An old book, but a great account of explorers through the ages, and across continents.
https://archive.org/details/unrollingmapstor0000leon/page/n13/mode/1up
Category: book review.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
This Booker prize winner of 2022 delves into the history of Sri Lanka. The photographer Maali is already dead, but he has seven moons of wandering around before he leaves the world. The book actually throws light on the different groups in Sri Lanka, ethnic conflicts and civil war. It is interesting but by the time I reached the fifth moon, it seemed repetitive, with headless bodies constantly moving around. Anyway an innovative approach. Would recommend it to anyone interested in Sri Lanka.
The Soul’s Growth
Another book by C W Leadbeater, the Theosophist who discovered J Krishnamurti in 1909 and believed he was the messiah. He wrote The Lives of Alcyone on Krishnamurti’s previous lives. Star names were given to many adepts of the past, and Orion was one such name. This book is the third in the series The Soul’s Growth through Reincarnation. Orion’s lives were investigated in 1907, before Krishnamurti was discovered. But he had a place in the Lives of Alcyone too.
Were these invented stories? Quite likely, but still intriguing.
Sri M, Apprenticed to a Himalayan Master
Sri M is a teacher and guide, a spiritual person , who has set up the Satsang Foundation in Madanapalle, Andhra Pradesh. His fame has grown over the years, and recently he was awarded the Padma Bhushan. Born Mumtaz Ali, he is non-sectarian, one of those who belongs to no religion, or all religions, though he also delves deep into Hindu texts such as the Upanishads. Recently I read one of his books, Apprenticed to a Himalayan Master.
I had been wanting to read it as I knew him when he was Mumtaz Ali and headed the Neelbagh School, a school for rural children started by the brilliant educator David Horsburgh. Even in those days, in the 1990s, I was intrigued by his stories of his spiritual quest, and urged him to write them down. He also had a prodigious memory, and I recollect he could recite the entire Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit.
At some point he moved away from Neelbagh, and became Sri M, starting his ashram in Madanapalle. Along with a small group, he once led a peace march from Kanyakumari to Kashmir, has opened other educational institutions and given talks across the world.
This book, his autobiography, is not for sceptics as it contains some fantastic material, difficult to believe. Are there really Nagas who can descend from some other world? His many experiences with his teacher, his different names, and his life in the Himalayas are all narrated here. For me, however, the book was more interesting for its cultural portrayal , beginning with his early childhood, how as a Muslim boy he was allowed to enter a temple, and his family’s harmonious relationships with their Hindu neighbours. The book also has a wealth of information on other historical spiritual people, and is valuable for this, not only for the insights it provides. Sri M believes in the truths of ancient Hindu texts, but at the same time has not denied his roots in his birth religion of Islam, or lost his empathy for people of all religions.
I have not written about the details of his life here, as these are easily available on the internet.
Letters of Wisdom by B. Sanjiva Rao
While writing one book, one comes across a thousand others. This is one of the books only peripherally related to J Krishnamurti. B Sanjiva Rao was employed in the Indian Education Service [retired 1938] and was married to Padma, who shared his world view of working for others rather than oneself. A close associate of Annie Besant, he was entrusted with the task of buying 400 acres of land around the Ganga river near Varanasi. Krishnamurti asked him to do this, but provided neither funds nor support. Having promised Mrs Besant to help, support and follow Krishnamurti, Sanjiva Rao set out to do this, not matter how daunting the task. But this book only touches on the problems he faced, and how Rabindranath Tagore helped out, providing his own architect, Surendranath Kar, and coming himself for the inauguration of the Montessori section of the Rajghat Besant School in 1934.
The book actually is a series of letters written to a young friend and relative, Vasanti Rao, who at the age of 17 settled in Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry [Puducherry], having renounced the world. On a visit there Sanjiva met her and found in her a spiritual friend. His letters to her, from 1958 to the time of his death in 1965, are part spiritual musings and part autobiography. They reveal the endless conflicts among Theosophists, and also among Krishnamurti supporters. How does one reach and understand the true Self? Sanjiva Rao continuously tried to understand himself and the world around him, while working incessantly on the tasks given to him.
We don’t have Vasanti’s replies to him, so the book is one-sided. Nevertheless, it makes interesting reading, with some beautiful passages.
Bohm-Biederman Correspondence: Creativity and Science
The physicist David Bohm and the artist Charles Biederman wrote letters to each other on relationships between art and science, amounting to 4000 pages! This book presents some of these letters, edited by Paavo Pylkkanen. The letters are fascinating, brimming with ideas, and even opening the book at random and reading a few lines provides something to think about. Bohm, as seen earlier in a review of his biography, sought to find the universal principles of life, the inner reflecting the outer, and vice versa. Biederman, a structurist in his artistic style, tried to represent the structure of reality through geometric planes. Among the aspects they discussed was how the past existed in the present, each moment therefore, representing an inexhaustible totality. They discussed art, physics, nature, time, relativity, identity, and a lot more. A refreshing book to delve into, to look at two intellectuals exploring the nuances of life.
