BENARES McDONALDS
The first corpse of the morning
is a priest
burning on a sandal pyre.
Continue reading ‘Benares McDonalds – a poem’
I’m hitting Publish & heading for the airport & then India; below is where I’m going; I’ll be sitting on that rock, watching the sun set slowly over the ocean, Jai Hind! Jai Bharat Mata! Jai Ho!
Patnam Beach, Canacona, South Goa
Continue reading ‘Thank you all for all your help’
(by Marilyn Stablein, who lived in India & Nepal between 1966 & 1972).
In 1966 travellers from Istanbul to Oxford dreamed of journeying to Kathmandu for Christmas.
Today Western Buddhists, Tibetans living abroad, and indigenous Himalayan Buddhists from Ladhak to Assam make the annual pilgrimage to Bodhnath on the outskirts of Kathmandu to celebrate Tibetan Losar, New Year festivities.
In February 2008, in the dead of winter my daughter Sunita and I set out on our own pilgrimage to Nepal. Thirty-six years had passed since I lived in Nepal.
Continue reading ‘Losar at Bodhnath 2008′
Jasper Newsome, aka Ram Giri Baba - his last recorded exposition of what being a Baba meant to him; told at the heart of it, the Prayag Raj Kumbha Mela 2001.
Recorded at the Maha Maha Kumbha Mela 2001, held every 144 years, at Prayag, Allahabad, India. Sixty million people took part, the largest spiritual gathering in the world. Celebrated at the confluence of three great rivers, only two of which are of this world; the third, the mythical Saraswati, joins the Ganga & the Yamuna at the confluence, Triveni Sangam, a sacred place, at a sacred time.
Continue reading ‘Jasper on Video – Kumbha Mela 2001′
A one hour, two part, audio interview (sides A & B – 30 minutes each) digitised from the original audio cassette tape and made into high-quality (320kbps) MP3.
Ganesh Baba, ‘The Psychedelic Guru’ is talking with Terry Clifford, in Kathmandu, Nepal – 20th September 1976.
(Use the built-in players below or download the original files).
A Side – Ganesh Baba talks with Terry Clifford (31:49 – 74,573KB).
B Side – Ganesh Baba talks with Terry Clifford (31:50 – 74,642KB)
Ganesh Baba:
Born around 1890 in Orissa, India, little is known of his early life; he is said to have married and to have had financial, social, and familial success. By the 1960s, as an old man, he had become a renunciate spiritual seeker and he met and interacted with many Westerners over the remainder of his life. Ganesh Baba visited and taught in the USA between 1979 & 1981. He died in Nainital, India, in 1987.
Terry Clifford:
Terry was born in New York in 1945, and after gaining a degree in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1967, she worked first as a psychiatric nurse in New York & then headed East to India and Nepal. She became a Buddhist, learnt Tibetan and studied Tibetan Medicine, later being awarded a Ph. D and working on a Tibetan Pharmacopoeia under a grant from the Wellcome Trust. She died tragically of cancer in 1987 at the early age of forty-two.
Credits:
Audio tapes from the collection of Terry Clifford, courtesy Arthur Mandelbaum.
High-quality audio digitisation and editing by Charlie Martin.
Notes:
Excerpts from this were published in High Times as Terry Clifford, “Interview with a Dope Guru … Ganesh Baba,” High Times, Number 29, January 1978, pp. 78-79, 112-113.
Paul Giraud (aka ‘Taxi Paul’ or ‘Babes’) interviewed by Arthur Mandelbaum in New York City, October 2009 – video length 22m:37s.
Arthur Mandelbaum wrote:
Paul would like the name Paul Giraud used. His nicknames are Taxi Paul (old days) and Babes (nowadays) as he’s been calling his friends ‘babes’ for years.
Continue reading ‘Paul Giraud – Memories of Jasper – Part I’
From our war & peace correspondent Andy Klein who was last there in 1971.
