The last months have been a blur of activity. Winter in India is the time people visit from the colder climates, and being in Bombay means a continuous stream of guests from Germany, Switzerland, the U.S. and other places. One reason I've been inactive on the net - other than to look up mails I guess.

Just back from a workshop centred around Bodywork, a great learning process for me. I had got some friends from Germany to conduct it for our group in India and we decided to have it at Timbaktu where I've finally had my own place built. Have to rush again but before I go - if anyone feels like seeing some pics of Timabktu (the Indian version - this is not the one in Africa) - check out  "Once More In TImbaktu"  on blogger.

Catch up with you again soon.

I wrote my first piece on Baba Amte long before I met him or had even visited his home, Anandwan, where he had set up a rehabilitation center in the fifties, for people with leprosy – a center which, within some years grew into a flourishing township inhabited by people from all walks of life and not only those who were sick or crippled. My father, who had heard about him a couple of years earlier from a friend in the U.K. had come away thoroughly impressed by his visit to the place. The second time he went there he took a young photographer called Santosh Verma with him to help him put together a slide show on all the projects managed by the Amte family and their friends, which could be used for fund raising.

Santosh, who visited my dad with his photographs and slides, after they got back from Anandwan, managed to persuade me to write an article about Baba Amte, which he said he would get a magazine called "Gentleman" to use alongside his photographs. After a great deal of humming and hawing (how can you write about a man you’ve never met and a place you’ve never visited I complained to Santosh only to have my arguments swept aside with a premptory laugh) I went ahead and did the piece. In the process of collecting information and writing the piece on the Amte's, I gradually developed an insatiable urge to go and see it all for myself.

So I landed at Anandwan some time in November ’87 and came away not quite knowing what hit me. A place as quiet, as green, as clean as Anandwan was, (and even the food was yummy) didn’t seem quite Indian, if you know what I mean (and I suppose you would have to be Indian yourself or at least to have spent some time in India to know what I mean). Baba himself turned out to be so normal and talkative that one hardly experienced the usual fear and reticence with which one tends to be overcome in the presence of a “great man”. He was a past master at amusing people with anecdotes related from his life. He never failed to ensure I was comfortable during my stay at Anandwan, going so far as to organize a western style potty for me when we all trooped off to Hemalkasa to visit his son Prakash who runs a hospital in this wild forested region in central India, for members of the Madia Gond tribe. Baba said he knew what it felt like not to be able to squat (which I was not able to do on account of an attack of polio in childhood) which left me quite zapped.

Baba did not wish to be cremated according to Hindu tradition, but rather to be buried and to have a tree planted on the burial spot where he was to be laid to rest. So maybe we will meet again in this lifetime after all, though Baba might look a bit different than he did when he was a human being!

It is winter in Bombay. At 10 degrees Centigrade (50 Farenheit) we're freezing. Friends in Europe and the U.S. please don't laugh, but here we are shivering, my knees are giving way, my ankle is stiff, and I am actually enjoying sitting in the sun on the back balcony - something I avoid doing like the plague at any other time. It's so cold in the evenings on the front balcony facing the sea, (windy too) that we have taken to sitting indoors with our drinks. The up side of this is that we now listen to a lot of music, which is something we hadn't done as a family for ages.

The bout of malaria has meanwhile dampened my interest in booze so I've standardized on my own rather eccentric variation of Bloody Mary without the vodka, inspired by my cousin Shiv. It's made with home made tomato juice to which I add Worcestershire sauce, a dash of Jal Jeera, more than a dash of Tabasco sauce, half a lime and soda, topped with ice. I could drink any amount of it but I suspect many people would want to spit it out.

Have also lost a couple of kilos on account of the illness and am trying desperately to maintain my current weight. Wish me luck.

Malaria is not a nice disease to have and it is what I'm recovering from at the moment. After a great spiritual retreat in this great place called Timbaktu in south India, my friends and I decided to vacation in Goa when it struck. I didn't know what I was landed with, just irritated with the cough and fever which had me lying in bed for large parts of the day. Back in Bombay when my temperature hit 105 degrees F. I dashed to the hospital where I was diagnosed with Vivax malaria with possibly a touch of the Falciparum kind. Yech! I don't know whether the disease is worse than the medication or the other way around but for several days the sight of food made me sick.

