help on the way

this is what im talking about people. the first ever question to the as yet unnamed column

thank you.

thank you.

thank you.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Dec 26, 2006 6:04 AM
Subject: cooking column

Dear Ank,

I am trapped in the land of sandwiches, bangers and mash, and flat cask
ales. Every day the sky explores  yet another uniform shade of grey while my
skin continues to approach the shade of white only the purest of lillies can
display. The only thing I can look up to is a surprisingly good tasting
organic carrot readily available in the grocery stores. What can I prepare
in this land that can bring the sunshine to my soul and reunite the Beatles
on earth?

Scott

sound and pictures from pooja

http://www.somethingconstructive.net/mangolandia/kupadija/

pooja was here for a few days and left some beautiful bits of herself,
spices, and fabric, and teas and these words:

sanskrit chants

and in english
 

about the date palm
while i'm here
i'm divine
sleep in your clover

they're beautiful. english can be nice.

also i've been collecting some sounds of kuppadi

prasad singing a kirtan
pravin singing a film song

love
ankur

durruti's fifth column

also on the list of quick to decide and slow to implement, on the
advice of the Knowledgeable i have decided to start a popular column
in a major newspaper on cooking. now that i'm no longer interested in
cooking, i feel i have the necessary professional detachment to make
this endeavor a major success.

it's going to be dear abbey or doctor strangelove style, with people
from all over the intelligible universe sending in emails or postcards
of cooking questions and me attempting to write sensical responses,
with the quixotic media-luna ever-waiting in the proverbial wings.

so in order for this particular branch of the madness to take off
carry this whole cookbook marketing scheme to the next spaceship
level, i need some questions from the collective you.

that is, in an attempt at clarity:

i am asking for people to send me questions about cooking which i will
then answer and post on "cooking can be god" as first steps towards
writing a cooking advice column. they can be simple like "how do i
make a vegetarian foie gras" or somewhat subtle, such as, "my boss
invited me over for dinner. should i eat the meat if it's local but
not organic, organic but not local, or only if raw? and is this sexual
harrassment or not?"

i promise not to take the questions seriously if you take the answers
in kind. to prevent this from getting out of hand in a pontificatory
manner, i do declare that each response will have a recipe for
something edible (or bebible) that is vegetarian and in english.

thanks in advance for your kind assistance in this new, daring,
endeavor. the goal is that i'll have a dozen columns or so to show the
raving masses of newspaper editors currently plaguing me with
inquiries to my non-existent mobile handy. which means, naturally,
that if you know someone who would carry this column, do let them
know.

everyones
ankur

ps we can have "swearing" and "non-sweating" versions, maybe.

--
black panthers head back to the motherland:
http://mangolandia.blogspot.com

dec 18th transcription of a dream...

so my DREAM last night -- in some fancy cafe among a line of fancy
cafes with expensive dishes i would never go to order but i had to
meet some human there. the people i met there somehow associated with
the spirits of Death and Argentina -- a man and a woman -- and i went
off about Meche dying and how beautiful she is and will be and the
woman was in tears. i continued about Death not being separate, the
discretion was an illness, an illusion, a delusion of our separate
egos. The man bristled -- he had hair like Mark and waw jewish, she
had long wavy hairs. i continued it would all -- the life and the
Death -- be better seen as part of the same multifacted gorgeous
hideous kind cruel indescribable GODNESS that is the sum and synergy
of all Being (and nothingness besides). the man scraped bristles into
words of a venerable monotheism and said his god did not include
everything.

the energy immediately shifted with the camera angle from argument to
experience and i remember him saying he had of yet experienced no such
thing -- the onenes, the unity of all creation and destruction -- and
i outlined some teachings (practical injunctions) so that he might.

we continued with Meche and we were all crying, the woman said here i
have 15,000 $ and i want to give it to you so she reached into her
purse and pulled out three Argentine 100 peso notes and gave them to
me. i accepted them on the condition i could give them away and send
her a letter when i did so, thinking "nirali will know what to do with
this", the whole idea is to support people like jayeshbhai and john
giuliano budding flowers, not the specifics but the soul of these
operations and we were all crying and i walked away into the bustle of
the indian night, warm and sinister a la vez, wondering how i would
myself survive without sinking to using such holy notes for my own
luxuries, my dosa and my mangos... as i woke up.

*

there's so much felt about meche's sudden passing and i'm not quite
ready but to share this song pooja sang ("while i'm here") and to
reiterate how death is not some antithesis to life but rather it is
our environment, the ether we breathe, the amniotic fluid he turn
somersaults in. it can be no Other, no Alien.

in ayurveda they have this concept of all matter as being based on the
5 elements (ether, air, fire, water, earth) and each of the elements
besides ether being composed of 50% ether. analagous to the modern
physics notion that there's a lot more space than matter packed in
those subatomic particles (i havent done the research personally; that
might be wrong).

--
black panthers head back to the motherland:
http://mangolandia.blogspot.com

Vinobaji on Gandhiji

from _Vinboa on Gandhi_ (p11)

"
Once a friend asked me: Should one address Gandhi or Gandhiji. I said
if he considered him a human being, a human being worthy of respect,
he should address Gandhiji. But if he thought of him as an idea, it
would be sufficient to address Gandhi. Today, for me, Gandhiji is no
longer a person, he is an idea.
...
Gandhiji himself was so sensitive to changing conditions that he never
had any dificult in adjusting himself to new situations. I once used
for him an expression that many found objectionable: double-faced.
There is a song of Ekanath in which he has called men of God
double-faced people in that they describe God one day in one way and
the next day in a quite different way. Gandhiji could similarly be
called a double-faced person. He never stuck to words. He was always
evolving. His mind was ever occupied with the quest for truth.
"

--
black panthers head back to the motherland:
http://mangolandia.blogspot.com