The LED lamp designed by Clay Moulton and named Gravia, forming a portion of his master’s thesis, has just won second place in the Greener Gadgets Design Competition as part of the Greener Gadgets Conference in New York City. ...

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If we have seen the possibilities and pitfalls in Big Science given to us by the American model, we also notice its results in other places,—for example in Japan. Japan's first experience with high-level business and industrial development forms a good illustration to see how one can get trapped on the economic path when something alien enters into the system. Yoshiro Hoshino writes: “There is nothing worse than war for bringing about the destruction of nature, human beings, factories, housing, and transportation systems, and for causing starvation and sickness, the discharge of untreated factory wastes, and the destruction of farm lands. When environmental destruction is understood in its broadest and most fundamental sense, the original culprit is war.” America, after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, invaded Japan in another way. It looks as though the evil found another soil to grow and flourish in a vigorous manner. The present article Japan’s Second Defeat after the Second World War forms a chapter of my yet unpublished book Big Science and its Impact on Society....   more »

So was she left alone in the huge wood,
Surrounded by a dim unthinking world,
Her husband's corpse on her forsaken breast.
In her vast silent spirit motionless
She measured not her loss with helpless thoughts,
Nor rent with tears the marble seals of pain:
She rose not yet to face the dreadful god.
Over the body she loved her soul leaned out
In a great stillness without stir or voice,
As if her mind had died with Satyavan.
But still the human heart in her beat on.
Aware still of his being near to hers,
Closely she clasped to her the mute lifeless form
As though to guard the oneness they had been
And keep the spirit still within the frame.
Then suddenly there came on her the change
Which in tremendous moments of our lives
Can overtake sometimes the human soul
And hold it up towards its luminous source…
The voice of life is turned to infinite sounds,
The moments on great wings of lightning come
And godlike thought surprise the mind of earth.   more »

...Few of his contemporaries think of George Walker Bush as a visionary American president, unless they are using the term to imply a touch of madness. Yet early in his second term Bush launched a bold initiative to try to establish closer American ties with India, the world’s biggest democracy, in what may eventually be judged by historians as a move of great strategic importance and imagination...

Bush... has managed to cast aside 40 years of hostility and suspicion between America and India – and even agreed to start collaborating over nuclear energy – in the hope of strengthening India and its economy. And all for a special reason: the rise of China. ...   more »

Stephen Pfohl has written a great article on Norbert Wiener father of the field of cybernetics and undoubtedly one of the most brilliant scientist of the 20th century. The field of cybernetics not only has given us information technology, but a far reaching method of analysis used across all scholastic disciplines. While cybernetics or systems thinking is a tremendously effective instrument for studying all kinds of phenomena, Pfhol points out here of the possible hazardous implications when used primarily as a tool of the social sciences. Pfohl rightfully argues that cybernetic analysis comes up short as a tool for sociology in that it fails to take account of differentials of power held in society as well as the inequities of economic status. Since complexity science has its source also in cybernetics I would also assert that the same holds true in the frequent mis-application of complexity metaphors pertaining to social phenomena. rc..

All around me, inside me, flowing through me, between me and others, it is easy to discern signs of the flexible, mass marketing of cybernetic delirium. This is a delirium associated with both cyber-products and cyber-experience. "Cyber-this" and "cyber-that." Its hard to do the ritual of the check-out line these days, without some magnetic cyber-commodity-connectors wrapping their seductive sensors, cheek to cheek, in feedback loops with yours. Commanding attention. Inviting a try. Not that the effects are homogeneous. Nor the possibilities. From cyber-sex-shopping-surveillance, to cyber-philosophy, and even utopian dreams of cyborg revolts - whether for fun, or out of desperation, flaming desire, or for want of more passionate and politically effective connections - the world around and within me appears increasingly mediated by a kind of delirious cyber-hyphenation of reality itself. This is a short (sociological) story of the history of this hyphenated world. This story revolves around the delirium of Norbert Wiener, the so-called "father" of cybernetic perspectives on physical and social reality. Today, Wiener's delirium has become our own.   more »

The poet Shelley, who immortalised the skylark, would have been saddened to know that threatened songbirds in Spain are losing their voice. A study has found Dupont’s lark, a relative of the skylark, is losing its singing range because numbers are falling. Biologists from the Donana National Park in Andalucia found that when male larks had fewer birds from which to learn new notes or ranges their repertoire decreased. The number of notes a male uses is vital in attracting females. Dupont’s lark, Chersophilus duponti, is found in Europe only in southern, central and north-east Spain and there are thought to be only 2,000 birds remaining as their natural habitat has been destroyed by man...    more »

