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get this book

August 23, 2011 By Meera Leave a Comment

Such a pleasure to finally hold a hard-bound book of Sharlet’s essays in my hands, the true stories he’s held closest to his heart, collecting on the side as he worked on The Family and C Street. Knowing Jeff, I’ve read some of these before, on screen at KillingTheBuddha.com (a site he founded and I continue to help edit) and amid the ephemeral pages of Rolling Stone and Harper’s. But between the covers of Sweet Heaven When I Die, on thick stock, they’re richer with the re-reading. For the many essays that were new to me, I got a fresh look at what I’ve always loved about his writing, the anti-scripture of a man who is crazy about a world that drives him mad, in love with ordinary people around us that he can see are larger than life. The comparison to Joan Didion is apt. He writes passages like this, from the tale of a college love from Colorado and a return visit to see her years later:

She thought she might study religion. She bought herself a concordance. She would sit cross-legged on the floor, the concordance’s giant pages spread on her lap like the wings of a gull, a cup of wine or a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a Marlboro in the other. Her back curved like calligraphy—she had worn a brace as a girl, and her legs were a bit crooked, and her toes wrapped onto one another because when she was little she’d refused to abandon a pair of shoes that she’d loved—and she would parse scripture.

Read Sweet Heaven because you love words and stories. Read because you long and love. Read Sweet Heaven because you believe, or wish you did.

Buy this book, for yourself and a friend.

Filed Under: killing the buddha Tagged With: books, reviews

best women’s travel writing

April 21, 2011 By Meera Leave a Comment

I just returned from another trip to India. On my second day there, I was eating lunch at my aunt and uncle’s house, setting out the tiered tower of stainless steel tiffin containers to reveal finely cut green bean curries, sambar, rasam and other South Indian staples. In an attempt to be polite, I served my uncle first, scooping out a spoonful of rice fresh from the pressure cooker.

“Oh, we don’t do the rice first…,” my aunt began, waving her hand in an attempt to interrupt my hovering spoon’s path. And then she explained that Brahmins don’t let the rice touch the plate before some curry has been put down first. Well, not all Brahmins, my uncle added, just our kind, and he makes the horizontal motion across his forehead indicating the marks of a Siva worshipper, as opposed to the trident-shape mark of the Vishnu followers.

Damn, did it again! Rule-breakin’ in Chennai. Bless my eternally accommodating extended family as I transgress, they laugh, and then explain. I learn the rules, one by one, if not necessarily the reasoning behind them. Repeat.

It was a reminder that my essay “A Hundred Unspoken Rules” that was originally published in Killing the Buddha still stands true. I’m happy to report that it was selected for the anthology The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011, edited by Lavinia Spalding and just out from Travelers’ Tales.

It should be arriving in bookstores soon, but in case you prefer arm-chair shopping to complement arm-chair traveling, then you can get it now on Amazon.

In addition to my South Asian bumblings and ruminations, you’ll find true stories about having lunch with a mobster in Japan and drinks with an IRA member in Ireland, and learn the secrets of flamenco in Spain and the magic of samba in Brazil. You can deliver a trophy for best testicles in a small town in rural Serbia, fall in love while riding a camel through the Syrian Desert, ski a first descent of over 5,000 feet in Northern India, and discover the joy of getting naked in South Korea. And then, maybe, think about where your next adventure might lead you.

Filed Under: journalism, killing the buddha Tagged With: anthology, india, killing the buddha

the lingering loveliness of long things

January 14, 2011 By Meera Leave a Comment

Published today on Killing the Buddha…



Last Friday night, a man late in his years and a recent recipient of news about his body that no man wants to hear, leaned in close to me and asked me a question. The air was heavy with mortality, and its twin emotion, love. What his question was is irrelevant, but the answer, I realize as I sit down to write about a marathon public reading of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick last weekend, is not. My answer was about how I cherish the quiet spaces in life. Time without interruption. Time for deep conversations or a sensuous focus on a single subject. Time to get into the grit of life, and let it unfold. I am decidedly of the mind that that’s where all the good stuff happens. I also feel like these moments, in our hyper-communicative lives, are becoming extremely rare. We share more, with more people, but we stay on the surface of an unfathomable ocean.

