Week One Update

Howdy faithful readers....

Where we last left off, I arrived in India. And since then, I haven't updated. It's not that I haven't wanted to (believe me! I have!) it's more that I have been so busy and have not had the best of access to the internet. But that is life, and we deal with it. I started this week off in Rishikiesh and Haridwar. I ALMOST took a plunge into the Ganga...but I don't think my professors would have appreciated that much, so I stuck with a polite splash on the arms and legs. I took some wonderful pictures of the mountains in Rishikesh, and there is one in particular that I like. There was a storm moving in, and on one side is light and the other is dark. I'll try to upload that one sometime (the challenge is that it is on my computer, which I am not currently using.

Oh! and I was also on t.v. I was interviewed about teh Nizamuddin (a Sufi Shrine) and a bit about Indian history. I think I impressed them....at least my professor told me I did. It's supposed to be airing in CSPAN in a month- so do watch CSPAN for my television debut ;o)

The one frustrating thing, now, is that because I have waited so long to update, I feel that there is so much to say and not enough time to say it in. I really have been kept busy- if it isn't class or excursions, it's meeting up with old and new (well, new, but they feel like old friends :)) friends. I should have more time once we leave Delhi (I know people here!) Monday, we leave for Aligarh, and while there, I'll be living with a family. After that, to Agra, and if things settle down in Jaipur, then there. No plans yet as to what we will be doing if things don't get better in Jaipur...(I would cast my vote for going to Mumbai, but that's just me).

Alright, I better get going. stay tuned for more updates (hopefully more frequent ones at that...).

-b

I'm in INDIA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hi guys!

Here is the obligatory "I got here" post. I'll try to update later with how the flight was and about Frankfurt. All in all, it wasn't too bad (as far as flying goes...)

bernie

(oh, and I will post a little later with a "backlogged" post- I handwrote it in the Frankfurt airport).

India!

Howdy all!

Oh faithful readers of this blog (yes, all 3-5 of you, plus any new additions), I shall be taking this in a new direction for the next three months. Instead of random musings and random thoughts that happen to wrench their way into my mind and prod me to the point of compulsion to write them down....I shall try to be more consistent and chronicle my summer in India. Should be fun, should be interesting, and always, feel free to leave comments :) Links to pictures will also be posted! So stay tuned for those. And as always, thank you for the love and support!

bernie

Wow...

Ashley sent me this interesting link....makes me glad that thoughts about the abilities and choices of women have come so far...but it's also a bit disturbing to me that this is the way that some people still perceive women and their role.

wow.....

General Update- Because it seems to be about that time...

Well, I haven't written in a while, so I felt it was time for a general update. Grad life continues on; piles of school work and papers, with no end in sight. Actually, part of the problem is that I have ADD and can't sit down and do my work..or if I do, I am doing the homework for two classes simultaneously (don't ask me how I do that one...). But, the time passes quickly. I've been busy also getting ready to go to India this summer. I can't wait!!!!

On the bright side, the month of April has started! My favorite month of the year! and Blacksburg is finally bright, sunny, and warm. No more Bleaksburg. The flowers are out in bloom, and campus is just beautiful....AND, you really get to see it when you have to walk way out of your way to avoid the whole section of campus that is cordoned off because of a bomb threat. Some jackass probably didn't want to take a test....

Actually, that was a nice break from life; Ashley met me and we just walked around Duck Pond, and took pictures of ducks. Ducks are funny. Especially those weird looking ones.

Hmm...what else....I'll be back in the GREAT state of TEXAS on May 13th and will be there until August 21st. Leave for India, will be back August 17th, and then back off to Virginia to hopefully finish off my last year at grad school (please Lord, I just want to finish my thesis by May!)

hmmm...what else........what else......can't think of much else...I should really get back to studying.

Enjoy the spring!!

What the World Needs Now is Love, Sweet Love

I have been ruminating over this the past few days, but I think the two things I dislike more than anything else in this world is hate and ignorance. I would have to give a lot of credit to Dave for his insights and numerous discussions we have had on this topic.

I don't even mean hate in the visceral sense; I mean it in the "I don't know what that is but I don't like it sense." It is a hate that is influenced by ignorance and an inability to want to change or become more knowledgeable. I think when you are young, especially, these are two conceptions that are so dangerous to hold on to. Youth are a driving force, but alone, we cannot accomplish everything. Our voices are not taken seriously and dismissed by those that are older and "more experienced."

I do believe, as well, that age is not an excuse for changing these outlooks and refuting the evils of ignorance and hate. It is, rather, a refusal to see things differently and take into consideration other perspectives- ignorance. Yes, it is difficult to change and shift your whole paradigm after years of believing one thing, but it is also not unheard of.

I felt compelled to write about this because I just thought of how these two forces have served to only create divisions among ourselves; divisions that prevent us from seeing our similarities and focus on our differences. It has started wars, lead to discrimination, and various other situations in which divisions and walls are built between individuals or groups of people.