Global Voices is a great blog of comprehensive alternative journalism for world wide news. Funded by the non-profit Harvard Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society, they have assembled a systematic method for procuring first hand information about world events that the multinational mass media sources miss. I believe it is on the cutting edge of global alternative journalism. rc   more »

On 29 March 2008, people around the world will switch off lights for one hour from 8-9 pm to show a stand against global warming...   more »

The fingerprints of man-made climate change are evident in seasonal timing changes for thousands of species on Earth, according to dozens of studies and last year’s authoritative report by the Nobel Prize-awarded international climate scientists. More than 30 scientists told The Associated Press how global warming is affecting plants and animals at springtime across the country, in almost every state. What is happening is so noticeable that scientists can track it from space. Satellites measuring when land turns green found that spring “green-up” is arriving eight hours earlier every year on average since 1982 in the northeastern United States...    more »

The encounter between Sri Aurobindo and Michel Foucault occurs at the cusp of mans vanishing, before what Nietzsche would call his "crossing over" . The event horizon of each ones "crossing over" may be discontinuous or even displaced by centuries in its manifestation, but for all their seeming incommeasurablity in uncanny ways Sri Aurobindo and Foucault have certain styles of thinking in consonance. If Sri Aurobindo style of thinking critically has an early postmodernist flair, Foucault's thought movements - from structural to post-structural - are at times elegantly integral.    more »

We need a functioning world governance structure that is not only participatory but trustworthy and effective at the same time, says Amin Maalouf: “Only through the eyes of the present can we see meanings in the past.” Excerpts of the interview that appears in the Hindu dated 27 March 2008....   more »

It is, then, in this context that Foucault speaks of humanity as a recent invention. Only with the elaboration of specific systems of thought which could inquire not into humanity's ideal or essence, but the functioning of the foreground and the silhouette of humanity against the enabling background. "We shall say, therefore, that a 'human science' exists, not whenever man is in question, but wherever there is analysis--within the dimension proper to the unconscious--of norms, rules, and signifying totalities which unveil to consciousness the conditions of its forms and contents." (364) The subject of humanity was constituted during a certain moment in history which "dissolved" language, that is, an era which knowingly constructed its understanding of humanity "objectively," in between the spaces of representationality which show how humanity is deployed. According to Foucault, the human sciences address humanity in so far as people live, speak, and produce (biology, philology, and economics), and create its model by isolating and questioning the functioning of humanity when the norms and rules break down, and on that basis rebuild knowledge by showing how a functional representation of humanity can come into being and be deployed (and thus, Foucault will later argue, perfect the techniques of normalization and socialized encoding of rules via totalizing methods of power).

As language is now re-coalescing at its limits, combining thought and unthought, the Other of knowledge must give itself over to the Same. Where the limits of thinking reveal its own basis as its foundational limitations, a new way of thinking is constituted which, as Levi-Strauss says, "dissolves humanity." Foucault writes, "Since man was constituted at a time when language was doomed to dispersion, will he not be dispersed when language regains its unity?" (386) The "death of man" seems a relatively peaceful event, not where humanity explodes with enormous violence, but a moment where humanity withdraws into the background such that a new array of knowledge can be foregrounded. Foucault does not yet have the advantage of a fully elaborated theory of language; however, if such a unity of language is not philosophized, humanity will forever find itself in a dying state, undoing itself by its own logic without our awareness. Foucault seems to ask that humanity die gracefully so that we can direct our energy to elaborating what is not yet thought, and approach a new horizon of articulation. ...   more »

4) Here are the final letters by Leonard Susskind' and Lee Smolin in their email debate re the Anthropic Principle.

Smolin: ... My main point is that string theory will have much more explanatory power if the dominant mode of reproduction is through black holes, as is the case in the original version of CNS. This is the key point I would hope to convince Susskind and his colleagues about, because I am sure that the case they want to make is very much weakened if they rely on the Anthropic Principle (AP) and eternal inflation. ...

Susskind: ... Finally let me quote a remark of Smolin's that I find revealing. He says "It was worry about the possibility that string theory would lead to the present situation, which Susskind has so ably described in his recent papers, that led me to invent the Cosmological Natural Selection (CNS) idea and to write my first book. My motive, then as now, is to prevent a split in the community of theoretical physicists in which different groups of smart people believe different things, with no recourse to come to consensus by rational argument from the evidence." First of all, preventing a "split in the community of theoretical physicists" is an absurdly ridiculous reason for putting forward a scientific hypothesis.

