Thank God for "Goodness Gracious Me"!

Time for celebration! The dvd-box "The Ultimate Goodness Gracious Me" arrived today! I have a few things to do this weekend, but otherwise I plan to lock myself in and laugh the days away!

"Goodness Gracious Me" (called for some peculiar reason "Curry nam nam" when it was broadcast in Sweden) is one of my absolute favourite comedy series (up there with The Office, Monty Python, Fawlty Towers and Little Britain). It originally ran in the UK 1998-2001 (3 seasons).

Some of my favourite returning characters:

* The noveau riche Kapoors ("pronounced Cooper" - see picture!) who tries to be more British than the Brits themselves: one favourite episode is when they apply for membership at a golf club, and when the (white) club secretary after trying in vain to politely explain that they cannot join the club finally loses patience and exclaims that "pakis" are not welcome, and the Kapoors fully agree - they are Indian and don't like pakis either! So there is a double form of racism going on - brits who can't bother to tell different asian apart and label them all "pakis", and between Indians and Pakistanis. But most of all - it is always funny when people try to be posh...

* The buddhist exterminator: when called to a private home infested with mice in the kitchen, the woman asks the exterminator how he intends to get rid of the mice - his answer: he will sit and meditate, and make the mice reflect upon their actions until they reach Nirvana! And in another episode, his research assistance runs up to him and explains "we have found how to kill cancer cells!" he answers his usual catchphrase "Kill?! No, we mustn't kill"". Which of course I find extra funny being a buddhist myself, but also because it points to the eternal dilemma: are there things you "must" kill?

* Then we have the two bragging mothers, each claiming their own son is the best at whatever the topic is (even being the best criminal!) and the "loosing" mother always end up with the ultimate repartee "- yes, but how big is his danda?!?". (Danda means "stick" or "staff", so I leave it up to your own imagination to guess what they refer to. And I can't help but smile in yoga class when we are supposed to do dandasana - the staff pose...)

There are other great returning characters, and I get to see them all soon! Hooray! It will be a fun weekend!

/Kris C

Our daily poem, give us today

On Swedish radio, every day at noon (except for Sundays) a bell will strike the hour, followed by a poetry reading and a short piece of music. It's a popular program, it has been running since 1937 (72 years)!

On 10 February, actor Gösta Bredefeldt read the poem "Lektioner om ting: Fjärde lektionen- Våra hus" by the American poet Ron Padgett. I don't have the original language version, but the title means something like "Lessons on things: Fourth lesson - Our houses". I just loved it, so I rushed off to the library and found a collection of three New York-poets ("3 x New York" translated into Swedish by Gunnar Harding). Here is the poem in Swedish (and if you can help me find the title in the original, please let me know!)


Lektioner om ting

Fjärde lektionen

VÅRA HUS

1. Huset skyddar oss från solen, regnet, vinden: sådant vi älskar. Huset är den plats där vi församlas med familjen. Fadern är solen, modern är regnet, barnen far omkring i huset som långsam vind, en stilla bris strömmar in genom fönstret.
2. Huset bör vara solitt, hälsosamt, rymligt, rent, torrt, öppet mot ljuset, luftigt, med dörrar och fönster som släpper in utsidan. Träd och växter utanför bör placeras så att insidan känner sig välkommen ut.
3. Husets olika delar är: taket och så vidare.
4. För att bo bekvämt i ett hus fordras inte så mycket: en ambulans, ett pussel, en flaska med moln.
5. Vi står i stor tacksamhetsskuld till den man som uppfann den korrugerade plåten, eftersom den gör våra tak starka och rytmiska.

Frågor:

1. Trivs du där du bor?
2. På vilket sätt har historien placerat dig där du är?
3. Kan du bygga ett hus? Varför inte?

Ron Padgett

Memories of evil

On 27 January 1945 the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was liberated, and this day is now commemorated by the international Holocaust Memorial Day.

I visited Auschwitz some years ago: I had arranged a guided tour out of Kraków for a group of friends. Upon arrival an authorized guide, a kind of businesslike, middle-aged lady, joined our group and took us through the grounds and the museum.

The day was suitably overcast with rain just waiting to be released.

