Podcasts about Brahmin

APEX Express is a weekly magazine-style radio show featuring the voices and stories of Asians and Pacific Islanders from all corners of our community. This Thursday APEX Express proudly presents “South Asians and The Labor Justice Movement.” This episode highlights Sandhya Jha, a pastor, founder and former Executive Director of the Oakland Peace Center, and racial, housing, and labor justice activist. In the first half of the episode, we discuss Sandhya's life, their path into organizing, and what they're up to now. The second half is dedicated to their recent project with the South Asian American Digital Archive's Archival Creators Fellowship Program. This episode was interviewed, produced, and edited by Swati Rayasam   Follow @Sandhya Jha on Facebook and check out Sandhya's website https://sandhyajha.com/    APEX Express is a weekly magazine-style radio show featuring the voices and stories of Asians and Pacific Islanders from all corners of our community. The show is produced by a collective of media makers, deejays, and activists. Listen to the episode live on KPFA 94.1 in San Francisco, 89.3 in Berkeley, and online at KPFA.org.  References throughout the Show and Links: Without Fear Consulting Interfaith Alliance Oakland Peace Center Book – Blueprint for a Revolution Book – The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad Podcast – Bending Toward Justice: Avatar the Last Airbender for the Global Majority The Alliance of South Asians Taking Action – ASATA Bay Area Solidarity Summer South Asian American Digital Archive Archival Creators Fellowship Program Sandhya Jha's project, you can listen to all of the oral histories here. Solidarity Forever Online Exhibit Arab Resource and Organizing Center Block the Boat No Tech for Apartheid  University of California Labor Center Equality Labs California Trade Justice Coalition NAFCON – National Alliance for Filipino Concerns Filipino Community Center Madhvi Trivedi Patak Transcript ​[00:00:00]  Miata Tan: Hello and welcome! You are tuning in to APEX Express—a weekly radio show featuring the voices and stories of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. I'm your host, Miata Tan. Tonight we're revisiting an episode from our archives, first aired January 5th, 2023. We're bringing it back this week in honor of South Asian American Heritage Month. This one centers Sandhya Jha — a pastor, organizer, and founder of the Oakland Peace Center — in conversation with APEX producer Swati Rayasam. The first half traces Sandhya's path into organizing, from a labor campaign at Johns Hopkins to two decades of interfaith and racial justice work. The second half digs into Sandhya's project with the South Asian American Digital Archive, where she spent a year interviewing South Asian workers inside the labor movement — collecting stories that don't usually make it into the archive. Here's Swati Rayasam in conversation with Sandhya Jha. [00:01:00] Swati Rayasam: I'm really excited actually today to talk to Sandhya Jha, who is a really close friend of mine. Hi Sandhya. Hi there. Sandhya is, a Pastor is a consultant and has been working on this really amazing project with the South Asian American Digital Archive that will get into later in the episode. But yeah, Sandhya I'm just really excited to learn more about you and to hear more of your story and, let's just dive in. [00:01:26] Swati Rayasam: Absolutely. [00:01:27] Swati Rayasam: We should first talk a little bit about how we know each other, you have this long organizing background. I've been in the Bay Area for the past seven years and I would be totally lying if I said I have not historically been, or I'm not even currently an active fangirl of yours. You are literally a pastor. You are a movement worker, how did you get involved in organizing? [00:01:53] Sandhya Jha: Yeah. So I am the product of my parents who were generous, compassionate [00:02:00] people who thought about the world beyond themselves, but were never involved in organizing or activism or anything like that. I think for anybody who comes from immigrant backgrounds, it's hard to tell our stories without naming who we come from. Right. And so my father was Sunil Kumar Jha from the village of Tildanga in West Bengal. My mother, who is still alive is Jeanette Campbell Jha. She is from Glasgow. So I come from a mixed religion and mixed race home. My parents chose not to name me Sandhya Campbell Jha not to give me that kind of grounding, but I was called Sandhya Rani Jha, which is a lot to live up to, well, yes, Rani does mean Queen. But it was actually handed down to me, part of the reason they wanted that middle name was it was my aunt's name, Durga Rani Upadhyay and she was the one who really [00:03:00] brokered my mother's acceptance into the Indian family and I think that there was something about being accepted on the Indian side of the family and not for many, many years on the Scottish side. That caused my parents and particularly my mother to double down on making sure I knew who I came from and who I came from was my people in the village of Tildanga. [00:03:23] Sandhya Jha: I grew up in Akron, Ohio, so we immigrated to this country when I was a toddler, in the late 1970s, which was a complicated time for Asian immigrants to be in the Midwest because it was a time that the rust belt was rusting and there was a growing sense that we were the reason. But also I grew up alongside folks who were trying to figure out how to put food on the table. So I think that landscape shaped me in a lot of ways. And I also come from people who grew up in poor working communities. And[00:04:00] when I went off to college, there was an organizing campaign. The board of directors of the university had created a for-profit corporation with the exact same board. [00:04:15] Swati Rayasam: Oh wow. [00:04:16] Sandhya Jha: So that the universities could subcontract all of their catering, all of their custodial work to this… basically Shell corporation. [00:04:28] Swati Rayasam: Are we telling on the university? [00:04:29] Sandhya Jha: Mm, Yeah. Why not? It was Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and I think that's relevant because the tension between Black communities next to Johns Hopkins Medical School and the school itself were very real because this was part of a very long history of exploiting community members. So the workers were organizing, and you know, I had read about activism, I cared about it. I paid as much attention as I could for a high school student. But when I got to college, this organizing [00:05:00] campaign was going, and the workers were really clear, Hey, college kids who are excited about this, we do have a role for you. It's to fill the crowd. It's to cheer us on. It's to when we ask you communicate to the university that our well-being matters to you because they will listen to you in different ways. But the campaign centered the workers and was really clear with us about what our role was because we were the folks with all the privilege by getting to be there, right? We had tons of privilege and it was a really good lesson for me. I am so grateful. The first organizing campaign I was a part of was a labor campaign that understood what it meant to center the people who were the most impacted by injustice and I think that shaped the rest of my career. [00:05:46] Swati Rayasam: And that's so special too because I think for many people who come into organizing, and I will definitely cop to this myself, like coming up and organizing through high school and college level organizing. When you are a student, nobody ever [00:06:00] tells you that actually you are the least useful kind of organizer that exists. Right. You are in this incredibly enclaved community. Your oppressor, the university, all they have to do is wait for you to graduate institutional memory will not keep you. Yeah. Right. And I think that it is, it's this perfect storm of, you have actually sometimes cool ideas, sometimes very rudimentary ideas, but you also have this turnover issue and you have this sense of self import, which often comes with your teens, early twenties. Yep. As you're just figuring all of that out. So Yeah, self differentiation, right? It's a narcissistic phase in our development. . [00:06:46] Swati Rayasam: It absolutely is and I think that's so important, and I can't imagine how my life would be shaped if I didn't have to spend a lot of time unlearning the self import and narcissism that I had gained through student [00:07:00] organizing. [00:07:00] Sandhya Jha: Yeah. No, I am really, really grateful for it. [00:07:02] Sandhya Jha: My first job outta college was working for a member of Congress, which sounds super fancy and pretentious, but, a member of congress from Akron, Ohio. So put that all in perspective. His name, believe it or not, was Tom Sawyer. Oh, wow. What I loved about Tom was back in those days, he believed very strongly that 80% of legislation was nonpartisan and that was the part that he spent most of his time on. He would weigh in with his party, when they were dealing with that 20% pretty consistently. But he was more interested in the stuff that everybody could agree on and I remember for about 15 years after I worked for him, I looked back and found myself thinking that was so naive. How did he not understand where we were about to head with the divisions between the political parties? But at this point in my life, I realize the people I respect most in organizing work keep pointing out that the binary of [00:08:00] left and right actually doesn't serve us very well. One of my biggest heroes in the movement right now is the Reverend Dr. William Barber, [00:08:07] Swati Rayasam: Hometown hero of mine. Yes. [00:08:09] Sandhya Jha: Poor People's campaign from North Carolina. And he always talks about how it's not about right and left. It's about right and wrong. And it turns out that when we engage in organizing with the awareness that there are huge swaths of things that most of us are well served by, we can do better organizing. And that was actually how Tom was legislating. And at a certain point I realized that my deep passion was around racial justice, but the distinct experience I had in a multi religious household was an awareness of how religion was being used as a weapon. I had an obsession. Every paper in college I wrote was about the Christian coalition, this right wing, organizing body in the nineties. So a friend of mine [00:09:00] said, You know, there's an interfaith organization working against the Christian Coalition. And it was called the Interfaith Alliance. Her mom had been a superintendent in Washington state in eastern Washington and was a pretty conservative person by my standards. [00:09:18] Sandhya Jha: But, Dr. Chow believed in multiculturalism and believed in teaching evolution. And the Christian coalition had organized to push her out of her position as superintendent and the Interfaith Alliance of Washington State had supported her in that time. [00:09:38] Sandhya Jha: And so Liz said, you know, they've got a national chapter, a national office. And that's where I ended up, cutting my adult organizing teeth which was great because talk about learning lessons for our current moment where religion is being weaponized in ways that are anti-trans, that are anti-queer, that are anti-women, that [00:10:00] are anti reproductive rights, that are anti-immigrant and refugee. I am really grateful to have experienced the power of multi-faith organizing, around a lot of those same issues. So that was what I did in the early two thousands and then I went to seminary and public policy school, and then I ended up out here pastoring a congregation of 10 people in a building of 40,000 square feet. [00:10:29] Sandhya Jha: And long story short, that's how the Oakland Peace Center was born, was out of this dream of cultivating