Meher Baba

Tuesday

Philip Hensher

The phoney mystics who fooled the West

From our UK edition

In recent years when we’ve talked about the relations between India and the West, we’ve gone back to stressing the impossibility of interchange. A hundred years ago, E.M. Forster ended A Passage to India with the certainty that Aziz and Fielding could not be friends. Forster thought things would be different after Indian independence, but the spectres of cultural appropriation and the assertion of ongoing imperialist guilt have discouraged equal exchange.  Meher’s spiritual energy was soon devoted to persuading Hollywood to make a massive movie about his life That may explain why the excellent story Mick Brown tells in The Nirvana Express has hardly been covered in the past.

Monday

Bill Kauffman

Six degrees of Batavia

I never could figure out that Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. Am I one degree or two degrees removed from someone a friend or acquaintance of mine knows? Whatever, as kids a generation ago used to say. Through political eminences I have known, I suppose I’m semi-adjacent to various world rulers of yesteryear, but the challenge is to see how far back in time one can go. This is my best shot. When our daughter was one year old, she sat on the lap of my friend Henry W. Clune, the Rochester novelist who was then 105 years of age. Henry’s father grew up in a neighborhood whose luminaries included Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist orator who called the Flower City home from 1847 to 1872.

degrees