I was looking for audio recordings of the Bhagwad Gita online for J and the search lead me to places I would not otherwise found.
Autobiography of a Yogi I have seen this book several times but have managed to never read it. As luck would have it I jump right to Chapter 8 that is about J.C Bose and his experiments on the consciousness of all matter animate or not. I read about this last in a school text book when I was about twelve.
Then after wandering some more, I arrived at some writings of Sri Aurobindo Ghosh reminding of my childhood visit to the ashram in Pondicherry. There was no Auroville then as I recall. Encouraged by the discovery, I looked for the text of Savitri online and found it too ! I remember having looked for it when my friend P had first shown me the amazing series of pictures she had painted in Photoshop inspired by this reading this epic poem - I had not found it then.
She had said "As an adult, Savitri became the link between me and my father. He liked to read it every year and said that it conveyed some new meaning to him each time. I think it does the same for me as well" Her dream was do a different series of paintings after each reading based on her understanding and interpretation at that point. Her father died five yeard ago I realized that I have not heard from P since then.
An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
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