deeper collaboration among nonprofits who were dedicated to a shared cause. The Oakland Peace Center, which is a collective of 40 different nonprofits committed to dismantling the root causes of violence in our community. I was the founder of that organization and it was when I was pastoring First Christian Church of Oakland that I asked the handful of folks who were members of that church, what they wanted to [00:11:00] contribute to the community, and they said they wanted to contribute peace in the midst of violence. And for a dozen folks to have given birth to a space that in non pandemic years, saw over a hundred thousand people do things like the Lawyers for Black Lives Conference and to do Kingian non-violence training and to be a part of food and clothing distribution, to participate in all the very diverse ways that we can create peace is pretty impressive. [00:11:30] Sandhya Jha: And a couple of years ago, I left the Oakland Peace Center because a colleague of mine said, Anybody can run a non-profit. We need you to do what you're actually good at, and what she meant by that was we need more people of color doing diversity, equity, and inclusion work that is actually grounded in power analysis. That isn't just how do we be nicer to each other in the workplace, but how do we recognize the ways that systems of white supremacy [00:12:00] unconsciously often shape the culture of our workplaces? And what do we do to dismantle that white supremacy culture so that we can be building nonprofits and institutions of higher education and faith organizations, and even corporations that are dedicated to our full liberation, our liberation, the lands liberation. [00:12:23] Swati Rayasam: I mean coming, especially from the place that you come in grassroots organizing and in faith based organizing, what is it actually to transition into this kind of consulting space around racial justice and really interface with a lot of people that I feel like as organizers, we don't really talk to? [00:12:42] Sandhya Jha: One of my favorite things about this shift in my work is I love getting to work with folks who don't think of themselves as organizers, who, it turns out are organizers, Right. I think we sometimes create a cult of here's what an organizer looks like, you [00:13:00] have to be a Martin Luther King or a Cesar Chavez and what I love is getting to work with moms and with teenagers and with folks who think of themselves as caring, compassionate, individuals, and when I go into an organization and work with their handful of folks who care about this issue, the DEI team, I get to teach them how to strategically organize. I get to teach them how do you create culture shift over time? I get to teach them how do you figure out who your allies are? How do you figure out how to move people who are neutral? It turns out that there are a lot more organizers out there than we realize if we don't create one definition of what an organizer needs to look like. [00:13:45] Swati Rayasam: I have been reading this political scholar Eqbal Ahmed, who really talks about the way the burden is on those of us who are deeply committed to movement work, narrow definition people, the burden is really on us to try and [00:14:00] create a liberatory future that feels both achievable. Mm-hmm. and safe for everybody. Because when people engage in mass struggle and in revolution, there are people who are a hundred percent willing to put their lives on the line. People who are willing to die for the cause. And we absolutely need those people. And there are many people along the spectrum who, if you can create a future that feels like it's within their grasp, they will come with you. [00:14:30] Sandhya Jha: Yep. I teach a lot of organizing classes and have gotten a chance to teach alongside my beloved colleague BK Woodson at Allen Temple Baptist Church, they have a leadership institute there. And one of the books we use is Blueprint for a Revolution by Srđa Popović. And I feel like I learned a lot as we read that book together and thought about how to apply it to the work we're doing in Oakland. They talked about how by engaging in nonviolent direct action, [00:15:00] they created space for elders to be a part of their work and youth to be a part of their work and families to be a part of their work. By making the movement playful. They gave people hope and gave people courage because dictators are terrified of being mocked. [00:15:17] Swati Rayasam: Yeah, exactly. And I think by being really restrictive or narrow about who we view as actually valuable organizers. And I think labor movements teach us this a lot, right? We really cut ourselves off at the knees on our ability to build a network or to be in touch with the general population, many of whom are more connected than we ever give them credit for. [00:15:41] Sandhya Jha: Yeah. Yep. it's part of why I love labor organizing. I talk with a lot of people who are disenchanted with organizing who ask me how I can have stayed involved for the past 25 years. And why I've been able to stay in it is cuz I'm organizing alongside workers and they have [00:16:00] full lives. And the work that they're doing in the movement is so that they can live their full lives. And there's something about having that perspective and recognizing the why all the time instead of getting lost in the weeds of the what. Is so important in this work. I think that has been a big theme of my organizing life is how do we build to the greatest common denominator? As my friend BK often says how do we build towards those shared values that often get erased when we are engaged in the right versus left debate. [00:16:39] Swati Rayasam: Yeah. I think that it is so important and I also think that it's really hard in this moment of what feels like constant trauma and re trauma. [00:16:51] Swati Rayasam: And to some extent especially when we're talking about the left right dichotomy there are real concerns [00:17:00] about safety. Yep. And there are real concerns about security and who you are in community with and who you can find even the smallest level of acceptance from to ensure that you won't have violence visited upon you. And I think that these conversations of united front organizing, Right. trying to bridge across difference mm-hmm. for a shared goal, for a shared liberatory future Yep. Are really important. And they feel kind of impossible to achieve right now. [00:17:31] Sandhya Jha: It's interesting cuz I think that in many ways that is true. There are a lot of conversations that I think people with privilege expect, people who are marginalized to engage in. And those expectations are unfair, what I found very frustrating was the number of people with a lot of privilege who would be like, Ugh, I just can't talk to those people. And I'm like, Then who's going to? Exactly. and so I do think that some of this is about being willing to have [00:18:00] hard conversations in the places where we have privilege and recognizing who's at actual risk and showing up in ways that are protective of who is at risk. But that doesn't mean walking away from people who aren't where we are. Right. Because the fact of the matter is everybody's on a journey. And I have watched at the same time some of the disposability culture in movements write off people without giving them any way to address harm, repair harm, and find a pathway back into community. [00:18:41] Swati Rayasam: Yeah. And I think that's why, at least I am feeling really hopeful about, what I've seen over the past couple of years, this really important track into transformative justice and restorative justice, to acknowledge that there is harm that has happened, there are harms that happen every day between people. [00:19:00] And also we are all on our own journey to unlearn the things that we have been taught either directly or indirectly by our upbringing, by our environment and that you cannot easily dispose of people and that people are able to come back into community. Now that comes with a very important caveat that like they recognize the harm. Mm-hmm. that. They have done or how they've been party to it, that they acknowledge that there is healing work that needs to be done both with the person that they harmed and also probably in internally. [00:19:35] Sandhya Jha: Well, and the community, folks who don't do RJ on a regular basis tend to skip the community aspect. Yeah. That there is actually repair that needs to be done with community and there's work community needs to do to figure out how to re-embrace reabsorb people who have done harm in ways that still protect the person who's been harmed. [00:19:55] Swati Rayasam: Exactly. In ways that do not erase the harm that has happened, but [00:20:00] acknowledge, contextualize it and say, Okay, we are patching this and we are working to move forward in step with each other. Absolutely. [00:20:09] Sandhya Jha: Can I just say that one of the other things that I think you and I have in common is a real passion for bringing joy back into the work of Justice I quote Fabiana Rodriguez a lot on this particular thing, because I was at an event she was doing eons ago, and she looked out at us and most of us were activists and she said, Listen, y ‘all you keep inviting people to a struggle. I'm on your side and I don't wanna join a struggle. I want to join a party. And that was like a call to arms for me when I heard her say that. I was like, Oh my gosh, you're right. We are so much more fun. Like, I've hung out with people who are anti-trans and anti queer and anti-immigrant and anti refugee. They are not fun people. No, no. We have all of the best parties. So I don't know why we don't [00:21:00] capitalize on that more. So I think the role of joy and justice is so important. And this is why I was so excited to have you on the podcast that I launched recently. [00:21:11] Sandhya Jha: Right. Bending Towards Justice Avatar the last Airbender for the Global Majority. [00:21:15] Swati Rayasam: So literally like bringing it together. Two of my favorite things right, is like TV shows, wholesome TV shows like Avatar, The Last Airbender that I deeply love and organizing. Yes. All the work that I love. And I think it's true You know, what is actually really the important work is to work to build toward a future that is desirable Yep. That people want to be a part of. Yeah. That people can see happen. Yeah. And I think that is a lot of the difficulty that I have seen in some organizing circles. We are so well versed in what we are against and all of the things that are bad that so many people have a really hard time seeing or visioning or communicating [00:22:00] what it is that we are fighting for. Yeah. Right. And it's not enough to say, I'm fighting for a world where we can all be safe. Right. Yeah. I'm not, I'm fighting for a world where we can all take long naps in the middle of the day if we'd like to do that. Right. Yeah. But like really building and visioning that future of like, in this world in which we are all safe, there will be harm that happens. How do we deal with that? Yeah. What do we do with that? How do we make sure that it is able to keep everybody safe and also able to account for the times in which it is not able to keep everybody safe. [00:22:38] Sandhya Jha: Visionary does not have to mean naive. And we need it to be visionary. And sometimes I forget to do the visionary stuff. I've got a colleague, Dave Bell, he's a farmer who is also an anti-racism trainer and we do a lot of work together. He's a white guy who lives in White Swan, Washington, on the reservation and I remember being at a training with him and I [00:23:00] was all fired up and I was so excited about the conversations we were having and the people were really ready to do the hard work and roll up their sleeves. And Dave says to them, I would like to not have to do this work. And I'm