I went on a 10 day silent Vipassana meditation course in the Goenka school, at Bodhgaya in Bihar province in north India. It was a complex event – my emotions and thoughts about it have often changed dramatically in a day. This blog post is more in note form than a cohesive, final account. 1. Silence For […]
He took my hand. “Follow me. Move fast. Don’t stop.” I’d spent the early morning looking round the tranquil mosques of ancient Champaner at the bottom of the holy hill. (This is a good guide to them, plus I left a comment on buses which might be useful. It’s in Gujarat, west India, a little north […]
A two year old draft blog post I just found, which is too good not to publish. Age leavens its earnest attempts to be ahead of trend. New computer technology used to be my relaxation, my hope. As the world has changed, that comfort has gone. We grew up in a digital village. Now we’re […]
They all seem to be called Lakshmi. The first one I met at the Virupaksha Temple in Hampi. You pay a small coin for a blessing, which he takes with his trunk and passes on to his minder. Then he touches your bowed head like this woman in Pondicherry. That one was at the Sri […]
I wrote this post two weeks ago before going on a meditation retreat. It felt too negative at the time; it isn’t in that it reflects my mood then. India is like a scouring pad. The dirt the dust. Litter cast uncaringly – except in Pondicherry, as if to show it is deliberate everywhere else. […]
Zenrainman’s house is like a tree. Grown out of the earth of its own basement on the edge of Bangalore, pressed into bricks. Nurtured entirely by water and light from its own roof. It breeds, symbiotically, large primates to maintain it. Treating their sewage. To water a rooftop rice paddy ready to grow enough to […]
Oh India! There’s always another surprise, toughening your way through the day. This week Modi, the Hindu nationalist PM, announced to the nation that the two largest bank notes were now worthless pieces of paper. This clamp down on black markets and electoral bribes has a complex set of rules which let you trade in the old notes in […]
India is unusual in having two shared public “pets”. Dogs are the ones that I’ve seen before in other countries, prowling every street and temple. These puppies with their sore-furred mum are in Pushkar. Unusually, people feed them. The other day while waiting for a safari at a tiger reserve, I saw a woman feed […]
The next page I found in the notebook (after the last one) is my own view of the problem of information goods having zero marginal cost, so not functioning within capitalism. Paul Mason describes this in Postcapitalism. Walking through the diagram… “Zero marginal cost newtech” is the starting point. A “marginal cost” is a business […]
I found another oldish notebook. It’s about the edge of chaos. The more lightly shaded left hand edge is absence, null, non existence. The dark shaded right hand side is total chaos, randomness. The sharp line down the middle is the edge of chaos – where things are balanced, interest lies, life grows. There are […]