But what I find especially mystifying is Smolin's tendency to set himself up as an arbiter of good and bad science. Among the people who feel that the anthropic principle deserves to be taken seriously, are some very famous physicists and cosmologists with extraordinary histories of scientific accomplishment. They include Steven Weinberg [2], Joseph Polchinski [3], Andrei Linde [4], and Sir Martin Rees [5]. These people are not fools, nor do they need to be told what constitutes good science. ...    more »

The former President of India, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, cited an example from the life of Nobel laureate Sir C.V. Raman to stress the dedication needed by teachers, especially in research institutions. The name of Raman was included in the first batch of Bharat Ratna winners, the highest civilian award given by the President of India. The then President, Rajendra Prasad, wrote to Raman inviting him to be the personal guest in the Rashtrapati Bhavan when Raman came to Delhi for the award ceremony. Raman wrote a polite letter, regretting his inability to go. He had a noble reason for his inability to attend the investiture ceremony. He explained to the President that he was guiding a PhD student and that thesis was positively due by the last day of January…   more »

Picasso captured an intense scene reflecting the deeply unjust suffering, agony and despair experienced by the people of Guernica. And in doing so he produced one of the most iconic, powerful and affecting pieces of anti-war artwork ever put to canvas. It is little surprise then that a reproduction of the painting, which hangs outside the entrance to the UN Security Council, was covered while Colin Powell was attempting to sell the Iraq War to the world.

The people of Iraq are suffering what amounts to the similar unjust brutality inflicted on the people of Guernica Iraq, except it's practically on a daily basis. A more accurate comparison would be to imagine having the London Tube and Bus bombings everyday. And have them happen so often that they become a predictable daily occurrence and part of life."

Guernica was the product of a fascist Spanish-German alliance between Franco and Hitler, and the corportist sponsors of the Luftwaffe. The following collage of images come to us trough the efforts of the Anglo-American alliance of Blair and Bush and through the courtesy of Boeing, Haliburton, Blackwater et al....    more »

On the five year anniversary week of the Iraq war what can one say? Hundreds of thousands dead, millions of refugees, a nation in civil war, and no real end in sight. A war that even former head of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan concedes was fought over oil. One can only turn to images and here is Picasso whose depiction of the slaughter at Guernica Spain as a result of German bombing, is considered one of his most important paintings. I will post a link to U tube video by the same title which unfortunately subjects Guernica to the eternal return of the same.

Here is a bit of History ...   more »

A wetland park will be set up at Poyang Lake, the country’s largest freshwater lake, if a local government initiative is approved by central authority. The national wetland park, to be set up in the Poyang Lake in the eastern province of Jiangxi, may cover some 400 sq km, consisting of a core preservation zone, a buffer zone and a sightseeing area, according to the initial plan released at a working conference here on Wednesday…   more »

Sri Aurobindo’s Beyond the Silence is essentially free quantitative verse with a predominant dactylic movement. It is being presented here along with a painting by Huta Hindocha which illustrates the following lines of the poem:

One with the Eternal, live in his infinity,
Drowned in the Absolute, found in the Godhead,
Swan of the supreme and spaceless ether wandering winged through the universe,
Spirit immortal. ...   more »

Mary Magdalene has finally begun to regain her rightful place in history, after being portrayed in church history for centuries as a penitent prostitute. In 591 AD Pope Gregory pronounced that Mary Magdalene, Mary the sinner, and Mary of Bethany from the gospels were one in the same. But there has never been evidence of that, and in 1969 the Catholic Church restored them to three separate identities, ending 14 centuries of mischaracterization. ...