At noon the next day, I stepped into a space that felt deep and from some other time. The approach, rumbling down cobblestone streets, helped. The entrance to the new Bedford Whaling Museum was plugged with people, some (including myself) laden with sleeping bags and backpacks of snacks. It was the fifteenth annual Moby-Dick Marathon, a non-stop reading of the epic tale from the site of Melville’s own departure on a whaling ship in 1841. My friends and I were in it for the long haul. I, I must admit, had never read the book. I knew it was about a ship, and an obsessive captain, and a whale.

And so I learned about Ishmael and Ahab and the white whale and their adventures. For more than a day, it was just voices. One after the other, 180 readers stepped up to the mic for a ten-minute stretch each over the course of 25 contiguous hours. You could look at the number affixed to their sleeve and then the program and perhaps figure out who they were: notables such as Barney Frank (MA congressman) or Peter Whittemore (great-great-grandson of Melville), or simply “Retiree” or “Melville Aficionado.”  Though we moved venues a couple of times, mostly we were settled in the museum’s Jacob’s Family Gallery, transformed into a space of words and whispers. Whale skeletons, suspended from the ceiling, hung over our heads. A blue whale exuded oil from its bones that collected in a small flask that would take decades to fill.

Nearing midnight, the crowd had thinned. I had signed up as a substitute reader, placed my own S-14 label on my arm and it was as I was getting sleepy that one of the organizers rested a hand on my shoulder and asked me to read. As I stood at one podium listening to the prior reader finish and awaiting my cue to begin, I saw that it was snowing outside and I smiled. And then with his nod, I began to read of the “power and malice” of sperm whales, as noted by our young sailor. Call me, not Ismael, but a romantic; I felt like I was taking part in some small yet wondrous bit of history.

For reading aloud is a dying art. When did you last read something, more than a snippet from the newspaper, to someone close to you? When was the last time you had something read to you? A poem? An essay? A book? A long book? Jeff Sharlet, who founded this website, (and, it’s not unrelated, named his blog, “Call Me Ishmael.”), was once my professor. He made us stand at the podium and read our work aloud to each other. “Go to book readings,” he commanded. “As writers, they are your church services.” Some of the readers in New Bedford were born preachers, in this respect. They read neither too slow nor too fast. They lingered over words. They savored the stage directions of punctuation. Others were young, or inexperienced, or melodramatic. The resulting flavors were humorous (when an English captain took on a thick Brooklyn brogue) or painful (when the most basic words were mispronounced), yet there was always something fabulously democratic about the mélange. Our lack of reading aloud, or perhaps more accurately, our lack of listening, is the death of our pronunciation. Moby-Dick is advanced; there are deceptive nautical terms where only half the letters are pronounced and 25-cent words galore. When they were spoken correctly, they sang. We listeners learned.



The other blessed thing of these epic events, these extended spaces of quiet, is the stages they pass through. In the beginning, hundreds of us were in a room filled with the Lagoda, a half-scale model of a whaling bark, its mast inches from the cathedral-height ceiling. We moved to the Seaman’s Bethel across the street for the sermon section, sitting in the stiff wooden pews where Melville once sat, listening to a real-life pastor play the part of Reverend Mapple as he thundered the story of Job from a boat prow pulpit. We returned to the museum and settled into the Jacob’s Gallery, taking short forays into the theater and another exhibition room to surround a sperm whale skeleton for a soliloquy on cetology. The hours ticked on. People came and went. By three in the morning, there were fifteen people sitting in folding chairs and another dozen snuggled in sleeping bags in the upper corridor. I slept myself, on and off, and then periodically leaned up, book in hand, and resumed listening. As light began to stream in the window, a new wave of people arrived with coffee cups in hand, stomping fresh snow from their boots.

