Mahashivratri with Sat Guru ‘Jaggi’ Vasudev

shekhar45 Comments

About 5 years ago I met an unassuming young man in a Sadhu’s garb in Puert Rico. Both of us were attending the conference on Deepak Chopra’s ‘Alliance of the new Humanity” and that was when I had my first ‘ride’ with him ! We drove into the middle of the night searching for a place where a function was being held in the old town. Driving with ‘jaggi’ is a hair raising experience. I called him the ‘speed’ Guru then. Of course he will not let any one else take the wheel just in case life becomes a little more sedate. There were other adventures on the way which I will write about later, but please read on to discover with me what I was really moved by..

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do not fear me

shekhar22 Comments

do not fear me
for i have nothing to take from you
my vast emptiness has no room
for all the wealth in the world
be fearless
and reveal yourself to me
for what you hide and protect
and enclose in your illusion,
your individuality,
is the thinnest skin of your real being
for beyond that skin
you and I exist as one
allow me to seep through
and let your self explode out
my well of ecstasy is overflowing,
drink from it’s waters
before it evaporates
to return as rain
in another eon
but if you drink in faith
you will purify the waters
and keep the well flowing
long after my ‘I” has dissolved

Renting out your body for sex – should it be legal ?

shekhar40 Comments

Notice I did not use the word prostitution. Somehow like suicide, it has a nasty and abhorrent ring to it. People kill themselves because for some reason they are unable to face life day to day. Whether the situation is real, or provoked by chemical imbalances in the brain, ( induced perhaps by medication), there is a compulsion and helplessness to it. I am sure there is a financial or other compulsion to selling your body for sex. Question we need to discuss is if that is inherently immoral, or more to the fact, illegal. Don’t get me wrong. The use of young children and the forced prostitution of girls/women is as abhorrent as rape, if not more. But if a man or a woman is consensually selling their body for sex, should that be illegal ? If so, then at what age ? And most importantly, would legalizing prostitution allow the state to have greater control over it ? Reduce the criminal activity that surrounds it, and vastly reduce the spread of aids by having licensing laws to control this trade. Like now in some European countries. Knowing that nowhere n the world has any country been able to eradicate or even control this trade ?

Heath Ledger and Four Feathers

shekhar27 Comments

Dear Shekhar –
It is a month and two days since he has past. This is the night of the Academy Awards and he is still very much on my mind. I somehow got linked to your site partly because of my discovery of your movie The Four Feathers which I will come back to. I really resonate with the sentiments expressed by TG in post number 10. I too, an ordinary American middle-aged business woman, have been dumbfounded by how affected I have been by Heath Ledger’s passing. I’m a very practical person, yes with a love of movies, but I’m not at an impressionable age and not prone to movie start infatuation or worship.
So it has been very mysterious and strange to me why I have been so impacted, indeed, actually experiencing grief – my heart, as thousands of others, goes out to his family and loved ones. Every night I have prayed for his soul’s safe journey. To try and understand the why of this grief over a person I have never known, I have gone and watched his movies. I had seen A Knight’s Tale, The Patriot, Monsters Ball and Brokeback Mountain and believed him to be one of the few young actors who was truly on the path to acting greatness. But, I am principally writing this to you to tell you that The Four Feathers was a revelation. I believe it to be my now favorite Ledger movie (and now I have seen all of them except the ones not yet released). It is not a perfect movie (few are) but I think it is an incredibly under valued movie maybe partly due to when it was released post 9/11. I know this might be blasphemy to some but I like this movie more than Lawrence of Arabia. The actors were wonderful. Besides Heath in the starring role — Wes Bentley and the wonderful Djimon Hounsou. After seeing all of Heath Ledger’s roles, what stays in my mind is the pivotal scene in the desert. The first time I saw this film I broke down and cried after this scene. I watched the entire film again a couple of days ago. Watching this scene again, I realized that Ledger was not becoming great, he was great and I am thankful his body of work exists. This scene goes way beyond the organic basic need to survive against all odds to a place that is born from total physical and spiritual anguish. The roar that Heath brings up from somewhere deep, deep down to conquer his assailant is raw primal power and expresses a language of soul that can not be adequately articulated.
Shekhar, you mentioned that you will write more about Heath and I hope you do. I want to read more about Heath not for celebrity sensationalism but to continue to celebrate the greatness of the actor and to celebrate his body of work. So tonight, in the spirit of the movies and awards, I will raise a glass to heaven to Heath and also to you Shekhar and give my own little award to The Four Feathers.
Thank you, Sheri.