And this is what I remember most:

- That the famous gate with the "Arbeit macht frei"-sign is much smaller than you expect. It has become such an icon over the years that you think it must be much bigger. And I never understood the meaning of the sign. No-one was freed no matter how much they worked!

- From the museum, the saddest images I recall are the piles and piles of personal goods sorted - one pile for shoes, one for bags and suitcases, and one for eye-glasses and so on. What petty, sick minds will cause people to invent such a sick bureaucracy? It was also very moving to look at all the photographs of the former prisoners, and try to imagine their lives and feelings. I had to mentally pinch myself - this is for real! These people were real! I'm not watching a movie or a TV documentary!

- The crematorium was loaded with such a negative aura that it was almost tangible. I remember it as completely black in colour, but the photographs reminds me that that was just my mental concept of the place. It held such an amount of concentrated evil that I half expected some shadowy monster to materialize out of the walls and out of the ovens! (I have probably watched too many monster movies.) The small bouquet of fresh flowers on the slab in front of the oven openings looked so out of place. But maybe hopeful? That evil can be transformed?

- From Birkenau, the extension of Auschwitz, I remember best the "shelves" inside one of the barracks that actually served as beds... Unimaginable to "store" people in this way! And of course the iconic tower at the end of the rails. We went up in the tower and I could help wondering what the soldiers in the guard tower were thinking when a new train of prisoners arrived.

But the strongest memory of all was an incident right as we were about to leave - we were heading back to our bus when we met a small group of elderly people that just entered the gate. And just a few steps inside the gate the small group stopped and huddled together and cried and cried. And they wore the blue-and-white striped scarves that indicated that they were former camp prisoners...

The incredible sorrow that surrounded them like a thick cloud was overwhelming. It was compelling, and we got caught in a strange dilemma of not being able to stop staring and at the same time not wanting to intrude on their very personal sorrow. Oh the memories they must carry!

To deny the holocaust is both silly and pointless. And Auschiwtz is the logical end point of any racist argument. So why do the neo-nazis deny it?

There sure is a lot of things I don't understand.

/Kris C

New Age obscures that which it claims to enlighten

I have a deep distrust of the phenomenon called “New Age”. I see it as a large market place where people try to get a quick fix for their existential anxieties, from hucksters mining religious traditions for saleable trinkets that demean their origins.

The main problem with New Age, in my view, is that it is used as an ego-booster rather than reducing the power of the ego, which is necessary if you want to live a "real" life: read this text from Wikipedia and you will see that the ego - more specifically its defense mechanisms - has a vast array of strategies that keeps you living in denial:

"To overcome this the ego employs defense mechanisms. The defense mechanisms are not done so directly or consciously. They lessen the tension by covering up our impulses that are threatening.

Denial, displacement, intellectualisation, fantasy, compensation, projection, rationalisation, reaction formation, regression, repression and sublimation were the defense mechanisms Freud identified. However, his daughter Anna Freud clarified and identified the concepts of undoing, suppression, dissociation, idealisation, identification, introjection, inversion, somatisation, splitting and substitution. " (link to source)

Paul Heelas, Professor in Religion and Modernity at Lancaster University, has written a book aptly called "New Age Movement. The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity" (1996) . The key words being "the celebration of self"... So you go to this market, look around at all the stalls and pick and choose the bits that suit you, your wallet - and your ego. Some chanting? Crystal healing? Reading books that confirms that you are the centre of the universe? That you are indeed a god?

In my view, true religion or philosophy, involves taking a good look at yourself, and acknowledge even the ugly parts, not trying to gloss them over as the ego will have yo do. And then you search for a method to dissolve the ego - to eventually remove the very reasons for its existence.

This is why I have become a Buddhist, because I find it to be the best way to work with the ego. But I am sure that the other major religions offer similar help: they all have an element of surrendering - which is the last thing the ego wants us to do.

Buddhism has also become a source for "new-age thieving": the increasing popularity of "secular mindfulness" is one example. It is sad to see mindfulness reduced to a servant of the ego... But if it can inspire people to eventually discover true Buddhism, maybe it can bring something good anyway!

(Link to more reading on Wikipedia)

/Kris C