But the movement in body was minimal, not more than 20 or 30 minutes spent in transition, the rest in continual reading, page to page, chapter to chapter, reader to reader. The audience was hushed. Attentive. There were a few Kindles and iPads, but those with computers were rare and tended to tuck themselves away into far corners. A few women knitted. Most of the audience bent over copies of the book, their own—dog-eared and pencil-marked—or borrowed from the museum. If we spoke at all, it was in a whisper. I learned nothing about the friends of friends I was with until we buckled up in the car for the ride back to Boston early Sunday afternoon.

Except for the brief time when we crossed the street to the Seaman’s Bethel, I had not left the museum but once. A spell was broken as a friend and I stepped into the cold morning in search of a coffee. Early on in Moby-Dick, Ishmael talks about the love of extended stays on sea, far from daily news.

For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks….

I imagine the quiet of the sea, the drama only in moments of storms or the slaughtering of whales. As the barista fixes my coffee, I glance at the newspaper lying in wait. A massacre in Tuscon. We leave, return to the museum and the sacred space within, find solace, and escape, in the auditory marvel of a story well told.

Filed Under: killing the buddha Tagged With: books, moby-dick

om. hindu. huh?

November 28, 2010 By Meera Leave a Comment

Today, on Killing the Buddha…

Yoga. Fifteen million practitioners in the United States…and not one unified position on what exactly yoga is. What a surprise! And yet the debate rages on, among Southern Baptists and Orthodox Jews just to name a couple of religious groups, about whether or not yoga is a specifically Hindu practice, and whether to practice it is a betrayal of one’s own religious predilections should they not happen to hail from the Indian subcontinent.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece for India Today about yoga in America that touched on this infinite mix:

Although it was my father who was born in India, my mother, an American of European descent, took me to my first yoga class. I was about 10, and found myself after an hour of deep breathing and deeper stretches, sprawled on the floor in savasana. We were at church. … Little did I know I was playing out a role in some strange echo chamber of historical experience. The blood of east and west pumped through my young heart. My lapsed Baptist mother had married my lapsed Hindu father and, wanting to give their children some religious foundation, had chosen Unitarianism. It was a flexible faith. In the 1800s, its early American adaptors helped bring Hindu ideas to a New World audience when Henry David Thoreau penned to a friend, “Even I am a yogi,” and Ralph Waldo Emerson published his poem Brahma.

But my ruminations on twenty years of yoga practice aside, some people are getting serious about wanting to remind Westerners that theres a bit of history behind yoga—perhaps as much as four thousands years’ worth. Today, a piece by Paul Vitello climbs the top-ten list of most emailed stories on The New York Times site, about the “Take Back Yoga” campaign being waged by a group of Indian-Americans. They have

ignited a surprisingly fierce debate in the gentle world of yoga by mounting a campaign to acquaint Westerners with the faith that it says underlies every single yoga style followed in gyms, ashrams and spas: Hinduism. The campaign…does not ask yoga devotees to become Hindu, or instructors to teach more about Hinduism. The small but increasingly influential group behind it, the Hindu American Foundation, suggests only that people become more aware of yoga’s debt to the faith’s ancient traditions.

So what do you think? Have Americans, in our physioyoga™-core vinyasa-embodyoga™-anusara-ashtanga-Bikram™-hatha-prenatal-power-yin-happy-restorative thirst for yoga rejuvenation, stolen something? And is that something religious? Who or what are you invoking when, hands clasped in front of your heart center, you open your mouth and emit the eternal sound of Om?

Filed Under: killing the buddha Tagged With: hinduism, india, Yoga

KtB celebrates ten years!

November 14, 2010 By Meera Leave a Comment

KtB just turned ten! Join us to celebrate on December 7th in Brooklyn, New York.

Poster by the ever-talented Danica Novgorodoff.

