Monthly Archives: July, 2011
On the Tragedy in Norway
Norway is a country respected by all. It is known for its beautiful fjords and the Nobel Peace Prize, a tradition of liberal democracy and the Vigeland Sculpture Park. It is a country where for decades now immigrants have gone and settled down with ease, from Sri Lanka and Somalia, from Morocco and India. Who …
Wisdom or Folly?
Subjecting of every facet of poetry, imagination, and spiritual experience to the microscope of rationality, empiricism, and scientific argumentation may not be the best application of scientific methodology.. No one can deny the enormous expansion of knowledge and enhancement in perspectives, let alone the plethora of creature comforts and ease of action and communication that …
Sa’di’s Gulistan
Once in Persia there was a king who had condemned a wrong-doer to death. The angry man abused the king in his native dialect which the king could not understand. So he asked a vizier to translate what the had said. The vizier said” “This man is saying that those who control their anger and …
Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Stanton
I recall a visit to Eisenhower College sometime in 1980 to give a talk there. That college 0 no longer in existence – was in the quaint little town of Seneca Falls which is in the Finger Lakes Region of upstate New York. I was told by a professor there that the town and its …
On Thackeray’s Vanity Fair
Exactly two hundred years ago today, on July 18, 1811, there was born in a house on what used to be called Freeschool Street in Calcutta, not far from St. Xavier’s College where I once studied, a child to an English couple serving the East India Company. That child was to become one of the …
Ghazals
Poetic forms know no cultural or linguistic barriers. Thus there are not only rhymes and meters, but also odes and sonnets, elegies and story-poems in English and French, in German and Italian and more. Likewise, one can find ghazals in many languages: not just in Arabic and Persian where they originated, but in Turkish and …
Thoughts Provoked by Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 -1400)
Many decades ago I had skimmed through some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in the modern intelligible version, for sure. I recall how that reading, with a version of medieval English on another page, made me aware of the way languages change with time. What we write today will be hardly understood by people five hundred …
From Daodejing
Laozi, known by a dozen like-sounding names, is said to have lived in the sixth century BCE. He is remembered by the classic Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) which is a treasury of capsule wisdom. There are jolting insights in this work. Tao is the Way. Here we read (in rough translation) yjr following: Way that …
How things and Perspectives change!
Thomas Payne (1737 – 1809) was born an Englishman, and became one of the founding fathers of the United States. He argued for American Independence in his pamphlet Common Sense (1776)which he boldly proclaimed as having been written by an Englishman. Payne was a staunch supporter of the French Revolution, and wrote Rights of Man, …
A Pioneer for Penal Reform
Cesare Beccaria (1738 – 1794) is to be counted among the many thinkers who, through their published works, affected the course of civilization in positive He wrote on crimes and punishments (Dei delitti e delle pene) long before Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote his Crime and Punishment: a novel in which Romanovich Rasolnikov murders a ruthless pawnbroker …
