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Notices by hosh (hosh@hub.disroot.org), page 5
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It's a more interesting and stylized representation of a Christmas tree than I could do.
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that's a big un. Too big for my old machine.
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India tightens rules on visits of foreign journalists to Kashmir: apply 8 weeks in advance
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Watch: After World Cup pitch invasion, Pussy Riot releases song envisioning a world with ‘good cops’ "“This track is a utopian dream about alternative political reality in which instead of arresting activists and putting them in jail cops are joining activists. The world where cops got rid of homophobia, stopped the war on drugs and actually understood that it’s much better to be joyful and nice to people.”" Also a selfie video of Ai Weiwei supporting their world cup action.
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Scroll's "Sonic Saturday": Listen as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Begum Akhtar sway you to the rhythms of Dadra taal
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Malayalam novelist S Hareesh withdraws his novel citing threats on social media " literature is being mob lynched, darkest day in kerala’s cultural history"
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You still didn't lose focus of the important things.
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terribly blurry on that bottom shelf
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Lately I've been reading a translation of Sarmad by Paul Smith, who seems to have translated almost the whole body of Persian language Sufi poetry into English - tons of material. Paul Smith is a disciple of the 20th century spiritual teacher Meher Baba, whose center near Ahmednagar in Maharashtra I've visited. Interestingly the small town of Ahmednagar is also the place where emperor Aurangzeb (or Alamgir) died. Aurangzeb was responsible for Sarmad's execution; a year or so after he had his elder brother and rival to the throne Darah Shikoh killed. Dara Shikoh, like Sarmad, was also a sufi and a composer of poems. He is also known for translating the Upanishads. A great man but a poor leader of men, unfortunately.
I don't much care for Paul Smith's translations, unfortunately, at least not his rubaiyat of Sarmad. He attempts to follow the traditional rubaiyat format of rhyming the first, second and fourth line, as Edward Fitzgerald did more successful with Omar Khayyam back in the 19th century. But whereas Fitzgerald employed blank verse, Smith's translations are almost like prose, except for the rhyme at the end of the line. This convention doesn't work very well, in my opinion.
This is what I occupy myself with instead of worrying about citizenship laws, impending wars and other troubles. Sarmad would feel right at home I think, or not at home:
"Until your last breath
This world won't be your friend."
I feel a need to write some sort of manual about how to spiritually survive the current dark age. It would be full of quotations from Lao Tzu, Ashtavakra, Sarmad... Lao Tzu was probably the most practical survivalist. His teachings provided the philosophical basis of Chinese martial arts, but he also showed people how to stay out of harm's way. In T'ang dynasty China, many a disgraced courtier would find asylum by adopting a new life far from the emperor in the forests and mountains south of modern day Xian. Even today, folks who are disgruntled with modern day China and want to lead a simpler lifestyle are reportedly finding refuge in these same mountains. There have been a couple of films about these modern day hermits. However, the spiritual survival about which the sufis and vedantins (and Lao Tsu himself) speak is more important than merely living out one's days.
O Sarmad!
Shorten your complaint.
Of two choices, take one.
Either surrender your body
To the will of your friend
Or offer
to sacrifice your soul.
At the time of his death, he was perfectly ready. He "looked straight into his executioner's eyes, and spoke the following words:
Come
o come, I implore you!
In whatever guise you come
I know you well.
Aurangzeb, on the other hand, lived almost to the age of 90, but did not know peace. He had on his conscience the deaths of hundreds of thousands of men. From his deathbed he wrote:
I know not who I am, where I shall go, or what will happen to this sinner full of sins. . . . My years have gone by profitless. God has been in my heart, yet my darkened eyes have not recognized his light. . . . There is no hope for me in the future. The fever is gone, but only the skin is left. ... I have greatly sinned, and know not what torments await me. . . . May the peace of God be upon you.
