Jagat

 Raman Iyer has started a GoFundMe page to collect funds for my travel to Canada. I thank him for his support and approve of it. https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-jagadanandaji-travel-to-find-his-missing-son ( https://gofund.me/ccab272e ) Thanks to all those who are so generously helping me with this painful but necessary pilgrimage. 

जीव तीर्थ संस्कृतम् I don't want to leave Vrindavan or my cave in the Jiva Institute, but I have been obliged to change my plans somewhat and resume a responsibility towards my family because of these very painful circumstances. These are the crazy years of Covid. I will continue giving classes in Sanskrit and even if I cannot be back in Vrindavan by Karttik (because of visa and flight restrictions) I will continue to give them on Zoom, as currently. It is best when we have live students present physically on the premises, but in the current circumstances, easy movement between countries has been disrupted, and India is considered to be a particularly tough place for Covid, even though in terms of cases per population [342 per million, compared to USA nearly 2000 or Brazil 2700.], it is quite far down the list. But there are still a huge number of cases. So the new normal appears to be Zoom. Let me state unequivocally, however, that I am committed to my students and I am looking f...

My dear friends. Radhe Radhe! Anne and I both appreciate the positive vibrations and sentiments coming from you all [in response to posts on Facebook about Pavel]. In circumstances like this, it takes solidarity from the living to give one the will to continue. ⁠ That is the practical social reality for the living. But Krishna says one should lament neither for the living nor the dead. Of course Pavel is still alive, in this form or another, because once having existence, the soul never loses it. He is simply visible to us physically or not. ⁠ In actual fact, I have long thought about love in this world and the next. The Upanishads and the Bhagavatam tell us that we love others because of ourselves. We are self-centered and so others' value is measured in how much pleasure they give us. And we call that pleasure love. ⁠ But what we don't know is that it is actually the presence of the Self in every individual that attracts us, is revealed to us, and that is the true thing that ...

The entire Brzezinski and Campeano families have been shocked and devastated by the news that my son Pavel (30 years old) disappeared in a popular wilderness and mountain biking area near Quebec City, Vallée du Bras-nord . He went up last Sunday, the 15th, and went missing on the same day. We have no idea what happened to him.  He was a beautiful child, smart, talented, full of potential. He had growing pains, but was just coming through them all -- he finally got his computer science degree, got a good paying job he liked doing, had friends and a girlfriend. Life was looking up for him like never before. He had seemingly come through a dark zone and was opening up to a life of achievement. It is terrible not to know what happened to him. It is terrible to see it all come to such a sudden and meaningless end. He was blessed in so many ways. From childhood he had been hearing the Holy Name. He had taken prasada and loved it. He was a lifelong vegetarian, and a great advertisement...

Towards an objective assessment   So far, the gist of my argument has been that the problem of poetry appreciation is mainly one of subjectivity—and that an unsurpassable distance separates the modern person, the uncultivated person, and the non-devotee, from the poetry of Rūpa Gosvāmī. But such arguments, though not without validity, do an injustice to both Professor De and his capacity to make legitimate criticism as well as to Rūpa Gosvāmī by failing to establish what I feel is his rightful claim to a place of honor in the history of Sanskrit literature. It is a real slap in the face to consider him a mere technician, without fully acknowledging the deep feeling and ultimate concern he had for his subject matter, what to speak of his ability to transmit these in his work. I may also have undermined my argument by intimating that the devotee's ability to criticize is impaired by a favorable bias toward any poetry, good or bad, dealing with Kṛṣṇa.   But we have also argu...

  6. Rasa : From aesthetic to sacred rapture Positive aspects of Sanskrit poetry that were the measuring sticks used by the connoisseurs of old and which can still be enjoyed by the modern reader are manifold: we can point to its meter, its sonority, or its love for multiple layers of meaning. Both Nathan and Ingalls precede their translations with excellent summaries of these aspects for the uninitiated and I heartily recommend the reader to study these essays.   The theory of language called sphoṭa-vāda , though universally applicable, has a recognizable influence on Sanskrit poetry. Sounds and words are said to build up to a cumulative effect that is not realized until the final pieces of the puzzle fall into place. Since Sanskrit is a highly inflected language, the poet enjoys a license for almost infinite variations of word order and can still count on word inflections and context to clarify syntactical relations. Powerful meters carry the words forward inexorably, bu...