like, What is he talking about? This is amazing. We're doing such good work. And he says, I would like for us not to have to talk about racism all the time. I would rather be farming. I would rather be, taking care of the cows in my field. [00:23:26] Sandhya Jha: I would rather be talking about my pottery work that I'm doing badly but learning how to do, I would rather be doing anything than have this conversation. But I don't get to be on the farm with the wheat, with the cows, with my bad pottery until we figured out how to do this anti-racism work. And it was a really humbling moment for me because I also get into that like I'm an organizer, that's my identity space. And it was this reminder of Dave's doing this. So he gets to live in a world where he gets to hang out in the fields and he [00:24:00] gets to, love on the cows. There's something about being reminded that we're doing this so that eventually we don't have to do it. That I think is actually visionary in its own way and it's important. [00:24:12] Swati Rayasam: Moving into a little bit more of the grit of like why I asked you to be on the show today. I met you originally when I moved to the Bay Area when you were the executive director of the Oakland Peace Center because At that time I was doing organizing work with the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action, which is a 20 year old bay area based organization, that was really founded around the Laki Reddy Bali Reddy sex trafficking. Yep. Caste and labor exploitation case that happened in Berkeley in 1999. And I was just so thrilled to be around and have in community so many rad desis. And you also did work with ASATA, right. Historically and are actively doing work with us. [00:24:56] Sandhya Jha: Absolutely. One of the places I think I invested the most [00:25:00] energy in where we got to spend a lot of quality time in the kitchen was one of the projects, Bay Area Solidarity Summer, an organizing institute, camp, however you wanna refer to it. [00:25:10] Swati Rayasam: Political education, Summer camp. [00:25:12] Swati Rayasam: Yeah, exactly. For young South Asian Americans who are committed to activism. What I think was the most beautiful part of that program when I was involved in it, and it's still the case today, is for young South Asians who think that they're the only ones who care about justice issues, who haven't met other people, who are South Asian, and identify as justice seekers first to meet each other and realize that there are people just like them. Then to look around and realize that those of us who are usually 10, 15, 20 years older than them are also committed to the work and have been doing it for decades. And then for them to get exposed to the long history of radical visionary organizing and activism of South [00:26:00] Asians here in the US and also in the homelands of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and diasporic countries all over the world. [00:26:13] Sandhya Jha: There's something about realizing, Oh, you have contemporaries, oh, you have elders, oh, you have ancestors. Mm-hmm. Especially in the face of the model minority lie that so many of us have had imposed on us, this lie that all we are all we're supposed to be is cogs in this larger capitalist machine that are non disruptive, which is why we're allowed to survive. And if we are non disruptive enough, we might even be able to be comfortable. And to discover that there's more to our story than that is so exciting and I love, love, love being a part of that. [00:26:52] Swati Rayasam: Yeah. I think that is like fundamentally one of the most important kind of activities that [00:27:00] happens in the ASATA universe, I was a kid who also grew up thinking that there were no other South Asians like me, or there were no other folks who were interested in justice. I spent a lot of time doing, reproductive and queer justice in the south; I always think about what would it have meant if I came in, BASS for 18 to 24 year olds. Yep. what would it have meant if I had come in at a fresh 18 and been able to basically be apprised of the fact that I have this history Yeah. That it's not just me. And that actually, immigration and white supremacy and neo-colonial culture has created this project of assimilation that all of our parents have been in on, in a way to survive Yeah. And to be safe. And I tell my, I tell my mom that a lot because she's always a little surprised about the organizing work that I do. And I was just like, Your job was to survive. My job is to liberate. Yeah. [00:28:00] You know? Yeah. And I could not do that if you were not so focused on creating that environment for me. [00:28:07] Swati Rayasam: I love that. [00:28:07] Swati Rayasam: we'll drop in the show notes, but, BASS – Bay Area Solidarity Summer is solidaritysummer.org. So we'll put that in the show notes as well as ASATA, the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action is ASATA.org. And yeah, I think that is a really good segue into how we got involved in this amazing project. [00:28:31] Swati Rayasam: You're tuned in to APEX express at 94.1 KPFA and 89.3, KPFB in Berkeley. And online@kpfa.org. [00:28:43] Swati Rayasam: I think it was Fall 2021 that you and I were talking. Yep. And you were telling me that you were involved in this amazing archival fellowship project. Is run by the South Asian American Digital Archive and [00:29:00] that you were going to do your project about labor. Mm-hmm. and South Asians. Yep. And my immediate, incredibly naive response was, how many South Asians are there in labor? [00:29:12] Sandhya Jha: Exactly. And it's not naive. It's interesting cuz I think that this project actually emerged out of my favorite part of BASS, which was when the young adults would ask what their opportunities were in the world of justice. And I would say, you know, there's a place for us in labor justice. It had never crossed most of their minds. Right. We don't think of ourselves as having a role especially in formalized unions. And so SAADA, the South Asian American Digital Archives has an archival fellows project. And the whole purpose of it is to diversify their archives and collect the stories that are usually overlooked in the telling of South Asian American stories. [00:29:56] Sandhya Jha: And they have done a great job over the years of collecting the [00:30:00] stories of informal organizing, like the Punjabi Taxi Drivers campaign, the Bangladeshi Nail Workers Campaign. Those were informal labor organizing campaigns. That have been really well archived and they're amazing stories. I wanted to make sure that the next generation of South Asian activists knew about the South Asians who were actually part of the formal organized labor movement. [00:30:30] Sandhya Jha: And so I spent this past year interviewing, maybe a half a dozen or so South Asian American workers. Generally, not always, but mostly what would be classified as low wage workers who found a pathway into formal organizing bodies, unite here or the building trades or any number of the formal unions that keep [00:31:00] the labor movement alive across the country today. And I'm really proud of the fact that we do have South Asian workers who have moved up the ranks to be official organizers or to be at negotiating tables. And so that's part of the story I thought it was worth us telling. [00:31:19] Swati Rayasam: And I am, I'm so excited that we get to dive deeper into this project and I really love your framing too, around the three large bins that you have, solidarity, spirit and struggle. [00:31:34] Swati Rayasam: Right? Yeah. Yeah. [00:31:35] Sandhya Jha: I started out with certain assumptions about what I was going to learn, partly because I've been doing labor solidarity work for 25 years at this point. I really thought I knew what I was gonna hear. And what I discovered was there were these consistent themes across, the interviews. that there were these notions of, Oh, what's meaningful to me is [00:32:00] getting to organize across cultures, getting to organize with people who, on the surface and even deep down are very different than me, but we share this vision of what our lives can be. And so that solidarity message I found really powerful. Also, and admittedly because I come out of a spiritual background, was probably looking for it. I was really struck by how many of the interviews ended up talking about the role of spirituality and shaping people's values. And in a couple of instances, organizers said, what my religion taught me was that religion needs to be challenged. And building up that muscle was what helped me challenge systems of injustice in other places. But others said that their journey with their faith tradition was what guided them into the work of labor organizing. [00:32:52] Sandhya Jha: And then that third bucket of struggle, I think is the lived experience of how [00:33:00] hard it is to take on oppressive systems of capitalism, how hard it is to take on decks that are stacked against us and what it means to have somewhere to turn in the midst of those struggles. I will say there were also a couple of lessons I was surprised by because my South Asian identity is so central to my organizing work, I was expecting to collect stories of people who were proud South Asians, who were also proud to be involved in the labor movement. And I assumed that they would see connections between those things because I certainly do. But what I discovered is for the most part, they were like, Yeah, I'm South Asian. I'm not saying that doesn't matter, but it's not super relevant to my organizing work. My organizing work is about [00:34:00] our cross-cultural solidarity. And that was something I hadn't been expecting that emerged as I did those interviews. Interesting. And I'm really grateful that the South Asian American Digital Archives likes telling all of the stories because I think I promised them that what they were going to get was, we're proud to be South Asian organizers. And what I got was, yeah, we're South Asian, we're proud to be organizers. And the that SAADA is like, yeah, that's part of our story too. [00:34:28] Swati Rayasam: Yeah. And I think that's, that I think is incredibly important. We have this really, amazing series of audio clips from your SAADA interviews that really represent a lot of the themes that you were highlighting about solidarity, spirit, and struggle. And I'm just really excited to play them as we talk through these larger themes in your larger project and the experience of South Asian labor organizers. [00:34:55] Swati Rayasam: This clip is from somebody that you and I both know, which [00:35:00] is Prem Pariyar. I was so thrilled that Prem was a part of your project. I think Prem is an incredible organizer, so yeah tell our listeners a little bit about Prem. Prem [00:35:09] Sandhya Jha: It was pretty exciting to get to work with him you know, he moved here from Nepal and in Nepal he had been a Dalit activist and he came to the United States and had this notion that in the United States there is no caste and he was disabused of that notion very quickly as a restaurant worker dealing with anti Nepali bias in Indian restaurants, dealing with caste bias in Nepali restaurants, well dealing with Caste bias in all the restaurants. [00:35:35] Swati Rayasam: Hey, everyone, Narrator Swati here, I just wanted to put in an explanatory comma, a la W Kamau Bell and Hari Kondabolu to talk about some terms you just heard. Sandhya referenced that Prem was a Dalit activist and also talked about Caste bias. For those of you who don't know, Caste is a violent system of oppression and exclusion, which governs social status in many south Asian countries, although it is [00:36:00] most commonly associated with India. It works on an axis of purity and pollution, and it's hereditary. At the top of the caste system are Brahmins, by the