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The song, by the way, was inspired by posters of Meher Baba, which bore his trademark "don't worry, be happy" saying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meher_Baba
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The problem with using pseudonyms there is that sometimes they do account lockouts and then require you to furnish documentation in order to prove identity.
There are a million reasons to leave facebook, but fortunately you only need one of them.
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Saki's Filboid Studge
"One huge sombre poster depicted the Damned in Hell suffering a new torment from their inability to get at the Filboid Studge which elegant young fiends held in transparent bowls just beyond their reach."
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'Death by dowry' claim by bereaved family in India "According to the National Crime Records Bureau, 7,634 women died in 2015 – 20 every day – due to dowry harassment. They were either murdered or felt compelled to take their own lives."
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that's a very nice article. I also don't consume enough liquids.
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I can't pretend to be a writer, but am sometimes responsible for trying to make things look good in print or the web. The "out-of-the-box" shortcuts do not work under my distro (AntiX) and I'm not sure whether the Gnome ones could be made available, so I would be creating new key bindings, and this would require some research. Under Libreoffice, all special characters are available one way or another. I think also in Scribus - though I'll have to check. Markdown is a very nice solution for text editors and CMSs, though I don't think it has all the niceties Balkan mentions.
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That was the year that was - Tariq Ali talks to David Edgar - A long, satisfying Interview in the London Review of Books which covers a whole slice of history. I have only a distant understanding of British politics, and know Ali more for his historical novels than as a leader of the far left. (His novels are entertaining and offer a different take on history, though they are not historically dependable. I imagine him writing them with a bottle of scotch at his side. On one occasion, in his book on Salah a-Din, he actually contradicts something he said earlier about one of the characters.)
Here's a brilliant paragraph from the interview, from when he was still a youth in Pakistan:
My father was nervous when I started to be politically active. The country was under military rule and politics and marches were forbidden. I was 16, or 16 and a half, and still at school when I read in the papers that a black American, Jimmy Wilson, had been sentenced to death for stealing a dollar. I can still recall that moment of deep shock. We couldn’t believe it. Even if he’d stolen a million, executing him was a bit much. So I got a few schoolfriends together, and said to them: ‘We can’t not do anything.’ I think there were about twenty of us in school uniform marching to the American Consulate on Empress Road, and we were joined en route by lots of street urchins, who thought it was a good cause after we promised Cokes and kebabs later. Because Jimmy Wilson was a Western name, they thought they had to chant ‘Death to …’, so we had to say: ‘No, no – you can’t chant “Death to Jimmy Wilson” – that’s what we’re protesting!’ When we explained it to them, they reversed the chant to ‘Long live Jimmy Wilson!’ So we arrived at the consulate and saw the consul-general. I still remember his name, Dr Spengler, a hard-faced, wrinkled and bespectacled Protestant of German origin, not a trace of sympathy on his face. He didn’t even reply. I said: ‘We’ve got a letter here because you’re going to execute a black American for stealing a dollar and then you say you’re democrats … it’s unacceptable behaviour.’ His response was to ask for our names and when we’d given them he told us he’d be writing to our principal the next morning ‘to tell him who you are, why you did this and asking him to take disciplinary action’. This was my first direct contact with American democracy. We just left. ‘God!’ we said. ‘The guy didn’t even reply to us! Nothing at all, just cold as ice.’
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#^[hub=https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/17/internet-climate-carbon-footprint-data-centres]Our phones and gadgets are now endangering the planet [/url]
"The energy used in our digital consumption is set to have a bigger impact on global warming than the entire aviation industry "
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#^[url=https://972mag.com/a-state-that-belongs-to-only-some-of-its-citizens/136710/] A state that belongs to only some of its citizens[/] (about Israel's new citizenship law)
"As absurd as it may sound, the State of Israel does not actually recognize an Israeli nationality. In fact, the state has on several occasions argued in court that no such a nationality exists."
Would be funny if it wasn't sad.
hosh
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