in northern Indian provinces.

Over a period of time, however, it was this campaign to oust Persian and open up employment opportunities for those familiar with Nagari that coalesced with the resentment of the Hindu savarna castes against political and economic domination by the Awadh ‘Muslim’ elite. The roots of the modern ‘Hindu-Muslim’ divide, cunningly exploited by colonial administrators and continued to this day by successive Indian governments were thus embedded in the controversy over language and indeed became part of common vocabulary itself.

Amidst all this depressing history of the decline of the composite culture and lifestyle that large parts of pre-British India was justly famous for, Rai points out, the one movement that could have still nipped the emerging menace of religious sectarianism in its bud was the 1857 War of Independence. But the defeat of the rebels and the massacres of thousands of innocent civilians that the British carried out in reprisal, Rai says, only exacerbated the divide with both the post-1857 Hindu and Muslim elites competing with each other to prove their ‘loyalty’ to their now well-entrenched British ‘masters’.

Comparing these massacres to the Nazi Holocaust, Rai tellingly points out that the only difference between the two events was that in the case of 1857 the ‘Nazis won the war’ and the “surviving victims were condemned to living with the victorious victimisers: the ‘guilt’ of 1857 was visited solely on the victims, while the vengeful victors became also the party of virtue, of progress and modernity”.

One result of the terror unleashed by the vengeful British rulers was that members of the Hindu savarna castes, who formed the bulk of the early Hindi/Nagari agitations, sought to distinguish themselves from the Muslims who had been so ‘unforgivingly disloyal’ in 1857. When Raja Shiva Prasad, one of the early protagonists of Hindi/Nagari, petitioned the British government on behalf of Nagari in 1868 he sought to assure the rulers that the Hindu middle-class would be happy to accept the domination of the ‘fair-complexioned’. “Never will it be safe to leave any district without a fair-complexioned head. It is not the excess but rather the dearth of the fair-complexioned that we have to complain of”. (Raja Shiva Prasad could have been Jaswant Singh, our erstwhile foreign minister talking to his new masters in the United States on behalf of the ‘Hindutva’ middle-classes !)

Rai’s account of the debates in the immediate period after Indian Independence over making Hindi the national language, the anti-Hindi agitation in non-Hindi speaking states and the proliferation of ‘Hindiwallahs’ out to preserve the ‘purity’ of ‘Hindi’ will be familiar to most readers. However, while deploring the repressed, upper-caste nature of official ‘Hindi’, Rai also poses an important question whether the current dominance of English as the language of the privileged is really sustainable.

“English is too much the language of privilege, it is too visible a symbol of a ruling elite whose social base and claim to legitimacy is becoming ever narrower and ever more untenable. English cannot break out of its narcissistic confinement, its historical complicity with a scavenging elite”. One way out of this dilemma he suggests is to adhere to the goal of democratic and participative citizenship by first implementing governance in different parts of India in the local languages. Very importantly he concludes that in the Hindi heartland, using this principle, means using all the variants of Hindi such as Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Maithili etc., and not the same old Sanskritised ‘Hindi’ of the upper-caste, urban elites. The needs of communication between different regions he avers will ensure, in the longer term, the emergence of some common language that could be ‘something like Hindi’. But this process cannot even begin till the imposter Advani’s ‘Hindi’ stands in the way!

Music and Creativity assist our transformation

"Importance of Music in Education Plato in his Republic has dealt with extraordinary emphasis on the importance of music in education; as is the music to which a people is accustomed, so, he says in effect, is the character of that people. The importance of painting and sculpture is hardly less. The mind is profoundly influenced by what it sees and, if the eye is trained from the days of childhood to the contemplation and understanding of beauty, harmony and just arrangement in line and color, the tastes, habits and character will be insensibly trained to follow a similar law of beauty, harmony and just arrangement in the life of adult man... A similar result is produced on the emotions by the study of beautiful or noble art. We have spoken of the purification of the heart, the chittaSuddhi, which Aristotle assigned as the essential office of poetry, and have pointed out that it is done in poetry by the detached and disinterested enjoyment of the eight rasas or forms of emotional aestheticism which make up life unalloyed by the disturbance of the lower self-regarding passions. Painting and sculpture work in the same direction by different means. Art sometimes uses the same means as poetry but cannot do it to the same extent because it has not the movement of poetry; it is fixed, still, it expresses only a given moment, a given point in space and cannot move freely through time and region. But it is precisely this stillness, this calm, this fixity which gives its separate value to Art. Poetry raises the emotions and gives each its separate delight. Art stills the emotions and teaches them the delight of a restrained and limited satisfaction, - this indeed was the characteristic that the Greeks, a nation of artists far more artistic than poetic, tried to bring into their poetry. Music deepens the emotions and harmonises them with each other. Between them music, art and poetry are a perfect education for the soul; they make and keep its movements purified, self-controlled, deep and harmonious. These, therefore, are agents which cannot profitably be neglected by humanity on its onward march or degraded to the mere satisfaction of sensuous pleasure which will disintegrate rather than build the character. They are, when properly used, great educating, edifying and civilising forces." Sri Aurobindo from www.auromusic.org About everydayness What is everyday guru?