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A cosmic mind
Looked out on all from formidable eyes
Contemning all with its unbearable gaze
And with immortal lips and a vast brow
It saw in its immense destroying thought
All things and beings as a pitiful dream,
Rejecting with calm disdain Nature's delight,
The wordless meaning of its deep regard
Voicing the unreality of things
And life that would be for ever but never was
And its brief and vain recurrence without cease,
As if from a Silence without form or name
The Shadow of a remote uncaring god
Doomed to his Nought the illusory universe,
Cancelling its show of idea and act in Time
And its imitation of eternity.
She knew that visible Death was standing there
And Satyavan had passed from her embrace.   more »

This series is also available in podcast, hopefully these listen files will open from these links but I believe you will need windows media files installed (rc)

If science is neither cookery, nor angelic virtuosity, then what is it? Modern societies have tended to take science for granted as a way of knowing, ordering and controlling the world. Everything was subject to science, but science itself largely escaped scrutiny. This situation has changed dramatically in recent years. Historians, sociologists, philosophers and sometimes scientists themselves have begun to ask fundamental questions about how the institution of science is structured and how it knows what it knows. David Cayley talks to some of the leading lights of this new field of study. ...   more »

When Dr. Nadkarni did me the honour of inviting me to deliver this year’s Guru Pershad Memorial Lecture, I chose a subject I had been thinking about for a fairly long time: Sri Aurobindo’s relationship with and ideas about the Hindu religion. I was unaware when I selected this topic that the theme of our conference was “Spirituality and Life”. As you know, and as the participants in the seminar have brought out, Sri Aurobindo made a distinction between spirituality and religion. Religion, as he wrote in The Human Cycle, could never be an effective “guide and control of human society” because it tends to become confused with “a particular creed, sect, cult, religious society or Church”. The result is intolerance, hatred and persecution. Many of us think of these things as monopolies of the Semitic religions of the West, but Sri Aurobindo reminds us that sectarianism, hatred and occasional persecution have also tarnished the record of “fundamentally tolerant Hinduism”.

If religion plays such a negative role in human life, should it not be rejected altogether? Sri Aurobindo did not think so. The evil, he wrote, “is not in true religion itself, but in its infrarational parts.” True religion or “spirituality” becomes religiosity or, simply, “religion”, under the infrarational pressure of the lower mind and life. If life is to follow the path of evolutionary progression, it has to open itself to the spirit. “It is in spirituality that we must seek for the directing light and the harmonizing law,” he concluded, “and in religion only in proportion as it identifies itself with this spirituality.”ii The question remains whether religion is really capable of identifying itself with spirituality. In 1918, when he wrote the passages I have quoted, Sri Aurobindo seemed to think that it was possible; but later in his life he became less confident that traditional religion had a significant role to play in the development of integral spirituality. This conclusion came at the end of a long engagement with religion that began in England, took a new turn in Baroda and again in Calcutta, and reached an ambiguous conclusion in Pondicherry. I intend to trace the course of this engagement, but, before I begin, I would like to spell out for you the point of view from which I speak.   more »

Among the giants of the imaginative promotion of the ideas of interplanetary travel, the colonising by man of nearby planets and the urgent need for peaceful exploration of outer space, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, who has died aged 90, was pre-eminent, because of his hard and accurate predictions of the detailed technologies of space flight and the use of near-Earth space for global communications. Yet, in spite of his deep seriousness, JB Priestley described him in the 1950s as the happiest writer he had ever known. Tallish, bespectacled, rather big-eared and thinning on top, Clarke tended to be described by friends as a beaming and highly articulate shambles of a chap, a man to whom convention meant very little. Yet his mind was like a razor. Unlike earlier writers on space travel, his imagination and creativity sprang, not from fantasy, but from sharp scientific and technical insight, unfettered by the arbitrary limitations of the perceptions of his time. His amazing career was possible largely because he was never, in any ordinary sense, quite a part of this world. Indeed, he chose to live in Sri Lanka, partly because it helped him neutralise the influence of western culture. As he approached 80, it seemed that he had done almost everything that was possible in a lifetime…    more »

...the emergence of a new demographic trend has largely been ignored. Today, worldwide fertility rates are at an all time low, and in the decades following 2050 the global population is actually expected to stabilize and possibly decrease. The two factors driving this new pattern are the emergence of women’s rights on a global scale and the expectation among parents that all their children will survive to maturity.

Fertility rates, the best indicators of long term population changes, refer to the average number of children a woman will have. In order for a given population to replace itself, its fertility rate must be at 2.1 or higher. Graph 1[2] illustrates the decline of fertility rates that has occurred in the last fifty years, and shows projections for the next fifty years. ...   more »

...a massive new derivatives bubble is driving the domestic and global economies, a bubble that continues growing today parallel with the subprime-credit meltdown triggering a bear-recession...