Children being bred for sex

shekhar37 Comments

Like pigs bred for slaughter, minor girls in Mumbai brothels are being bred for prostitution by being injected with growth hormones and fed testosterone pills in the guise of vitamin pills. So that they develop larger breasts and hips early. Customers apparently like under age girls with slightly mature bodies. Not only that, in the event of a police raid, the brothel owners can claim the girls to be older. According to DNA a 14 year old girl complained ” i hate looking at my body. My hips and chest have swelled in the last year and suddenly I have hair on my chin”.
Just around the corner of course, the stock exchange is making people into billionaires everyday. And land deals are being also struck for billions of dollars in the backyard of these brothels.

Paani : Will even these buckets go empty ?

shekhar10 Comments

Another picture form my Paani photo file :
water album - 139.jpg
In Mumbai many of the slum and pavement dwellers begin their search for water at 3 am daily. Many having to buy water from the ‘water mafia’ at Rs 5 per ‘Handi’. Considering that it takes upto 4/5 handi’s to just cook a meal, many people are spending up to 30% of their incomes on water. If we do not completely re-assess our attitudes towards water, in the near future the daily life of most people in the city will be dominated by the search for water, and leading to riots and inner city wars over water. The city will be ruled by the water mafia. Please do go the following site, to get an update on the situation as it exists now :
http://www.infochangeindia.org/agenda3_06.jsp

Between nothing and everything

shekhar5 Comments

The great Indian teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj once said, “Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. Between the two my life flows.” “I am nothing” does not mean that there is a bleak wasteland within. It does mean that with awareness we open to a clear, unimpeded space, without center or periphery–nothing separate. If we are nothing, there is nothing at all to serve as a barrier to our boundless expression of love. Being nothing in this way, we are also, inevitably, everything. “Everything” does not mean self-aggrandizement, but a decisive recognition of interconnection; we are not separate. Both the clear, open space of “nothing” and the interconnectedness of “everything” awaken us to our true nature. This is the truth we contact when we meditate, a sense of unity beyond suffering. It is always present; we merely need to be able to access it.
Thank you, Himanshu for this extract in your post. I took the liberty of blogging it. It was exactly what I was leading to in my previous blog on ‘Love is”, shekhar

Love is

shekhar36 Comments

Whoever said that love is eternal was describing all of creation. Love embraces all existence. But when they added that ‘true love’ is eternal they allowed the wisdom of love to blow away. There is just love. Neither true nor false. We can be in denial of it. But nothing else would hold the universe together. It is what holds time and space together in a constant, beautiful and playful illusion. It always will. Love is what will forever elude scientists from being able to define our existence. For love is a never ending equation that wraps itself around all of eternity. Bounding in and out of itself and constantly evolving. And will do forever. Love is the song of the universe.
i love you
i love
love

Monkey mind

shekhar22 Comments

morning rays wrote : “hi shekhar, when a thinker is silent it could mean 2 things…….a positive…that you’re in the midst of ideas …..and a negative….your emotions are bottled up at the moment. when we visit your blog regularly there is a bond with you…….which makes us want to see you HAPPY ! share……. and the good will get better…….and the negatives will get blown away !”
Thank you ‘morning rays’. It makes me feel great there is a community out there that I can share with. Bond with. Honestly ? I am trying to calm the mind down. It has been in what I call the ‘scrambling mode’. Which is what you get into when you make and release a film. You are constantly problem solving amidst a hundred people. It has been too used now to diversions for so long, it keeps looking for them. I have the script of Paani in my mind, in my heart. Just finding it difficult to getting it down on paper. Trying to calm my mind down. Get used to being alone, and get on with it ! shekhar