Sunday 13th

Busy day today. First thing after meditation I commandeer Martins computer for a couple of hours.

I help out with the Vasudeva Server team, which provide the technical maintenance for this site, and also other inspiring sites such as Sri Chinmoy Radio and Sri Chinmoy TV. I know these sites give a lot of joy to people who arent even nesessarily students of Sri Chinmoy but are just looking for some inspiration in a stressful world, and this in turn gives me a lot of inner joy.

Dhurjati is scheduled to pick me up at nine, on my way down I run into Mallikarjun. Mallikarjun is responsible for most of the content on AspiringIndia.org, a growing website dedicated to storing thousands of years of Indian wisdom in one online home. I help out a little with the site, and I must say one could not have a nicer guy to work with than Mallikarjun. Being Indian himfelf, he has an instinctive understanding of the spiritual current running through that great country, and some of the articles and biographies he has written has been of a very lofty standard indeed. We are both a bit busy at the moment, so we are trying to agree a modest program to fill in some of the gaps in the site and really make it something special. We decide to concentrate on the Saints and Sages section for the moment and build it to a good standard; India´s lifeblood resides in her great saints and Masters and so this is arguably the most important section in the site. At the moment I am halfway through a biography of the great Swami Vivekananda and Mallikarjun is writing biographies of three other disciples of the great Master Sri Ramakrishna.

Dhurjati picks me up and we head off painting again. Most enjoyable work. Dhurjati lied about the fishes, Im sitting down with my feer in the water again and one of them took a nibble at my toe! Fortunately he was one of the tiddlers and had no teeth. I didnt wait to see whether the bigger fish had any teeth. Shivani reckons they just havent been fed. Very comforting.

Enjoyable icecream break, I discover Nutella as a very good icream topping. Colm turns up in the afternoon along with a few other people to help and the work merrily speeds along. I hear that back in Aspiration-Ground Sri Chinmoy is meeting and honouring a famous Bengali violinist. Sri Chinmoy himself is from the Bengal region of India. They say a visionary is never honoured in his own country, but hopefully the opposite will turn out to be true in Sri Chinmoy´s case, many famous Indian musicians have expressed their admiration for his soulful playing, and indeed his biography is currently being written in Bengali by one of Bengal´s most famous writers. In recent years quite a few Bengalis have become his students also, both from Hindu and Muslim backgrounds. From this meditation function a sizeable prasad makes its way back to us which more than compensates for missing dinner.

When we do get home, there´s quite a few things to take care of so I actually end up arriving quite late to the meditation function. I arrive just in time to catch Databi´s and Abakash´s play, which is always worth watching. This particular play was about Nirodbaran, who was one of the foremost students in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram where Sri Chinmy spent twenty years, and who only died this year aged 103. The play was very sweet indeed and included quite a few of Sri Chinmoy's affectionate reminisces about Nirodbaran. Naturally the play started Sri Chinmoy talking about a few anecdotes about the times he had there.