To grasp how significant this five-fold bubble increase is, let's put that $516 trillion in the context of some other domestic and international monetary data:
• U.S. annual gross domestic product is about $15 trillion
• U.S. money supply is also about $15 trillion
• Current proposed U.S. federal budget is $3 trillion
• U.S. government's maximum legal debt is $9 trillion
• U.S. mutual fund companies manage about $12 trillion
• World's GDPs for all nations is approximately $50 trillion   more »

Managing climate change first appeared in The Hindu dated 13 March 2008 in which the claims and responsibilities of the developing and advanced societies are discussed. “The issue is often portrayed as a battle between the developed and the developing world. Wrong. It is something which affects us all and which we need to address together.” It is a matter of concern for us all—says Sir Richard Stagg who is a career diplomat and British High Commissioner to India.   more »

This is truly an inspiring video clip. It's a bit over 6 minutes long, and well worth this small investment of time. Best heard with earphones.



Thanks to Kala for this link.

The following poems were penned by a new friend of mine, Rosita Wandallah, whom I met at Burning Man 2007. She's a remarkable writer, performance artist, model, dancer, actor, community leader, project coordinator, global traveler, and international service provider. -- I am honored to know her.

We are all wells of gratitude
deep, plentiful, pure
connected to the
infinite source of all

if only we would drink
more often,
replenish ourselves
with the kinetic wisdom
of the cosmos within

For what is it to live
without gratitude? ...

Poems from Oaxaca-Winter 2008, by Rosita Wandellah

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The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered the first organic molecule on a planet that's not in our solar system. According to NASA, this breakthrough could be a major step toward discovering life on other planets. Scientists believe that the organic compound detected, methane, can be an integral part in the chemical reactions considered necessary to form life as we know it. ...   more »

The Hindu dated 24 February 2008 carries the following report from New York about the grave threat faced by a large number of languages in the world. Here we may also note a few relevant facts about the International Mother Language Day. Its history is as follows: “On 21 February 1952, corresponding to 8 Falgun 1359 in the Bangla calendar, a number of students campaigning for the recognition of Bangla as one of the state languages of Pakistan were killed when police fired upon them. At a public meeting on 21 March 1948, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Governor general of Pakistan, declared that Urdu will be the only language for both West and East Pakistan. The people of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), whose main language is Bengali, started to protest against this. A student meeting on 21 February called for a province-wide strike. But the government invoked Section 144 on 20 February. The student community at a meeting on the morning of 21 February agreed to continue with their protest but not to break the law of Section 144. Even then the police opened fire and killed the students.”

The decision to observe 21st February as the International Mother Language Day was unanimously taken at the 30th General Conference of the UNESCO held on 17 November 1999. The details as how this was proposed can be accessed at 21st February as the International Mother Language Day. The second entry given below highlights these. Researchers say that many languages are dying. Randolph E Schmid reports in The Huffington Post, dated 18 September 2007, that languages embody the history and traditions of people. He is concerned that they are dying. I’ve put his report as the third item in the present posting.   more »

This is a beautiful essay which first appeared in Dawn Karachi (10 March 2008), with its extraordinary precision and accuracy. The author rightly recognizes four giants of European literature in Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe, but then he also omits Aeschylus and Sophocles, and Virgil and Milton. On being prodded by Amal Kiran, Sri Aurobindo put in three rows eleven of the world’s top poets. They are as follows: Homer-Shakespeare-Valmiki-Vyasa; Dante-Kalidasa-Aeschylus-Sophocles-Virgil-Milton; and in the third row solitary Goethe. When asked about Firdausi for his famous Shah Nameh, Sri Aurobindo declined to opine anything as he was not in a position to read it in the original. About Goethe he wrote: “Goethe goes much deeper than Shakespeare; he had an incomparably greater intellect than the English poet and sounded problems of life and thought Shakespeare had no means of approaching even. But he was certainly not a greater poet… Goethe was a poet by choice.” He was indeed “the last true polymath to walk the earth,” as George Eliot says. Here is the Dawn-essay.   more »

Arthur C. Clarke, a writer whose seamless blend of scientific expertise and poetic imagination helped usher in the space age, died early Wednesday in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since 1956. He was 90.

Rohan de Silva, an aide to Mr. Clarke, said the author died after experiencing breathing problems, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Clarke had post-polio syndrome for the last two decades and used a wheelchair.

From his detailed forecast of telecommunications satellites in 1945, more than a decade before the first orbital rocket flight, to his co-creation, with the director Stanley Kubrick, of the classic science fiction film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Mr. Clarke was both prophet and promoter of the idea that humanity’s destiny lay beyond the confines of Earth. ...   more »

3) Here's Leonard Susskind's #2 to Lee Smolin #2:

...The issue here is not whether the usual phenomenological inflation was of the eternal kind although that is relevant. Eternal inflation taking place in any false vacuum minimum on the landscape would favor [in Smolin's sense] the maximum cosmological constant. But for the sake of argument I will agree to ignore eternal inflation as a reproduction mechanism.