For the past three years, i’ve been in the buddha-killing business and it seems a fine time to celebrate. And ten years! Ten years old isn’t much for a tree. A ten-year-old religion hardly even deserves to be called one. But for a website? Ten years is ancient. It’s venerable. It’s wise.

That’s why, on December 7th, KtB is putting on a Tin (Tenth) Anniversary Spectacular at the Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO, Brooklyn. It’ll feature a Decadent Decalogueof performances by friends of the magazine new and old, including Gangstagrass, Gabriel Kahane, Eugene Mirman, Eileen Myles, Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, and others.

There will also be Buddha-killer drink specials, 6-word testimonies, a DJ afterparty, and unmentionable surprises. KtB editor Quince Mountain (Worldwide College of Auctioneering Class of ’96) will officiate over a live and silent auction.

All proceeds go to Killing the Buddha, which has always depended on reader contributions, so that it can support more exemplary writing and continue to bring people together offline at live events around the country.

On November 13, 2000, Jeff Sharlet and Peter Manseau launched Killing the Buddha with a quartet of odd, uncomfortable, beautiful essays. By 2001, Utne Reader heralded it one of “15 sites that could shake the world.” Since then, we have been publishing commentary, journalism, reviews, fiction, art, and more. CNN reported just this past year, “Killing the Buddha makes religion interesting again.”

More info here and RSVP on Facebook.

Filed Under: killing the buddha Tagged With: killing the buddha

the dark side of the festival of lights

November 5, 2010 By Meera Leave a Comment

Today, on Killing the Buddha…

I knew something was changing in India when I arrived for Diwali about ten years back and some of my nephews were boycotting the five-day Hindu Festival of Lights. While subtler forms of light are used too—a cascade of clay oil lamps illuminating sets of stairs—firecrackers are the big attraction in this annual commemoration of good over evil. Sparklers and M80s and things that go Pop! Bang! Boom! Ravana has been vanquished. All hail Lakshmi, goddess of wealth… with a thousand firecrackers strung together producing a magnificent five-minute-long series of explosions that surely the gods can hear in the heavens, making their ears ring and their eyes water.

My teenage relatives were having none of it. Not only does all that bang lead to missing fingers (a close call for one cousin) and house fires (an uncle’s rooftop thatch hut was engulfed), but the city is subsumed in a cloud of noxious smoke. The firecrackers themselves, my nephews explained to me, are produced in unsafe work conditions by child laborers. They didn’t want to support such a business.

Add to that the revelations that Diwali spurs an increase in the ritual sacrifice of owls to woo the the gods into helping the lives of humans. Something similar was happening during the World Cup in Africa, when smoking vulture brains was thought to help predict winners. (Little did they know they could simply ask Paul, who sadly passed away just last week.)

For Hindus, with their 300 million incarnations of god, it must be hard to please them all. And so many are intimately connected with the animal world. Last year, I met Jitu Solanki, a young naturalist making a living by running a guest house and offering desert tours in Bikaner of western Rajasthan. We were talking about the lack of dog control in India, the world’s leading country in rabies bites. He said:

Hindu people, you know, there is a lot of god and all, so we have a god we call Bhairava, reincarnation of Shiva and his vehicle is a dog, so people believe that if you kill the dog, Bhairava will be angry. This is a very nice concept that I like. If you see any god in Hinduism, you will find some bird or animal related and it is a very nice way to conserve wildlife.

But, everywhere, everyday, we lay lesser forms at the altars—little kids making firecrackers for our celebratory fun, exhaust from the transportation that carries me to a conference on conservation, the wind turbines that create “green energy,” daubed with the blood of birds. If only good and evil were just a bit easier to distinguish from one another. Give me more comics and less complexity. Give me light and the sweet, loud, smokey, conscience-free childhood memory of climbing rooftops in Chennai with my pack of cousins. Me in my brand new clothes, my clean hair freshly oiled, looking for the match to light my next sparkler.

Filed Under: killing the buddha Tagged With: birds of prey, hinduism, india

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