way Sandhya and I are both Brahmin, and not even at the bottom, but completely outside of the system are Dalits who were previously referred to by the slur untouchable and Adivasis who are indigenous to South Asia. [00:36:25] Swati Rayasam: Despite being “illegal” Caste bias, Caste Oppression, Caste apartheid, are still prevalent, both in South Asia and as Sandhya references, in the United States. It manifests in many ways that people experience racial injustice, via socioeconomic inequality, systemic and interpersonal violence, occupation, and through the determination of marriage and other relationships. You can learn more at EqualityLabs.org and APEX currently has a show in the works that delves into this more deeply. Now. Back to Sandhya [00:36:58] Sandhya Jha: What is [00:37:00] delightful to me is Prem went on to get an MSW and is building out amazing mental health resources for Dalit communities for the Nepali community. Seeking to build out a program where there are more and more people in Nepal who are trained with MSW skills. [00:37:21] Sandhya Jha: I met with one of his professors from CSU East Bay where he got his degree and she said, You know, that the entire Cal State system is adding caste to its anti-discrimination policies thanks to the work he started at CSU East Bay. And it was really beautiful to hear that because the focus of my conversations with him were more around how his experiences in the restaurants led him into the solidarity work with nail salon workers. [00:37:53] Swati Rayasam: To just, kick back to the caste abolition work that Prem has been doing, that caste abolition work [00:38:00] at CSU East Bay has been such critical work in these ongoing conversations around caste that have been in the South Asian community primarily, but have been percolating elsewhere. [00:38:13] Swati Rayasam: You know, the state of California filed a lawsuit against Cisco systems Yep. For caste discrimination in their workplace and there have been all these conversations around caste and tech work and interplay that with the no tech for apartheid work. Right. That has been happening in Palestinian liberation circles. Yeah. And really building that solidarity movement. So I think that Prem is an absolute powerhouse Yeah. In that regard. But yeah, let's listen to this clip. [00:38:42] Prem: During that time, I got connected with other community organizer, like workers group. I got connected and so I was connected with nail salon workers, who were exploited at their workplace and with them, [00:39:00] I got to go to the capital in Sacramento. And so I thought I need to advocate for the restaurant workers. that was my first experience, like working with other workers and with the assembly members and like other other policy makers I shared what is happening what kinds of discrimination happening at the workplace. So I advocated for the restaurant workers at that time. I shared my stories and I supported the rights of nail salon workers. I was there to support them and they supported me as well, and it was wonderful. And finally that advocacy worked. And the bill was drafted and it was passed finally. And so it was huge achievement at that time. [00:39:49] Swati Rayasam: I love that. I think that is such a perfect story of when you win, we all win. [00:39:56] Sandhya Jha: And what I also love about it is he goes on [00:40:00] to talk about how he has remained in relationship with those nail salon workers. That they show up for each other, that they take each other food, that they show up to each other's baby showers and birthday parties, and there's this sense of community that emerges out of this shared struggle. And so that's a cross-cultural campaign. They were mostly Vietnamese. There were some Bangladeshi nail salon workers, but it was mostly people from a different culture than his. [00:40:27] Sandhya Jha: But somebody at the Asian Health Services program that he was at, saw his gifts, saw his passion, and he really responded to that in exactly, the most powerful way. I can imagine. [00:40:38] Swati Rayasam: And I think one of the nice things as well about that is that person at Asian Health Services connected Prem in and the Nail Salon Worker group, California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, Prem came from Nepal, I'm not sure, but the extent to which his organizing background and how comfortable he was in the US organizing space around labor [00:41:00] issues was probably significantly less that worker group took it upon themselves when they saw Prem come in to say, Oh, you are advocating on behalf of restaurant workers. Great. Why don't you join us? Let's help support and so the nail salon workers saw Prem, saw solidarity with Prem and said, It is our responsibility mm-hmm to bring you into this space to connect you in and to move in, struggle together. Yeah. Toward our shared goals of safety, of health, of rights. Yep. [00:41:35] Sandhya Jha: Exactly. [00:41:36] Swati Rayasam: So, we have this clip from Daljit, tell me a little bit about Daljit. Daljit [00:41:42] Sandhya Jha: Yeah. Daljit was an attorney who now reads tarot for people because she needed a break from the toxicity of that career and how it was taking her away from her family. Daljit is a deeply spiritual person and, [00:42:00] as I mentioned before, this theme of spirit showed up in some really beautiful ways in some of the interviews. I loved the way she understood her Sikh tradition as foundationally being connected with the land and foundationally connected with the people who work the land. [00:42:15] Daljit: Agriculture is our culture and the religion that I was born into, Siki, the founder of that faith was a farmer. And so a lot of the scripture, the analogies, the metaphors, the poetry, the music, the songs, the boon, the traditional folk songs, that can be taunting and teasing banter, all that stuff the land is the framework for that. And my most favorite line from the Guru Granth Sahib, our holy book, is, [speaks Punjabi] and that basically means that, the waters our guru, the airs our father, but our mother is Earth. And that's the greatest of all , and that's adherence to ecosystem. That's the [00:43:00] indigenous Cosmo vision that should be paramount. And that's what I try to teach my children. And so I think that's what I was taught as a kid without necessarily being able to pinpoint it, but it was just infused throughout our songs, our music, our food, the Harvest, there's two times a year that our celebrations, whether it Baisakhi or Lohri. It's so connected to the harvest and what is coming out of the soil or not. And you're connected to the cycles of nature. [00:43:28] Swati Rayasam: The connection between nature land, spirituality the way that it shows up in so many faith backgrounds and so many faith organizers, I think is really, really beautiful. [00:43:41] Sandhya Jha: And I love that Daljit Kaursoni who was raised in this tradition, has found her way to Buddhism and is raising her kids with those connections, but without ever losing this grounding in the liberation of the land, the liberation of the [00:44:00] people. [00:44:00] Sandhya Jha: And for that to be a key element of her spirituality, even as her spirituality evolves, I think it's pretty powerful. Tafadar [00:44:08] Sandhya Jha: One of the other people I got to interview ,Tafadar, he's a Bangladeshi American in the building trades and is a deeply committed Marxist. For me, this was a particularly exciting interview because I'm Bengali, so from West Bengal, before partition, Bangladesh and what's now West Bengal, were one state. And so it was fun to get to talk with him and to say, Hey, this is our legacy as Bengalis is radical worker organizing. [00:44:40] Sandhya Jha: And I remember saying to him, Some people in the building trades are not super excited to be working with brown people. And some people in the building trades are a little biased against women. And as a very, very progressive South Asian? How do you navigate that [00:45:00] space? [00:45:00] Sandhya Jha: And he said, Here's the thing is, yeah, I organize alongside some moderate to conservative white folks from New Jersey and he said, but in the building trades, if that moderate to conservative white guy from New Jersey decides he doesn't like my feminist politics, or he doesn't like my brown skin, if he decides that's a reason not to train me, he might die. And it was really interesting because even though I've been doing labor justice work for a long time, it was one of those moments I was like, Oh, right. Your work is very dangerous and you all have to rely on each other whether you like each other or not. That is the magic of organizing that no one ever talks about. This is why we can do cross class, cross-cultural work because literally you have to trust each other with your lives. Right. That was a really clarifying moment for me. And it was one of those interesting moments where I was like, [00:46:00] Solidarity is not a romantic thing. Uh, it is very much a matter of life and death. [00:46:05] Sandhya Jha: And I think that is really important and that exact thing that you brought up, you don't even have to necessarily trust somebody. Right. But you do need them. Yep. Right. And like that really clear understanding that like your fates are intertwined and it is truly in everybody's best interest. If you are trained well, irrespective of whether or not at lunch, I'm interested in sitting anywhere near you. I think that's really great. [00:46:32] Sandhya Jha: One of the things that was really exciting about talking with Tafadar was the reminder that labor organizing and formal union organizing at its best can be in solidarity with other movements really worker justice and housing justice and racial justice are inseparable, on some level. And so, one of the most inspiring stories I got to hear across all of these interviews [00:47:00] was a campaign that brought together folks across the anti- gentrification, the immigrant rights, and the labor justice movement. [00:47:14] Tafadar: It's ironic, building affordable housing with deadly exploitation. And, um, to do this, the de blassio administration, they embark on massive major rezonings of poor areas to relax the local zoning laws to be able to bring in these developments. And a couple of years ago, my, my union in local 79's. Took a very sharp turn towards a community organizing approach because labor can't win on our own, and that's the perspective that all of labor should adopt. In order to fight against the sweatshops in our industry. We united with a lot of community organizations in the South Bronx. [00:47:53] Tafadar: We formed the South Bronx, Safe Southern Boulevard Coalition. And along with these groups, we [00:48:00] protested and did a whole lot of activism, lobbying, community organizing to stop the rezoning of Southern Boulevard, which is a massive stretch in the South Bronx, while the De Blassio administration had succeeded in another part of the Bronx where there's like massive displacement still underway right now. And we were determined to stop it there. And it was a beautiful thing that we can unite because on our end as labor, we had to prevent all these trash companies from coming in and exploiting workers. And we were working with these tenants who are afraid of being displaced. And people generally, we do need revitalization of our neighborhoods. We do need investment. We do need things to be changed and made better. For us. If it's not for us, if it's done without us, then eventually we're not even gonna be here anymore. So we had that alliance going on and not only did we manage to stop that rezoning, we also educated the local city councilman on why his position was wrong and supporting the rezoning. And he eventually completely flipped this [00:49:00] position. And now chairs the land use committee of the city council