The Saadhu Blog
What Is Wrong With The World
Sept 11, 2015 • 5 min read
The Times had written to several famous authors asking them "What is wrong with the world today?" They received one reply,
Return Of The Buddha
Aug 21, 2015 • 6 min read
Buddha has returned not only to India but to all of South Asia, through the a book by Prof. Himanshu Prabha Ray. She had titled it 'Return of the Buddha. Ancient Symbols for a New Nation'. I came to know about the book after she had presented a paper at the National Archives, New Delhi, on 'Archaeology of Buddhism in India: Sourcing the Archives', in June 2015. Because I did not have the good fortune to listen to the presentation, I wrote to her requesting a copy of her paper, and she wrote to me that it was based on her book, 'Return of the Buddha'.
Booker And Bookmakers
Aug 12, 2015 • 5 min read
"The Man Booker Prize promotes the finest in fiction by rewarding the very best book of the year. The prize is the world's most important literary award and has the power to transform fortunes of authors and publishers" This is how the Daily News Muse article on July 5, 2015 began. This is what Man Booker organizers themselves are claiming.
Art Into Politics
Aug 10, 2015 • 6 min read
New York University offers a course, Master of Arts in Arts Politics. "The politics that makes art. The politics that art makes.....Arts politics attends to both formal and informal political processes that bear on the production, dissemination, and reception of the arts. It integrates approaches from the humanities, social sciences, and the arts themselves. It studies governmental and policy processes and the institutional ecology and political economy of the arts. It employs perspectives that understand how to decode cultural meanings, how social movements are formed, and how to read the aesthetic dimension of contemporary politics. Through official patronage and censorship, celebration and loathing, affirmation and critique of prevailing values, art has long been imbricated and implicated in the political. Yet arts politics is never fixed; its historical and cross-cultural variations help us understand what possibilities exist for civically engaged artists working in the present."
Year Of Reading
July 29, 2015 • 5 min read
Throughout history, many kings and rulers of the world had celebrated their birthdays, in different ways, but mostly to continue with their megalomania. But when a king proclaims his 60th Birth Anniversary celebrations as the Year of Reading for the children of the country, he is really entitled to the title of king. He is not doing it for himself but for his country.
Copyright Of Ideas
June 30, 2015 • 5 min read
When a person, still wet behind the years, yet who probably believes himself to be the greatest writer-to-be of the 21st century, is worried that a highly respected, very senior author could steal his ideas, it turns the whole concept of copyright and plagiarism upside down. A creative writer could always have a few hundred ideas bursting to come out of his mind, and the same ideas could be in the minds of many. I would feel really honoured if another writer used my ideas to create a better work of art.
Nightmare Merchants
June 23, 2015 • 5 min read
As I was reading 'The Lost Symbol', I began to wonder if a symbol had been really lost, or if Dan Brown had lost himself in all the ancient scriptures and Masonic beliefs and practices. If Brown had really studied Masonic rites, symbols and their meanings, along with the Bible and the religious philosophies and writings, and if he had understood even a fraction of what these scriptures had tried to tell him, he would never have written this book.
Nightmares
June 13, 2015 • 5 min read
"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake." says James Joyce, through Stephen Dedalus, in Ulysses. This line has been quoted often, and all over the English speaking world it has been studied, commented upon, speculating on what Joyce meant by them, and what it means today. Karl Marx had put it another way. "The tradition of dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."