The question of how many black holes are formed is somewhat ambiguous. What if two black holes coalesce to form a single one. Does that count as one black hole or two? Strictly speaking, given that black holes are defined by the global geometry, it is only one black hole. What happens if all the stars in the galaxy eventually fall into the central black hole? That severely diminishes the counting. So we better assume that the bigger the black hole, the more babies it will have. Perhaps one huge black hole spawns more offspring than 10^22 stellar black holes.

That raises the question of what exactly is a black hole? One of the deepest lessons that we have learned over the past decade is that there is no fundamental difference between elementary particles and black holes. As repeatedly emphasized by 't Hooft [10][11][12], black holes are the natural extension of the elementary particle spectrum. This is especially clear in string theory where black holes are simply highly excited string states. Does that mean that we should count every particle as a black hole? ...   more »

We have here at the sciy an article Appreciating Arabic Science that predates Newton written by Jim Al-Khalili. Speaking of an early Muslim biologist it says the following: “…what surprises many even more is that a ninth-century Iraqi zoologist by the name of al-Jahith developed a rudimentary theory of natural selection a thousand years before Darwin. In his Book of Animals, Jahith speculates on how environmental factors can affect the characteristics of species, forcing them to adapt and then pass on those new traits to future generations.” Here I am presenting, by way of introduction, the work of this scientist belonging to the early Islamic period, the Dawn of its Golden Age. It is being reproduced from my book Narad’s Arrival at Madra in which there is a chapter dealing with scientific theories of evolution. The chapter has relevance in the book, even as the sage in his song presents the occult-spiritual aspects of the long story of evolution; he is on his way from his heavenly abode in Paradise to king Aswapati’s palace in Madra and is absorbed in meditative thought of the subject. I am also including two other connected pieces which may be relevant here. ...   more »

Princess of Thailand Maha Chakri Sirindhorn will arrive here on March 21 on a one-day visit to the town.

The Princess would visit the Village Resource Centre (VRC) of the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) at Pillayarkuppam, one of the bio-villages of the foundation, and acquaint herself with the works and activities of the centre, official sources said on Thursday.

She would wrap up her prgrammes with a visit to the Auroville, a universal township, near here. ...   more »

The mystic poetry of the Pondicherry school continues to be neglected, partly because of the media betrayal and chiefly of the lack of seriousness with regard to Sri Aurobindo's theory and practice of poetry. About eight decades ago, the theory of mantric poetry was explained first in the Arya, a little known journal to us. The theory was both revivalist and futuristic. To sum up Sri Aurobindo’s arguments: poetry has been deliberately incantatory in the Vedic age; poetry of incantation was returning through kavis like Whitman, Tagore and Carpenter, poetry will be more deliberately mantric in the future. Now some of us have read that, but we have forgotten to check whether the prophecy is turning true or not. Sri Aurobindo himself took the initiative, writing in that line, making poets in that line, correcting and clarifying the deliberate efforts of his poet-disciples like KD Sethna (Amal Kiran), Nirodbaran, JA Chadwick (Arjava), Dilip Kumar Roy, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, and others. He has repeatedly told us that beautiful poetry is beautiful poetry even if it is in the current style and that a new experience needs a new style of expression. I have chosen four living* poets from this school to place them before you, with my observation, and to ask for your opinion about them. The first two, KD Sethna and Nirodbaran, wrote poetry under the direct guidance of Sri Aurobindo. While RY Deshpande and Themis, the mystic poets of the 80s and 90s, have been continuing the tradition under the eyes of Sethna and Nirodbaran.   more »

Beside her Satyavan walked full of joy,
Because she moved with him through his green haunts:
He showed her all the forest's riches, flowers
Innumerable of every odour and hue
And soft thick clinging creepers red and green
And strange rich-plumaged birds, to every cry
That haunted sweetly distant boughs, replied
With the shrill singer's name more sweetly called.
He spoke of all the things he loved: they were
His boyhood's comrades and his playfellows,
Coevals and companions of his life
Here in this world whose every mood he knew:
Their thoughts which to the common mind are blank
He shared, to every wild emotion felt
An answer. Deeply she listened…   more »