from the perspective that we educated him on, which it's just been a very interesting dynamic. But, there's a lot of rezoning battles all over the city that's like the main front of anti gentrification struggles. And I've been watching those kinds of campaigns go on since I began organizing about 15, 16. I've seen very different approaches to them, but I've never seen any model really work until that one kicked in where Labor and the community came together. So that was one of my favorite campaigns because of that lesson that we were able to concretely put into practice and set as an example for not only for community movements all over New York City, but also for Labor. [00:49:43] Sandhya Jha: I think this hit me in particular because I've done so much work around antis displacement in Oakland, and my experience has been. [00:49:53] Sandhya Jha: That while for most of us on the ground, the connection between housing justice and labor justice is really clear. When you [00:50:00] start getting into the technical policy issues and the funding issues, the folks who are running labor and housing justice or affordable housing, struggle to find ways to collaborate. And it's been one of my consistent heartbreaks for at least a decade at this point because I work at the intersection of those things and sometimes I despair of us being able to find ways to move forward together. And so to hear a story like this one and to be reminded at core, those justice issues can and must be we already knew, must be, but actually can function together to build a better community. That was actually really life giving for me to hear. [00:50:45] Swati Rayasam: Yeah. I a hundred percent agree. And I think the point that Tafadar as well brings in the clip of just saying we knew that we could do this, but we knew we couldn't do this without community organizing. Right? Yeah. That labor couldn't do this alone. Yeah. [00:51:00] And I think that is a lot of what, when we talk about solidarity politics, it's not just a backdoor way of inclusion for inclusion's sake, we have to all do this. Actually, it is integral that all of us are involved in any of these campaigns because it impacts all of us. And because we are not going to win with only a single constituency and in the very same way that, Tafadar was identifying that labor couldn't do that alone. in community organizing spaces that you and I have been in mm-hmm. , like we are constantly talking about how we cannot do any of this without labor. Yep. And I think a beautiful example of that is the Block the Boat campaign yeah that the Arab Resource Organizing Center, started back in 2014 and then again during 2021 to block the Zim ship from the port of Oakland. And like this community organization [00:52:00] AROC could not do that without working with the longshoreman to collaborate with the port workers. And I think that when we see the marriage of community organizing and labor organizing, that is when we get the power of grassroots organizing. [00:52:16] Sandhya Jha: Something I wanna mention about the SAADA Fellowship that I was really grateful for: two things. First off, they did a really good job of making sure we got trained in grassroots oral history. So they took really seriously what it meant for this to be justice work. And they made sure we had exposure to methodology that was gonna lift up and honor and foster the voices of people whose stories don't get heard often enough. And that was a really big deal to me. The other thing is they made sure that we had an advisory board, people who are in this [00:53:00] work who could help us, figure out who to talk with, who could help us build out an event strategy. And you helped me build out my advisory committee. Anibel Ferris-Comelo who is with the University of California Labor Center, [00:53:14] Swati Rayasam: Prem Pariyar, a Nepali Dalit restaurant worker, organizer pushing for Caste as a protected category with Equality Labs, a Dalit feminist organization, and a social worker supporting the mental health needs of his and many other South Asian communities in Alameda county. [00:53:31] Swati Rayasam: Will Jamil Wiltchko with the California Trade Justice Coalition, Terry Valen who I did a lot of organizing with at the beginning of the pandemic, around the struggles that seafarers were facing with the onset of COVID-19. And he's the organizational director of the Filipino Community Center in San Francisco. The president of NAFCON which is the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns and just an all in all amazing organizer [00:53:57] Sandhya Jha: the last thing I wanna mention [00:54:00] is SAADA also helped me set up a digital exhibit with Art by Madhvi Trivedi Patak and I wanted to give them a shoutout because they're an incredible artist, but also they grew up in a working class family and didn't get exposed to what it looks like to do labor justice. And so as they developed the artwork to go with the digital exhibit, they got to experience the possibilities of labor solidarity that they hadn't gotten to experience as a child. And so I really loved that Madhvi was a part of this project as well [00:54:38] Swati Rayasam: All of the clips that you shared really identifying, again, these like huge fundamental pillars of solidarity and spirit and struggle. these clips were amazing. They are so rich and so layered with all of these people's varying and different experiences. Really showing in [00:55:00] all of these different walks of life at all of these ages with all of these experiences, that all of these people have this unified and shared identity in struggle, in spirit, and in solidarity for liberation. [00:55:14] Sandhya Jha: And one of the things that I think is worth celebrating is whether they see it as part of their South Asian identity or not. People who do identify as South Asian now have this resource that says there's a home for you in the labor movement. Yes, there are. There is a value to your voice. There is a value to your wisdom, there's a value to your experience in the labor movement. [00:55:36] Swati Rayasam: I think it's a beautiful project. Sandhya, I think it has been an amazing amount of work I've watched you do over the past year. These stories are so wonderful. I really encourage people to check it out. Where can they find your project? [00:55:49] Sandhya Jha: The website's www.saada.org/acfp [00:56:00] /exhibit/solidarity-forever. We'll put that in the notes. We'll definitely put that in the show notes. [00:56:05] Swati Rayasam: I just wanna make sure that we replug your podcast Bending Toward Justice Avatar, The Last Air Bender for the Global Majority and you can find that at tinyurl.com slash ATLA podcast, Capital P (tinyurl.com/ATLAPodcast). And then the last thing that I also wanna make sure that we plug is Without Fear Consulting. [00:56:27] Sandhya Jha: I love working with folks who know that their organization could be a little more liberative, and are, just not quite sure where to start. I love working with a team of folks who want to be about the work of incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusion into the DNA of their organization and I love setting them up so that they can keep doing that long after I'm working with them. So please do find me withoutfearconsulting.com. If you're interested in that. [00:56:58] Swati Rayasam: Amazing. Sandhya [00:57:00] Jha, Pastor, Racial Justice consultant, podcast host, archivist, singer songwriter, amazing cook. You can do it all. I think you deserve a nap. it has been amazing talking to you. I am so glad to be able to hear about your project and also to hear a lot more about your life. [00:57:23] Sandhya Jha: Yay. Thank you so much. [00:57:25] Miata Tan: That was Swati Rayasam in conversation with Sandhya Jha. As Swati mentioned, you can learn more about her work in the show notes at kpfa.org/program/apex-express. Speaking of Swati — she's currently working on an episode marking the 25th anniversary of 9/11, out in early September. It'll cover the work of the South Asian Coalition, a national network of organizations working together on South Asian American movement building. Keep an eye out for that one. This episode originally aired January 5th, 2023 — we're re-airing it this week in honor of South Asian American Heritage Month. This is APEX Express on 94.1 KPFA, airing every Thursday evening at 7pm. Thank you for tuning in tonight. APEX Express is a proud member of Asian Americans for Civil Rights and Equality. A network focused on long-term movement building, capacity infrastructure, and leadership support for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders committed to social justice. Learn more at AACRE.org This program produced by Ayame Keane-Lee, Anuj Vaidya, Isabel Li, Jalena Keane-Lee, Miko Lee, Miata Tan, Preeti Mangala Shekar and Swati Rayasam. Tonight's episode was produced by Swati Rayasam. Get some rest y'all. The post APEX Express – 7.16.26 – South Asians and The Labor Justice Movement appeared first on KPFA.

KPFA Theatre Critic Richard Wolinsky reviews “The Employee Dhama Handbook: a world premiere play by Geetha Reddy at TheatreWorks Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto through August 2, 2026.       TEXT OF REVIEW Discrimination comes at you in many ways. Racial bigotry. Religious fanaticism. Gender and disabled bias. Homophobia. Fat-shaming, agism. The list lengthens as you expand to other cultures. There's the whole tribal thing too. Then there's the caste system from India. Banned in 1950, it still lives on under the surface.Explaining caste in detail takes too long, but some jobs simply can't go to members of one caste or another. The Brahmin are on top; Dalits at the bottom. But has the system spread to America, and if it has, how does it manifest? That question, and the relationship of that particular bias to the caste system of corporations lies at the heart of The Employee Dharma Handbook, a new play by Geetha Reddy, at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto through August 2nd. The focus is on a handful of workers at a fictional aerospace company; they're building a rocket to Jupiter, and if it all works out, the whole crew will become rich. But Leela, a young Indian scientist born in the U.S., has just been passed over by her boss, Khrish, for an important promotion that instead went to another Indian, Baasu, who himself understands it should have gone to Leela. If this isn't resolved, there is no team. Enter Val, the black HR director, no stranger to bias herself, investigating the matter. Was the problem Leela's gender? Or something else? Khrish is Brahmin,. So is Baasu. Leela is not. No, no, says Khrish, it's not like that at all. But maybe it is. The Employee Dharma Handbook often doesn't know what kind of play it wants to be. Serious critique? Farce? Comedy-drama? The capitalism and caste dichotomy unclear. The comedy not as funny as it needs to be. 

As a world premiere it needs work. But the elements are there. Each character, at one point or other, becomes facilitator, accuser, victim, winner and loser. The cast handles the role switching well, particularly Kathryn Smit-McGlynn as Val and Kunal Dudhecker as Baasu. As the relationships twist and turn, we see a playwright at the top of her game.. There comes a point toward the end where The Employee Dharma Handbook goes off the rails, and in order to make a point, the characters become pawns of the playwright. Still, the play is often a thoughtful, funny, and very original ride with hopefully a bright future. The Employee Dharma Handbook by Geetha Reddy plays at TheatreWorks Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto, and for more information, you can go to theatre works.org. Im Richard Wolinsky on Bay Area theatre for KPFA.   The post Review: “The Employee Dharma Handbook” at TheatreWorks Palo Alto appeared first on KPFA.