Madame Blavatsky–fiction
Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society in 1875, well known for her works on the occult, including The Secret Doctrine and Isis Unveiled, also wrote some horror stories. These were evidently based on her nightmares. I just read The Ensouled Violin, expecting something mysterious and beautiful, but found a gruesome story of violinists achieving heights by using the intestines of loved ones as violin strings!
The story narrates that it was rumoured that Paganini’s brilliant playing was due to this. ‘Exaggerated as this idea may seem to some, it has nothing impossible in it.’ How the young violinist Franz Stenio, emulates this rumour, and how it ends in disaster, forms the rest of this horror story, which evidently draws on another, The Violin of Cremona.
The Ensouled Violin is available online, though I don’t recommend it.
Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm
David Bohm [1917-92] was something of a genius, a physicist always searching for parallels between theories of physics and the functioning of the universe. This biography by F. David Peat, is one of the best books I have read for a long time. Bohm delved into quantum physics with innovative theories that were not always appreciated by other physicists at the time. He should have won the Nobel Prize but somehow he was overlooked. From childhood he thought about the cosmos and created a world of imagination, imagining a light that could penetrate matter.
Among Bohm’s significant theories was that of implicate order. Explicate order that we see around us reflects something that cannot be seen, that is, implicate order. Thus the dichotomy between mind and matter, brain and consciousness, could be resolved. He also proposed that information, like matter and energy, is a basic principle of nature.
On the whole he had a difficult and in some ways a tragic life. But he was lucky that his wife Saral was always there to support him. At first a communist, Bohm, born to an immigrant family in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, had to leave the US during the McCarthy years. He was teaching at Princeton, but even that elite university succumbed to political pressure. He went to Brazil, later to Israel, and finally settled in Birkbeck College in England.
Bohm, says his biographer, ‘took the world on his shoulders and agonised about what should be done. Corruption, political mistakes, and military actions he believed, were all evidence of deep errors in human thought and society. And since Bohm believed in the wholeness of the world and consciousness, these errors were also enfolded within his own thinking.’
Einstein had referred to Bohm as his ‘intellectual son’, and intervened several times to help him get a job, difficult because of Bohm’s communist past.
I came across Bohm through his Dialogues with J Krishnamurti. Bohm’s ideas were similar to those of Krishnamurti even before meeting him, and thus these dialogues are among the most profound. Yet the relationship with Krishnamurti did not work out well. After many years of close association, one day Krishnamurti criticised him fiercely. Bohm, who had had episodes of depression earlier, sank into depression. He recovered from this, and even gave talks on Krishnamurti after the latter’s death, but heart problems and depression continued to haunt him.
This brilliant biography is for anyone interested in the world of physics, particularly new developments in quantum physics, and in the life of a man who suffered a lot, yet made immense contributions to the world.
E
Education–Not Just Grades
School education has so many variations, and across India there are schools that are trying to educate differently. Rajeev Sharma puts together the stories of some of these schools in this book, Not Just Grades.
Here we come across schools that have done away with exams and textbooks in the lower classes, and schools that specialise in admitting failures! There is a principal who makes a difference by first trying to get a good relationship with the students, and does this by sitting outside the school greeting the students who enter. This simple move was the beginning of an improvement in all aspects of the school. The book covers both urban and rural schools, as well as schools for first-generation learners.
Worth reading for anyone interested in education.
Writers and book reviews
Times have certainly changed. In the past there was no self-promotion. Writers spent their lives writing, some were recognised, some excellent authors faded away, hardly known.
Recently, I read a short review of a book [I am not sharing its name or that of the reviewer], that said something to the effect that it was written by undoubtedly the best writer of the 21st century–a brilliant new voice. How is it I had never heard of this book or author? I downloaded a sample. In the very first paragraph there were grammatical errors. Proceeding further, the story meandered in a meaningless way. Unable to continue I deleted the sample. The author was self-published and had paid a new small publisher, first for publishing it, and then for promoting the book.
I am not against self-publishing, in fact I believe it is the best way for an author to retain control over her work. But I am against fake reviews that people are paid to write. I have received several offers myself, Rs 4000 for four good reviews of your latest book, etc. , which of course I would never take up. If the book is good, or if it is controversial, people will review it themselves, without any encouragement or inducement.
Then there are those reviewers who are not paid, but rush to write critical reviews online, of books they have hardly understood–reviews that are again full of errors.
In today’s world, it is okay to advertise, perhaps it is essential, but shouldn’t a reviewer be honest, whether paid or unpaid? And shouldn’t they at least have basic writing skills, and some background knowledge?
Roshen Dalal 