Science, Culture, Integral Yoga

Though born on April 12, Herbie Hancock (1940 – ) is celebrating his 70th year today in Los Angeles. Our tribute to the master of jazz piano innovation.

The Isha Upanishad is an early Upanishad, and a highly condensed text, containing only seventeen verses. This Upanishad has a special significance for Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo’s relationship with this Upanishad goes back to the early years after his return to India in 1893, when he was a teacher at Baroda university. He began translating, contemplating and commenting on this Upanishad from that time. He continued taking this as one of the central pillars of his own engagement with the Indian tradition through the revolutionary period in Bengal (1905-1910). The final form in which we have it comes from the cultural and spiritual journal known as the Arya which he published from Pondicherry over the period 1914 to 1920, when he wrote all his major works. Here we find a growth or evolution in his engagement with this text which keeps pace with his own advance as a yogi. It leads us to wonder why Sri Aurobindo found this text so fascinating. At a certain point he started writing a commentary on this text which he titled The Life Divine. As anyone even slightly familiar with the writings of Sri Aurobindo knows, this is also the title of his most well known philosophical work , also serialized in the Arya. It became an independent text, with over a thousand pages. But perhaps it was a commentary on the Isha Upanishad that provided for him the initiatory movement and seed for this magnum opus of his philosophy. In retrospect we may say that what Sri Aurobindo found in this text is the quintessence of what would become his yoga philosophy, the idea of a divine life on earth and the condition for its possibility.

Dr Debarati Bandyopadhyay is a senior lecturer in the department of English and other modern European languages at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, West Bengal. Her areas of interest include fiction, literary theory, Indian literature and other literatures in English. She is working on her first novel.

In this short article, Bandyopadhyay revisits a number of Tagore’s better-known short-stories to show their innovative qualities of postmodern literature, marked by ambiguity and multiple interpretations and giving evidence of a variety of worlds in the making.

She can be reached at abdebarati@rediffmail.com.

Brilliant lecture that uses Tagore’s the Crisis in Civilization and Vivekananda’s visit to America as starting points and ends instancing a recent Amitabh Bachchan commercial, in which he is portrayed walking over a bridge representing two very different Indias. He then asks the question as to whether global India can still furnish the tools its founders endowed it with that make it worthy of being called a civilization in a Tagorean sense. Will globalization still furnish India the critical tools that its vast disenfranchised populations need to allow their critiques and grievances of it, to be heard? Dipesh deconstructs the Amitabh Bachchan commercial allowing one to see that the global narrative can lead us on to two very different shores…
Dipesh hits this one out of the Park!!! al.

The topic is Indian Modernity: Once Colonial, Now Global. Talk by Dr. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor at University of Chicago. Books by Dr. Chakrabarty include “From Colonial to Post Colonial: India and Pakistan in Transition”; Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (University Of Chicago Press, 2002), Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton University Press, 2000) and Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890-1940 (Princeton University Press, 1989)

Thus, temporal objects are constituted by primary memory through secondary memory facilitated by tertiary memory. Put more simply, consciousness constitutes objects imaginatively. This leads Stiegler to make the startling claim that consciousness and cinema are similarly structured. He explains:

the singularity of the cinematographic recording technique lies in the conjugation of two coincidences: on the one hand, the photo-phonographic coincidence of past and reality .. . inducing this “reality effect,” that is, this belief which is installed in the spectator immediately by the technique itself; on the other hand, the coincidence between the film flux and the flux of consciousness of the film’s spectator that triggers, in the play of movement between the photographic stills linked by the phonographic flux, the mechanism of complete adoption of the film’s time by the time of the spectator’s consciousness that, itself a flux, finds itself captured and “borne along” by the movement of images. This movement, invested by the desire for stories living in all spectators, frees the movements of consciousness characteristic of cinematographic emotion