So there's a new episode of Into the Zone. It's about this guy, who was a guest in my family's home in Agra some time in the 1920's.
At the time Jiddu Krishnamurti was at the apex of a dazzling career as a spiritual guru. Since he was a young child, he'd been groomed to be the new Messiah of Theosophy, the spiritualist society founded by Russian mystic Madame Helena Blavatsky
I knew Krishnamurti had stayed at our house, and as a child I'd found some old Theosophical books in my great grandfather's shuttered study, but until I researched the podcast I didn't know the full story.
It led me to find out more about my great great grandfather, Pandit Ajudia Nath Kunzru, who was the first hipster in Williamsburg.
Not really. He was a lawyer, and in the 1880's was one of the founders of the Indian National Congress, which was, I think, the first nationalist movement to emerge in the Asian territories of the British Empire.
And one of the weirdest parts of the story of the early days of anticolonial politics in India, was the role of Theosophy, and the way mysticism got mixed up in fighting for freedom.
It's a story that connects Indian independence to the UFO culture that grew up in the USA in the 1950's
You can listen to the story of Krishnamurti, my family's role in the independence struggle, yogis, mystics and UFO's - on episode 3 of Into the Zone 'The guru of Ojai' pushkin.fm/into-the-zone
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
This company Prosecraft appears to have stolen a lot of books, trained an AI, and are now offering a service based on that data blog.shaxpir.com/prosecraft-lin…
I've been traveling for a while, and some good book and music mail was waiting for me when I got back. I also bought some things in Paris. So, a thread of the TBR / TBListened pile
Gallimard are doing a series of political tracts. Badiou, political crime writer Didier Daeninckx and a collective of historians taking down Zemmour's distortions of French history
Two translations from @archipelagobks that I can't wait to read: @a_nathanwest's version of Hermann Burger's last novel Brenner and Maureen Freely's version of Sevgi Soysal's autobiographical prison novel Dawn.
Carlson has same pseudo-decent talking point. But this is what mourning looks like - people angry and sad enough to want to do something, rather than pretending it’s like the damn weather.
There is a posture of learned helplessness adopted by US politicians in the face of this and many other problems. Words like ‘tragedy’ drain away agency.
These deaths are the result of policy. In other countries policy was changed and these events became vanishingly rare. See UK after Dunblane, Australia after Port Arthur