Jagat

I went to Delhi on Sunday night for a meeting at the IGNCA where Shrivatsaji was discussing a project for a 10-day program about Braj to be held at the IGNCA next March. He was discussing primarily with Molly Kaushal, who is the head of the Janapada Sampada (or folk arts) division. I sat in on the meeting, which only ran into a little controversy when Shrivatsa mentioned the difficulty he had in getting a certain pandit to come to San Francisco to participate in a conference. This man insisted that he be able to see the very cow that he would drink the milk from. This was of course impossible to arrange for someone staying in a hotel in the downtown of an American city, and so he refused. Ms. Mehtab, a joint secretary at the IGNCA, then said, well this is precisely the kind of person we should refuse to have... And let's have a session on whether this is actually good for anyone... and what about the widows of Braj? And how come 90% of them come from Bengal? After all, isn't t...

After many delays, I finally got to talk to Shrivatsa Goswami today and I am able to report some good news. It looks like the Grantha Mandir is going to get sponsoring directly from the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts . Through Shrivatsa, they have already been mirroring some of our texts, but not keeping up very well. This means that we will probably be able to hire a couple of typists here and in Rishikesh and also find someone who can learn the database program that Madhavananda developed for the site. Madhavananda will be coming to Rishikesh in July and I hope that we can make good progress on this and other counts while he is there. Shrivatsa has been working with IGNCA for a number of years and has published 10 books over that time through them. One of them is, of course, Haberman's fine translation of the Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu. Otherwise, we covered a number of other topics. Shrivatsa was in form with his own historical obsession, the politics of 16th century Ch...