Jagat

I am writing quickly just in case there is another power failure, which interrupted my last attempt to blog. Unfortunately, I seem to have come down with a bad cold. I got up at 2.00 a.m. and could not go back to sleep my nose was running so much. I followed the meditation program, but did not do any yoga. I took some ayurvedic medicine a few minutes ago and I already feel a bit better. Could it really be that effective? Sanjay (the person who got me this gig) is here and I attended both his English and Hindi classes. Nearly all the ashram people come to listen to him speak on philosophy in Engish. He introduced me with great praise. He reminds me a bit of SN, but he is younger and better looking (maybe I should not say that publicly! Well Sanjay is a householder and SN a bearded renunciate). I think he also is a little more skeptical. Afterwards he told me that he thought he had benefited greatly from being in the west, which makes him a lot less blind in his faith. His philosoph...

I spent all day at the university for the Sanskrit conference. Third annual. Sanjaya put me as the first speaker. तिक्तेन समारभ्यताम् ! In fact, I was very tired and my talk was not very well prepared. So I just talked off the cuff. Sanjay followed; he was well-prepared with a Power Point presentation about Bhishma's आश्रमधर्म . He is very eloquent and droll. Next speaker was Giribharatan, the Sanskrit Bharati missionary. Sanskrit Bharati has come out with a very nice book on scientific advances and found in the Sanskrit literature, which was the basis of his talk. Ajaya Rao, a young professor at the University of Toronto, spoke about making Sanskrit a living language. All of these speakers were followed by lively question periods and discussions, which was perhaps the best feature of this year's conference. Arvind Sharma said to me that it seems everyone is losing their inhibitions. An elderly engineering professor from India named Brij Kashyap read some Sanskrit poems he had ...