Kathmandu is exactly the same as it was in 1969 except it has 3 times the population. There has been very little infrastructure investment; basically the same airport, highways, power grid (the neighborhoods look like Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon; a patchwork of homemade electrical connections at head height), with 3 times the population. The crowds, the traffic, the pollution; the pollution! It would take your breath away. I have never experienced air quality like that before; not in Benares, not in Sana’a, or Istanbul, not even in Ahmadabad. Nowhere else. An urban mess of staggering proportions.
We loved it. The people were the Nepalis of old; great folk.
Continue reading ‘Letter from Kathmandu – September 2009′
When we lived in Banaras in the 1960s, there were numerous unusual people & places, with Post Office Baba, above, one of the more visible. When a friend recently emailed this image, several of us kicked around the meaning that it has for us today, 45 years later.
Continue reading ‘Post Office Baba’
So I ordered “Hard Times” from the London interlibrary system after my last meeting with Dave. Studs Terkel seemed a good person to start my oral history research with.
But it didn’t arrive in time for this meeting and I had some vague questions about the different types of people who had gone to India and their reasons for doing so.
After rejecting my proposal “Beats, Buddhists, Freaks & Swamies” (‘I was too late for the Beats ….’ ) Dave patiently answered my incoherent queries; we ended up with five minutes of audio.
I would suggest to anyone interested in contemporary history that they read some Studs, or listen to one of his many audio recordings, a great communicator was he.
Five minute interview with Dave Tomory:
Friday 28th August 2009 – North London, UK – podcast feed HERE
Oral History:
“Hard Times”, by Studs Terkel, is an oral history of the Great (American) Depression, published in 1970. It is interesting to me that he wrote it 40 years after the Great Depression began in 1929. It seems that a generation space (30 to 40 years) is needed to achieve some distance from an oral history subject.
Forty years ago this month I was in Delhi, desperately looking for a way to move on out of India and kick-start my life. Five years in India and I’d lost all objectivity; felt I had no centre. Time to move on.
I’d never been able to adhere. Not to a doctrine, not to a sect, not even to my beloved and difficult Guru. Yet India permeated me and constrained the way I ate food, how I defecated, it set the models for my friendships and my lovers, impossible to ignore.
Forty years on I can look at those hard times dispassionately, with equanimity. Time to move on but also time to record and not to forget.
Links from the Podcast:
Additional Links:
Photo: Jennifer Soo
(copyright The Sydney Morning Herald).
“One of Lonely Planet co-founder Tony Wheeler’s favourite travel books is A Season In Heaven – True Tales From The Road To Kathmandu, by David Tomory. It is a collection of true stories told by the hippies of the late 1960s and early ’70s, who embarked on Asia’s “hippie trail” from Istanbul to Kathmandu. “A terrific [narrative] of the ‘road to the east’, the ‘hippie trail’ and that whole awakening to the possibilities of exotic travel,” Wheeler says. “It made me very nostalgic.”
Books by David Tomory:
Books with Writing by David Tomory:
I am soliciting feedback and comments on the structure of this site:
http://theflowerraj.com/
A simple Home Page (above) gives entry to the;
THREE MAIN SECTIONS:
BLOG (Articles, Stories, Reporting):
http://blog.theflowerraj.com
factual or fantastical, text, images, audio and video.
PHOTOS (People, Places, Art):
http://photos.theflowerraj.com
one album per person – linked to the wiki page.
WIKI (small encyclopaedia):
http://wiki.theflowerraj.com
each page is linked to the relevant photo album.
Example:
Jasper Photo album is linked to Jasper Wiki page;
http://photos.theflowerraj.com/v/people/in_memoriam/jasper_newsome/
http://wiki.theflowerraj.com/index.php/Jasper_Newsome
My next work is to add wiki pages to the existing photo albums (Bhaskar, TJ, Mataji, et al); after that I’ll start adding in people whose photos I have, giving them a photo album and a wiki page each.
Feel free to make comments on anything. Complaints on navigation, style, etc to me by email only please.
You can login to the Wiki to create and update pages.
You can log in to the Photo albums to make Comments on photos.
Blog posts can be commented on without a login but are moderated.
Test it all out – I want bugs out before the site gets too much momentum!
Recent Comments