In this episode I am once again joined by Dr Francisco José Luis, scholar of Indo-Iranian Studies and Comparative Religion trained at the Sorbonne, Paris and SOAS, London. Francisco describes the religious and philosophical view of Traditionalism, tracing the ideas of figures such as René Guénon, Julius Evola, and Henry Corbin to give a sense of the different strands of this increasingly influential system of thought. Francisco explains what he sees as the importance of uniting spiritual and martial disciplines, recounts his own experiences of receiving death threats during his academic research, and argues for an aristocracy of the soul. Francisco also addresses criticisms that associate Traditionalism with the political far right, various forms of ethnic and cultural chauvinism, and imperialism; compares and contrasts different caste and class systems from around the world; and outlines his objections to Plato's ideas about education. … Also available on Youtube, iTunes, & Spotify – search “Guru Viking Podcast”. … Topics include: 00:00 - Intro 01:06 - First encounter with Traditionalism 06:03 - René Guénon 10:11 - Devotion to Indian saints 12:05 - Concern for the working class 15:51 - At odds with society's direction 16:55 - Beyond René Guénon 17:50 - Debates are a competition between egos 19:30 - Julius Evola and the aristocracy of the Soul 22:45 - Who was Julius Evola 26:02 - Warriors, Brahmins, and merchants 28:07 - Corruption of the Brahmin class 29:51 - Evola's theory of the body, soul, and spirit 33:05 - Evola and fascism 34:58 - Trial of Evola 36:31 - Francisco's favourite Traditionalist 37:15 - Where does religion and mysticism fit into Traditionalism? 42:30 - Elites should practice a spiritual discipline 44:03 - Critique of institutional Catholicism 45:17 - Warrior spirituality 47:33 - Why Francisco is attracted to Sikhism 48:45 - Spiritual warfare 51:39 - Sikh Khalsa 52:17 - Francisco's interest in the martial arts 55:13 - Receiving death threats 57:37 - Facing death like a samurai 59:38 - Embodiment 01:01:13 - Limitations of Henry Corbin 01:05:41 - Is Traditionalism far right? 01:20:34 - Cultures should respect each other 01:25:31 - European vs American cultures 01:26:44 - Pros and cons of American culture 01:31:55 - Warning about the language of Traditionalism 01:32:48 - Spirituality and politics 01:34:37 - Warrior spirituality is not for everyone 01:41:28 - Dangers of warrior spirituality 01:42:24 - Francisco's spiritual path 01:43:11 - Francisco's therapy journey 01:45:15 - Setting boundaries without hatred 01:47:13 - Why discuss the application of religion to politics? 01:48:52 - Plato's views on education 01:50:55 - Francisco's disagreement with Plato 01:53:18 - Francisco's suggestion for education 01:55:15 - Waldorf education 01:55:59 - Speculum principum … Previous episodes with Dr Francisco José Luis: - https://www.guruviking.com/search?q=francisco To find our more about Dr Francisco José Luis, visit: - https://www.instagram.com/hludvig_tradicionalista For more interviews, videos, and more visit: - https://www.guruviking.com Music ‘Deva Dasi' by Steve James

APEX Express is a weekly magazine-style radio show featuring the voices and stories of Asians and Pacific Islanders from all corners of our community. Over the past few years, a series of popular uprisings across the world have been described by mainstream media as “Gen-Z Uprisings” – movements led by young people and described in western media as generally being against government corruption. These movements have been most notably visible in our own media due to their use of technology, including platforms like Discord and TikTok, and internationally consistent adoption of pop culture symbolism, like the flag of the “straw hat pirates,” a black flag depicting a grinning jolly roger wearing a straw hat. The flag is the banner of the protagonists of the long-running hit anime series One Piece whose adventures often find them coming to the defense of marginalized communities around their world. But these movements didn't come out of nowhere (or the internet for that matter). Understanding their origins – and the elections that have resulted from their successes – can shed light both onto the international struggle against authoritarianism and the challenges we face building an alternative. In this episode we are looking at two countries, Nepal and Bangladesh, where popular uprisings in the summer of 2024 and fall of 2025 have led to elections this year. In this episode, we are joined by two US based organizers, Sharmin Hossain and Samir Shrestha, whose work as part of South Asian diasporas has rooted them in movement work here in the US while maintaining relationships and solidarity abroad. Sharmin Hossain is a Bangladeshi Muslim organizer from Queens, New York, who is currently the Organizing Director for 18 Million Rising. To learn more about 18 Million Rising, check out their site at www.18millionrising.org. Follow Sharmin on all platforms at @sharminultra Samir Shrestha belongs to the indigenous Newari tribe of Nepal, where he was born. He has spent the last 18 years involved in movement work here in the US. To learn more about The Ruckus Society and request a training, visit: www.ruckus.org/training-action-support/training-requests/ To learn more about Convergence Magazine and the Block and Build Podcast, follow them at @_convergencemag and @blockandbuildpod. Check out Covergence's work at www.convergencemag.com. Transcript Swati Rayasam: [00:00:00] welcome fellow travelers to Apex Express. It's been a minute, but in case you don't remember, my name is Swati Rayasam, and I'm gonna be your conductor tonight. I have been very excited about this week's episode for a few months because tonight Apex is featuring Convergence Magazine's Block and Build podcast. Block and Build is creating a roadmap for the movement that's working to block the impacts of [00:01:00] rising authoritarianism while building the strength and resilience of the broad front that we need to win. And both the team at Convergence and the guests for tonight's show are close comrades and friends of Apex. On this episode, Cayden Mak, podcast host and editor-in-chief of Convergence, is joined by Samir Shrestha and Sharmin Hossain, two US-based organizers from the South Asian diaspora, Nepal and Bangladesh respectively. Sharmin and Samir will talk about the history and continued struggles of the international Gen Z uprisings, which have only really made a blip in Western media coverage. They'll discuss the history of those movements and the political conditions which created them, as well as help us understand how Americans can be in meaningful solidarity with people's movements abroad. Without further ado, I'll hand it over to Cayden. Cayden: Over the past few years, a series of popular uprisings across the world have been described by mainstream media as the Gen Z uprisings, movements led by young people and described in Western media as [00:02:00] generally being against government corruption. These movements have been most notably visible in our own media due to their use of technology, including platforms like Discord and TikTok, and internationally consistent adoption of pop culture symbolism. but these movements didn't come out of nowhere, or out of just the internet, for that matter. Understanding their origins and the elections that have resulted from their successes can shed light both onto the international struggle against authoritarianism and the challenges that we face building an alternative. In this episode, we're looking at two countries in particular, Nepal and Bangladesh, where popular uprisings in the summer of 2024 and fall of 2025 have led to elections this year. I was recently joined by two US-based organizers, Sharmin Hossain and Samir Shrestha, whose work as part of the South Asian diaspora has rooted them in movement work here in the US while maintaining relationships and solidarity abroad. Sharmin Hossain is a Bangladeshi Muslim organizer from Queens, New York, who's currently the organizing director for 18 Million Rising. Sharmin, thanks so much for joining us today  Sharmin: Thank you for having me. I love Convergence.  Cayden: Thank you. [00:03:00] And, Samir Shrestha belongs to the indigenous Newari tribe of Nepal, where he was born. He spent the past 18 years involved in movement work here in the US, and Samir, it's really good to see you this morning.  Samir: So good to see you too, Cayden.  Cayden: Well, to start us off, let's try and set some context Sharmin. I'm wondering if you can give us kind of a quick gloss of the 2024 uprisings in Bangladesh, where Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her party were ousted from power. What are the sort of themes of the protests, and then the way that the state responded, and where are we kind of now? Sharmin: Wow, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to talk about my country and all the amazing things that happened, because I think the Global South really forges, like, new possibilities as far as, like, what we can do and, and consolidate as far as power goes. So today is actually March 26th, and it's Bangladeshi Independence Day, coincidentally. Cayden: Happy independence Day.  Sharmin: Happy Independence Day. I find it very serendipitous for us to delve into this layered and complex history, um, of the student movement. So [00:04:00] the Bangladesh student protests of July 2024, were deeply rooted in systemic inequalities that the young working class and the poor faced. Nearly 32 million young people were actually out of the workforce, or education in a population of a country of 170 million. So that's a pretty significant number. And so that issue was a focal point for widespread discontent in the country. In July of 2024, the High Court of Bangladesh actually reinstated a quota system for government jobs after an appeal was made when the then-ruling Hasina government abolished the quota system, um because in 2018 she faced a lot of pressure from student protesters. But this quota system is really interesting, and it represents a lot. It reserved 30% of government jobs for descendants of freedom fighters. And in Bangladeshi history, that's a very complex and layered identity. Millions of our [00:05:00] ancestors actually fought in the liberation war against the US-backed Pakistani military, and the Bangladeshi Liberation War, and genocide in Bangladesh actually resulted in the death of over three million people who sacrificed for the birth of our nation. And so for the Hasina government, the quota system was actually what she used to appoint a lot of her loyalists and her supporters to high levels of government, the military, and it basically created the political ecosystem for the Awami League, her party, to maintain dominance. And the Awami League actually was the party that once led the liberation struggle, and over the course of 15 years, we actually saw how much they consolidated power through political repression, the Digital Security Acts that was surveilling and targeting freedom of speech, as well as the corruption and fear that they [00:06:00] stoked against their opposition. And these government jobs, like most of us, it represents many things. It represents the government's responsibility to take care of poor people, um, economic and political opportunity, and it also represents, like, the corruption and the authoritarian rule of the Awami League, and how they were rigging elections, and how the court systems, and even entrance exams for the Bangladeshi civil service, were actually regularly leaked and compromised. And so -within that background, that's when you have the Students Against Discrimination movement take the streets in July demanding fair access to government jobs. And things actually got violent really fast. Within seven days, nearly 174 people were murdered, and thousands were injured. There was an indefinite curfew, social media blackouts, and then a military occupation with shoot on sight orders. And of course, the bullets that were raining upon, Bangladeshis were US, [00:07:00] arms. So students were terrorized by these vigilante groups that were collaborating with the Bangladeshi police. And these student groups were actually organized by the Bangladeshi Awami League. These student groups were notorious for repressing student elections, sexually assaulting students, um really threatening people that were running for student elections. And so there's already this, like, vigilante ecosystem that exists within the campuses that was weaponized during the student protests. And then you have a climax moment on July 14th. Sheikh Hasina went on television accusing the students of being Razakars, and Razakars are collaborators of the Pakistani army, and it's a very derogatory term in Bangladesh, and it refers to people who support the Pakistani military's operation to suppress the Bangladeshi Liberation War. They're also accused of heinous crimes. And