Ok, rant over. Thinking about this topic makes my heart feel heavy... and so sad that there are people out there that perpetuate hate and ignorance.

An oldie, but a goodie, from my favorite, the Economist.

God

Dec 23rd 1999
From The Economist print edition

After a lengthy career, the Almighty recently passed into history. Or did he?

WHEN your friends start looking for proofs of your existence, you’re heading for trouble. That was God’s situation as the millennium got into its stride.

Few ordinary folk, though they had different names for him, doubted the reality of God. He was up there somewhere (up, not down; in his long career, no one ever located him on the seabed), always had been, always would be. Yet not quite so far up, in the churches and monasteries of Europe, many of its cleverest men would soon be racking their brains for ways of proving it.

Anselm, for instance, and others centuries later, such as Descartes, reckoned if you could think of God, then there must be a God to think of. Thomas Aquinas saw everything in motion, so there must be someone to give the first push. Others felt that a universe so elegantly designed as ours plainly must have a designer. And so on, and ingeniously on.

Yet why bother with proof, if everyone knew it anyway? One, because great brains are like that; two, because not everyone did. Out there were the gentiles, Saracens and such. But did not they too say, “There is no God but God”? Yes, but they didn’t mean what good Christians meant. They must be taught better. And there God’s troubles began.

They were largely his own fault. Like many great personalities, he had countless admirers who detested each other—and he let them do so. For one of infinite knowledge, he was strangely careless how he spread what bits of it to whom. To some he dictated the Bible; to Muhammad the Koran. He was much concerned with the diet of Jews. He let Hindus paint him as what, to others, looked like a blue-faced flute-player with an interest in dairy-farming. Each set of believers had its version of what he was like and what he had said. No wonder cynics began to hint that, if believers differed so widely, belief might be a mistake.

The believers then made things worse. For soon it was not sets but sub-sets. Christians nationalised God, as Jews had long since, like some coal mine. He’s on our side, the English told the French. No, ours, Joan of Arc hit back. Next, the Reformers privatised him: unser Gott, fine, yet not the king’s or the church’s, but each man’s own. From this umpteen versions of what “he” might amount to, or think, were apt to spring, and did. Close kin could disagree. As late as 1829, a bishop warned Britain’s House of Lords of divine retribution if it granted civic rights to Jews; happily, their lordships, aware that stupidity thrived in God’s house as in their own, took the risk. In the 1840s American Methodism split, north against south, arguing whether his word condemned slavery or justified it.

Nor did the rivals seem even to believe their own versions. The Christians turned not cheeks but swords against Muslims, Jews and each other. Muslims, while averring that “in religion there is no compulsion”, did the like to them and to Hindus, and put to death apostates from Islam. For centuries, such rivalries led to torrents of blood. Was this a good God at work? Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum, the Roman poet Lucretius had written: that’s where superstition leads. It was no disproof of clerical logic, but it was a reasonable point.

And in time reason began to take a hand. God, OK, but less mumbo-jumbo, said a platoon of English “deists” in the early 18th century; we can reach him without revelation, let alone incense. This was a risky step, as French and German thinkers were soon to prove. If human reason was so powerful, did man need God? No, said Enlightened men like Diderot (to be silenced, but not convinced, when the mathematician Euler told him “a + bⁿ over n = x, donc Dieu existe”). The French revolution buried God, albeit Napoleon soon dug him out.

Darwin did not help, blowing apart the first book of the Bible. Nor did critical 19th-century German micro-examination of what was left. Still less did men like Marx, who saw the close links between the ruling class and the ruling churches, and was eager to blow up both; come the 20th century, the Soviet Union did so, literally. Religion was the opium of the people, give them the adrenalin of communism instead. God was dead, as Nietzsche had announced; and even if the superman Nietzsche envisaged to replace him somehow never got born, communist man could do it.

Trouble was, communist man didn’t; the people did not agree; and the corpse just wouldn’t lie down. He popped up in the oddest places. “You don’t find many atheists in a landing-craft heading for Normandy,” recorded a padre aboard one such in June 1944; even though the Almighty was about to let many of their joint flock be turned into fish-food. A French journalist, no less, was ready in the 1960s with the best possible evidence, if it was true: a book entitled “God exists, I have met him”. (Or could it have been “her”, as even the current pope was heard to hint recently?)

And this was in the cynical, questioning, anti-authoritarian West. Ever fewer westerners share the church’s—or the synagogue’s—beliefs, and far fewer still attend their services. Yet outside the rarefied world of thinkers, remarkably few deny the possibility of a supreme being; less than 10% of Americans. In Muslim and Hindu societies, the thought is barely heard.

The test will come on Judgment Day, when man, we are told, will meet his maker. Or will it be God meeting his?