I'm now back home and doing quite well thanks, though not on speaking terms with mosquitoes any more if I ever was! Nasty little critturs. Bzzzzzzzz. I wonder what higher purpose they serve in life - other than to infect people with horrid diseases of which malaria is only one! But I can't complain. The treatment worked and here I am back at the computer, to prove that I'm alive and all's well. And as usually happens when you recover from an intense bout of illness of any sort the world suddenly seems to explode in technicolour and to come alive in every way. It feels good to be home again.

If I were asked to list off hand, five elements on which true community is based, this is what I think, I would come up with:

Freedom
Responsibility
Patience
Perseverance
And Love

To many people the first two might seem to contradict each other. When people are given full freedom over their lives wouldn’t responsibility fade into the background? But then, it depends on what freedom really means to you. True freedom is not only liberating for the person who experiences it but brings with it a deep awareness of responsibility. It is precisely when freedom is half baked and arises out of a confused mental construct that it leads to chaos and destruction, such as we are witnessing in the world today. In turn the mixture of freedom, responsibility, patience and perseverance lays the foundation for what we might call a state of love.

J. Krishnamurti often referred to freedom as the starting point of self awareness. What he meant was the freedom to look and to listen. These basic faculties are in fact the tools which help us to explore and understand ourselves and the world we live in. It seems to me at times, that the reason for all the chaos “out there” is our unwillingness and inability to explore our own relation to the world, to look at each other, to look at what love or our lives are really about. We are not really free to see things as they are but seem almost condemned to view life through lenses coloured by religious or cultural beliefs, if not by our insecurity or by past experiences which have shaped our lives. The genuine desire to explore all that we see and feel seems to be missing. As a result most investigations turn out to be half hearted inept attempts to find out the truth of a matter and end in fruitless debates and egoistic posturing. Perhaps we are secretly afraid of losing something by looking under the rug, because of which we spend most of our lives staring at and talking ad nauseum about the colour and pattern of the rug rather than on looking at how to sweep the floor clean.

Carlos Castaneda, the best selling author on Mesoamerican sorcery, and spiritual guru of the sixties and seventies generation, quotes his Mexican shamanistic teacher Don Juan on the subject of Man’s four enemies. Fear, according to Don Juan is the very first of our adversaries in life. (The other three being clarity, power and old age). Since the discussion on these four points goes into reams I am not even going to try and get into an explanation here. As a starting point though, what could be emphasised is that fear is the first emotion we need to battle with on the road to freedom. Learning to face it directly, without being defeated by it is a necessary step for those of us interested in fostering a community spirit which is authentic and not born of compulsion.

Essentially, what this boils down to is the fact that an on-going sense of community needs tremendous self awareness on the part of its members. It needs sensitivity, which can only come about when a person has to some extent managed to stop thinking of himself or herself as the centre of the universe and begun to realise the fact that he is a small part of the whole to which he is connected, and whose well being will determine his own.

Sorry guys I fucked up the tagging thing. Was taking too long and getting too complicated and the names and links disappeared out of the blue so those of you who've been tagged by me and don't know what this is about ... we'll do it some other time! I gotta go now.

Whom do I feel most similar to? Do I have to pick on one person?! Sometimes I feel like Homer Simpson, sometimes I feel like Charlie Brown. Some days I can feel Lucy taking over my brain and personality  and squashing other people like they were bugs.  Most days I just feel like me. Curious, happy, sometimes restless, sometimes anxious, always looking forward to meals, longing to get home a kitten, and many other things. And now I'm wondering, is there anybody who feels like me?

Being truly open means being vulnerable and this is something most of us don't like and don't know much about. I am still learning about being open, in my relationship with three of my best friends. It is about being truthful and learning to go beyond the hurt that the truth often brings with it.

It is also about showing yourself the way you are and giving others a chance to accept you. Learning to open up to others is a sort of multidimensional goal, because you learn so many other things in the process. Openness also involves dealing with taboo themes which we don't often address. All kinds of underground feelings and fantasies we don't even know exist. An exciting process.