so when students were accused of being Razakars, it, like, [00:08:00] lit a fire. Millions took the streets that day, and they were like, “Oh, hell no.” Like, “How dare she disrespect us?” While there's thousands of people who are on the streets, blood, everywhere. Rickshaw wallas are having to pull students into hospitals. There's just so much violence happening on the ground. And so on that National Day of Action, July 15th, clashes happen. Multiple deaths are live-streamed, and one of them, Abu Sayeed, he was a university student at Rangpur University in northwest Bangladesh, really galvanized the country because we watched this student, who is not armed, surrender and get sh- shot, by the Bangladeshi police. And we know what these spontaneous moments of violence do to the public, right? It usually always sets fire to another wave of social protests and action. And so then millions start marching to Sheikh Hasina's home, and [00:09:00] really, her brutal and arrogant response sealed her fate. And the protesters, and at this point, this is a populist movement, millions of people that are rickshaw wallas, working-class people, students, teachers, are taking the streets, marching towards her house. And they demand her resignation. And on August 5th, within 36 days of the movement, she resigns and flees to India, our neighboring country. Over 1,400 people have been killed, under her brutal repression. And so that's some of the background of the student movement, and we can talk more about some of the dynamics of it. Cayden: Yeah, that's super helpful, and I think reflecting on the ways in which also the sort of, like, escalation on the part of the government is, I think, a really important story here, for sure. Samir, I'll also now turn it to you. What should our listeners know about last fall's uprisings in Nepal, which also ousted the sitting government of, K.P. Oli and his, his party and how they led to [00:10:00] elections, earlier this month, in March of this year?  Samir: Thanks, Cayden, and Happy Independence Day to you, Sharmin. I am somebody who was born and raised in Nepal, and am spending most of my life in the diaspora now, and I wanna name the limitations of, uh, my understanding of what's going on in Nepal because of me not being on the ground organizing with the masses. And, I wanna honor the work that's been happening in Nepal, on the ground one of the big things that, that's really n- is important to name is, like, it's only been 20 years since we abolished monarchy. Uh- Mm-hmm. … uh, 2006, right? That is a big thing for us to understand. And the party that was in power, and has been in power since, was the party that has been organizing our movements, and that is the organized left in Nepal, and, like, really betrayed our people once we, once they got into power, right? And, like, started kind of veering towards the right once they got in power. So 20 years later The economic conditions of our people on the ground are really dire. There's no jobs available. People are migrating. A lot of our folks, one of the biggest source of economy and source of money for our, [00:11:00] our people back home is, like, migrant work, uh, in Dubai and, traveling to Dubai, Qatar, and working under very bad conditions. So one- that's one of the big things that's also been informing,, lot of the consciousness of the- our young people in Nepal, right? And then one of the other things that's named really important is, so since the election, since 2006, the Communist Party, the Congress Party, and the Maoist Party have been, they're the only ones who have been in power for the last 20 years, and these are all old upper caste men, even though they were the ones who were leading the movement and were organizing at left. But these were s- the representation and the leaders in these parties were all upper caste, caste Arya people, which is the dominant caste in Nepal, right? And that's a very important layer to name. And that really informed, I think, a lot of the ways they showed up after we won. And, and that's one, one big question that we always have in the left, right? What do we do after we- Yeah … abolish monarchy? What do we do after we win? And we haven't figured that out too, as does any other movements, right? And 20 years later, the frustration is on the very high, against the status quo. And then we, and there [00:12:00] was a lot of, like, obviously there was a lot of inspiration from Bangladesh, like Indonesia, and, like, the uprisings there. And, like, this one, uh, thing started trending the young people started organizing around Nepo babies. There's like, you know, “Yeah, you don't have access to we do, you're gonna take our access away from social media while your kids, and people who have connections to you and have, access to you are just posting about the life, the lavish life they're living abroad and in my homelands,” right? So that's one of the places where it started. And once that started, there was online campaign. And there was already conversations around banning social media in Nepal, and they were- Hmm … finding, like, different ways around it, and that really escalated the way people really responded to the situation, is like once they started organizing around Nepo babies and how they were, like, getting momentum around that, that's when exactly the social media ban went into effect, right? And that's a really important name because, like, one of the biggest pet peeves for me as a diaspora person has been this idea of people only started the uprising and took the streets because of the social media ban. [00:13:00] But just- Hmm. Mm-hmm … all these other things really added up to it. That was just the, just the point of escalation, right? So fast-forward, people started organizing on Discord. Uh, also the irony of it is that was one of the apps that was banned, uh, in Nepal as, uh… And people started organizing in Discord. And also wanna name the reality of, like, the only people who had access to Discord are also, like, privileged folks like us- Sure like younger, upper middle class people. So we were not really getting folks from outside Kathmandu and from our villages and from rural areas, right? So they didn't really have any say in what the organizing would look like. So it happened very, organically, very decentralized. So there was a call for people to show up at Maitighar which has been a popular protest space in Nepal, for a very long time. And it was like at the, at the center of Kathmandu. So there was a call out september 8. A lot of folks came out, and then people from outside Kathmandu that couldn't make it to Kathmandu started coming in big numbers. And the goal of the protest was peaceful protest, right? [00:14:00] And one of the things that happened, don't quote me on this, but my understanding of it from, talking to people there is, like, a lot of political parties who had, who were the opposition from the Communist Party at that time started infiltrating the protest, and the protest started becoming, quote-unquote, “violent,”, which was not, uh, what the young people wanted. So fast-forward, that led to 19 deaths on the first day of the protest, which led to the home minister resigning, at the end of the day. But Oli, the prime minister, is so arrogant and really didn't figure out the power of young people and, like, how they could keep mobilizing and organizing. He decided to just downplay them and say, “I'm not resigning,” which led to more heightened escalated protests the second day, where people started marching to the parliament buildings and started burning down buildings. And people started, people got to a lot of, like, the political parties' political party leader home and started burning them, and, really started, holding them accountable. And also , there was videos of clips of, like, people torching into people's homes and, like, [00:15:00] Sher Bahadur Deuba, who has been in power for the last 20 years in different, ways, who's one of the, considered one of the most corrupt leader in Nepal, from Nepali Congress party, got attacked by the protesters. So fast-forward, more escalation led to, like, 52 more deaths, and the Oli party finally decided to resign at the end of that night, and that's, that's when curfew was impo- imposed by, the army. So that led to, like, a total of 72 deaths. I wanna name, like, in just the two days of mobilization, two days of organizing, because sometimes in the left we don't understand. We talk about the similarities of our struggles but we don't really talk about the conditions that led to it and, like, the level for the risk that our folks leveraged, to be able to topple the government, right? So I just wanna name that out loud and honor that part of, like, how the, how people, like, really leveraged risk. And then fast-forward, people started organizing. The conversation kept going on on Discord, and then there was, like, a town hall style meetings happening on Discord where, like, I think 7 to 8,000 people were on it. And also I still wanna name again, the people who didn't have access to the internet and [00:16:00] phones were not able to part- participate in that. And decided Susila Karki, who was a chief justice 10 years ago, a woman, who also joined protesters during the first day of them mobilizing in the street. They decided, they voted, to hold her as the interim prime minister for now. And There was also one other layer is like a lot of people wanted Balen Sah, who is our prime minister now, but constitutionally if he was part of the interim government, he wouldn't be able to run for prime minister. So that was like a strategic decision that, uh, like he made, and the movement made around not electing him as part of the interim government. So one of the big responsibilities of the interim government was to hold elections in six months, which honestly I was not very-  Cayden: That's hugely ambitious. Samir: It is hugely ambitious, right? And also the reality is it happened, and also there are questions around, yeah, were we able to hold elections in a way where everybody had access to it, right? And that is a big question that I'm still asking, I'm still sitting with. But there were like record numbers that showed up to the polls, but [00:17:00] we haven't really, like we still really don't have answers around what accessibility looked like for people to show up at the polls. And fast-forward now, the Rastriya Swatantra Party which emerged at like a, at a very popular party in 2022, won with majority. And we just sworn in our new Prime Minister Balen Sah yesterday, we can talk about more later. Cayden: Well, thank you for summing up, both of you for summing up- Pretty long, complex histories fairly quickly for us. I've been thinking about the way that, like, Western media largely reports on these kinds of uprisings as if they come out of nowhere. And, like, we know as movement people that rarely, if ever, like, do they truly come out of nowhere. So, like, yeah, I wanna dig into what the longer arc of these stories really is. And I, I really wanna talk about, I guess, like, the specific texture in both Bangladesh and Nepal about how these protest movements position themselves against the government, against, like, other social forces, and, like, how kind of, like, other social phenomena acted on and shaped [00:18:00] these movements as well. Sharmin: I love that question 'cause it allows us to see, like, also the rich history of our, like, respective areas, and how much, like, young people have always been at the forefront of so many revolutionary struggles. And we often, um, you know, uh, post social media era like to make generalizations that this never existed before. But actually, you know, in Bangladesh, students are the most incredibly organized force that has shaped much of our history since 1947. The 1969 uprisings against Ayub Khan, the 1971 Liberation War, and then the , 1987 protests against the military dictator Ershad. And then later, our return to democratic governance in 1990 and the road safety protests of 2018, which actually laid the groundwork for so much of the student, frustration with the government not being able to keep students safe because of road safety issues and [00:19:00] just, the general mismanagement of transportation and, public resources. And so the campus has always been a key space for the pulse of the nation. But it's also a key space for goons and vigilante groups to organize their forces. So the Bangladesh Awami League has their faction, the Chhatra League, and then there's, you know, the Jamaat-e-Islami, which is the right-wing Islamist group of Bangladesh that has been growing, has their faction, the Chhatra Shibir. And then the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which, you know, has been in opposition to the Awami League, also has their goons on campuses. And so one of the major, trends you'll see during these moments is how these factions are actually weaponized to make sure that the violent state apparatus is deployed within public spaces. And, you know, you asked about, like, missteps and some of the things that political formations, might forget to plan for or think [00:20:00] about. And, you know, one of the things that I, I'm sure Samir can relate a little bit is, like, a lot of these student organizations, you know, students against discrimination, there was a group of men who claimed leadership of the student movement and formed, a party, the National Citizens Party. And you notice quickly the contradictions of their formation. All the women leaders were either asked to leave or they left because of what an undemocratic, unfeminist space it was. And then you noticed quickly that the National Citizen Party started allying itself with the right-wing forces to gain a populist base. And that, to me, is the, one of the biggest contradictions of what do leftists do when we gain power? And also, like, the sober conversation is, are these leaders leftists? Or did-  Cayden: Yeah, were they ever? Were they ever?  