Having crawled through kilometres of traffic on the autobahn we finally arrive at Ottobrunn, a small town founded in the fifties, which lies south east of Munich. Tilmann, Shasha (who’s visiting from Paris) and I make our way to a large building in the town square, where on the first floor a satsang is being held in a spacious, airy room. There are more people attending the meeting than the hall can comfortably accommodate, with several people squatting on the floor, some perched on a table at the end of the hall and others up in the mezzanine which is also equipped with a few light aluminium frame chairs. On the podium in the main hall sits a portly looking man with a friendly face, framed by a head full of crinkly brown hair flecked with white and chin embellished by a tidy looking beard. Dressed in a casual green sweater pulled over a pair of dark brown trousers, he listens intently to the older man occupying the chair facing him. The man seems rather in distress and elaborates on his problems. After a quiet hearing Shapiro reckons that the root of his distress lies in his lack of patience. The man heartily agrees. “Every day I pray to god to give me patience,” he says, “And I tell him please! Give it to me NOW!” The audience dissolves into laughter and so does Isaac.

Questions are put to Isaac and generally to the group, about how to live in the moment, about how to introduce the element of self awareness at the work place. “At work you need to be aggressive, the climate calls for it. You can’t survive being nice to people,” says a woman. Self awareness is not about being “nice.” It is about paying attention to all that is going on inside yourself and also to the other person. Patiently, Isaac expounds on his experience of living in the moment, about what it means, about how living in the private world in one’s head, being trapped in thought and ideas, is what creates conflict in the world. He goes on to suggest that we focus on the process of awareness instead of perpetually focussing on problems which arise out of our lack of awareness. He talks about how our conditioning forces us into a groove from which we find it difficult to exit so as to act with intelligence.

We are caught in all kinds of patterns without knowing it, Isaac says, and being constantly trapped in patterns and habits which we are unaware of, is what makes us unhappy, nervous and difficult to be around. To go beyond these habits we need to become aware of them, to notice the way we behave. The attention we start to pay to our own thought process eventually helps us to dissociate ourselves from it and from all that we believe ourselves to be. It enables us to identify with the essence in us rather than with the patterns which take over our minds and which normally define us.

Isaac Shapiro, born in 1950 in Johannesburg, South Africa, claims to have had his first glimpse of truth and of unconditional love at the age of 19. His desire to further explore this aspect of life led him initially to a kibbutz in Israel where he spent a year. Later he found himself in a small organic farm on an island in Denmark after which he travelled to New Zealand where he started a commune in order to go even deeper into the questions he felt he needed to investigate. Through the years Isaac dabbled in a variety of techniques to do with self awareness, including biofeedback but it was in Hawaii that he got his first clue as to what the whole experiment was all really about. His contact with the Kahunas in Hawaii and with others who worked with communication based on energy movements, helped him to realise that the key to self awareness and to studying the mind was the realisation that true awareness develops when we focus on attention itself.

Sent on by a friend to a teacher in Lucknow, who went by the name of Papaji, Isaac further learned how to stop focussing on the thought process and to bring his attention round to the flow of awareness itself. Within a year of experimenting in this direction he had found the way to himself. Recognised by Papaji as a teacher in his own right, Isaac started holding satsangs all over the world. People who attend his meetings and who come into contact with the man claim to find a profound sense of peace within themselves and to gain access to a deeper awareness in his presence, the way individuals claim to have done in the presence of sages like Ramana Maharshi who seemed able to bestow on their disciples or those who came to meet them, peace and a sense of joy by virtue of their own deep inner stillness.

Isaac maintains that truth is “your own heart speaking to itself."  It’s the true tantra. It is deeper than intimacy. Intimacy still assumes the other. This is like making love. It is an inner kiss. In the heart, in your own heart.”

Actually, I  have two favourite rituals which I enjoy equally. One is at the beginning  and the other towards the end of the day. My morning ritual is breakfast which consists of a banana and a cup of coffee which I seem to have standardised on since I was about ten. The coffee wakes me up and the taste of the banana (especially an "Indian" banana) for some reason makes me feel happy, don't ask me why!

The second ritual I look forward to is in the evening, when friends or my parents drop in and we sit together on the balcony facing the sea, nursing a whisky or a gin. Sometimes we talk, sometimes we just sit silently, watching the waves break on the shore. In either case it feels like a good way to usher out the day we've just been through and to welcome night and the darkness.