Sharmin: Or did we project our leftist dreams onto them and I think one of the things that [00:21:00] we've been doing for many generations, and I think Vincent Bevins' work really synopsizes this well, in looking at the last decade of popular uprisings, is that we've been doing politics without ideology, right? Mm-hmm. That these political for- formations actually don't have a coherent theory of change when they're contesting for power. And so you notice quickly the National Citizens Party was very reactionary, and it was very anti-fascist by, their vernacular, but what anti-fascism meant was that we hate the Awami League, we're gonna ban the Awami League, and the Awami League is no longer going to exist. And then we're- Yes … gonna fight for Sheikh Hasina to be hanged, right? And so that became their populist slogan.  Cayden: Hmm.  Sharmin: And so, you know, there is no left force in Bangladesh, and that's something that we have to name, that for sure there are garment workers that are organizing a party. There's a communist league that does not actually grow in their base. Um- Hmm … and that is why coming out of [00:22:00] the July uprisings, you notice this leadership actually turned center right really fast because they didn't have a, a vision that was rooted in economic and political struggles of the working-class students who made up majority of the base of people that were on the streets. Um, and you know, it was surprising, Cayden, I'll just say, like, after the, the NCP was getting ready for elections that just happened this past February, they joined a coalition with the largest Islamist force of Bangladesh, and this is such a misstep, right? To join forces. W- your enemy of your enemy is not your friend, right? Like, wh- where, like, where, when has that gotten us anywhere? It falls into the traps of organizing without a clear, coherent ideology, and then the post-uprising impact is weakened. And so a lot of that groundwork of, like, theoretical work, we actually have to do that to be able to be ready for fights that take power in the way that [00:23:00] feel, restorative and generative, instead of what we're seeing now, which is a populist right-wing growth in Bangladesh. Cayden: That feels like such an important lesson that we need to learn, unfortunately, over and over again, and I feel like this theme of, the enemy of my enemy is sometimes still my enemy has been coming up on this show a lot lately. That like, it, I, uh, you know, we see it happening in our movement politics here too, especially in, in this sort of moment of authoritarian retrenchment in our own government, that like, there are, there are challenges around that, and there's like ways that I think, yeah, it makes sense that it feels good in the moment to be like, “Yeah, there's more of us than there are of them.” But it's like, well, who, who are us? Like, what is the us that we're talking about? Samir, I will pass it to you to talk about, I guess, some of the texture that we should know about the protest movement in Nepal, and like what are the ways that, other social forces also outside the state have shaped the way that the protests have played out there. Samir: I was listening to Sharmin, and I was like, “Oh, there's so many similarities,” [00:24:00] like in a lot of the political forces that led our movements and also like talking about K.P. Oli, there's so many similarities of like how they were the face of the movement. And as somebody who really admired K.P. Oli because, you know, he was part of the social movement left. He was part of , like the first people's movement struggles, uh, that happened in the '90s that got rid of absolute monarchy. He was the face of the Communist Party. He did take up arms, right? So all of the tools that our revolutionary histories have used to, find liberation, right? So he used a diversity of tactics. Like, he started as somebody who believed in picking up arms. And then he led a people's movement in the '90s of, like with other political parties to get rid of the Panchayat system, which was a system of absolute monarchy and where all the political parties were dissolved right by the king from the 1960 to 1990, right? But one of the big things that I think we didn't think about when our movements were being led, when our movement ancestors were organizing and like really thinking about is like what does identity mean for our movements. There's political forces, [00:25:00] the social movement parties that are leading our people and organizing our people, and they did the organizing that happened in Nepal, the door-to-door, the base building that happened, if that was done by political parties, right? Which is true, and we need to name that layer, too. And I think one of the things that we're missing in this moment right now is we have been so, so frustrated by the last 20 years of governance by these forces. We wanna forget the political history of how we got here, right? Mm-hmm. And that has been one of my big critique of the young people in Nepal, right? And for me, I also think about as somebody who's getting older and also had access to my dad who was part of this movement, right? He was a big force as part of the Communist Party, and now he's heavily traumatized because of the way he got betrayed by his comrades, right? And I think one of the forces I was talking about identity is, like, all of these political forces were led by upper caste Brahmin men, and there was no indigenous representation. So finally, the 1990, we were able to get rid of absolute [00:26:00] monarchy. By '96, we still don't have full democracy in Nepal, so, you know, the Maoists decided to wage a civil war where they really organized the masses, and really created conditions for the monarchy, to bow down, right? And the Maoist party came out of this forest and, like, built a coalition with the Communist Party and the Congress Party to take the streets again. In 2006, we finally were able to get rid of monarchy, but 2006 to 2014 was a struggle to, like, really, draft a new constitution for us, where we made some progress and where we also did some things where it took us back around, like, women's rights, right? And so there was a big feminist movement that really created, like, organizing conditions of 2026 in so many ways, right? And one of the things that we were seeing during the last 20 years is what's happening is all the communist parties, the people who led our movements and uprisings were veering towards the right, right? Hmm. Because they consolidated more power, like, you know, exactly what happened with, uh, Bangladesh. They consolidated more power where, you know, they could stay in power [00:27:00] for long. The indigenous folks were part of the struggles and the uprisings in the 100 years of our movement struggles. But once we won and they got, the Communist Party got into power, they started, like, pushing policies that would not benefit indigenous peoples, right? And then one of the big things that Nepal wanted is federalism in terms of, like, one of the big critiques of Nepal has been the government is so centralized in Kathmandu. Other people outside of Kathmandu really don't get to take part in politics. And, so federalism was one of the big things that we pushed for, right? At Indigenous Struggles, that is the one thing that we pushed for so that we can govern our homelands, and that was the one thing that Oli was, like, against too, and that was also one of the reasons why he started becoming less and less popular, right? But one of the things that's 2026 was, I think it's also really important to understand, is the 2026 uprisings were led by youth who I believe, I dare to say, didn't have, the full understanding, the political understanding of our political histories in that way. And there's this, like, disconnect in terms of, like… it's hard for me to bridge the 100 years of left in Nepal [00:28:00] and like, you know, this youth uprising that's happening in Nepal that has no connection because it's not an organized group, right? It's very decentralized. Right. It happened on Discord. And that is one of the big questions we have now is, like, how do we as young people, the young people who led this uprisings, how do they stay organized, right? And that is a big question we still don't, we don't have answers to, right? The movement histories and, you know, the last 20 years has been very traumatizing, but there's also so many lessons and so many beautiful things that happened during the organizing, right? So how do we make those connections? How do we ask those questions? How do we talk to this feminist group? How do we talk to, like, workers, right? We need to figure that out. And I think one of the big things, like Sharmin talked about too, is like the student protest student movements were a big part of how we got liberation in Nepal, and the student movements are like directly connected to political parties because they have the student wing. But that also doesn't mean they are not organized. Yes, they were organized, and they really figured it out, but they have gotten corrupt. There's goons there, there's only men there. [00:29:00] And, like, how do we really ask those questions as a movement now and start building on some of our social movement histories? And that is a big question. And I haven't heard anything, and I'm very curious what's gonna happen on that, and I've been sitting with that a lot, too.  Cayden: Yeah. No, I, I mean, I feel like thinking about the challenges in remembering and then sometimes, like, having movement history misremembered to us by people with motivations. I can see how in that way for these young people who are getting organized, who are, like, trying to figure out what they want from the government in the future . there's some real, delicate territory for them to negotiate around, like, understanding themselves in a lot of ways as political and historic actors, which is really interesting. Swati Rayasam: You are tuned in to Apex Express on 94.1 KPFA, 89.3 KPFB in Berkeley, 88.1 KFCF in Fresno and online@kpfa.org.  Cayden: One of the other trends that [00:30:00] I would love to talk about is this, sort Western media trend where, an uprising happens somewhere, a protest movement happens somewhere, and they're like, “Oh, there's an interim government. Great.” And then, like, in the US, we don't hear anymore the establishment of interim government is, first of all, deeply informed by the social movements and social forces that are already moving on the ground and also glosses over the way politics is done in a particular place. I'm wondering if there's stuff that you've noticed that has really been lost from the international media discourse about the politics of both Bangladesh and Nepal since the sort of student uprising moment. And if there's stuff that you've been seeing in the like, interim government moments that you're like, “Oh, this is something to watch out for.” Like, “This is something that we can draw some lessons from.”  Sharmin: Yeah. Well, in Bangladesh we had a United States favorite Nobel Laureate, you know, Muhammad Yunus- Mm-hmm as our interim government. And, and I think what's so fascinating is that, you know, he is the world's sweetheart because he created [00:31:00] this, like, you know, microfinancing program that is, a program that they say, you know, empowers the poor people. And, we know that in practice it actually did not reverse poverty, and it actually left millions of people in more debt, than, they or- originally were projected to gain. And so I think what's very fascinating about having such a pro-capitalist, figure that is, a sweetheart of empire, it spoke to his legacy in office, you know? During his time, he also signed one of the most devastating US-Bangladesh trade agreements with Trump- Hmm … which actually, further isolates China from the Bangladeshi trade market and, forces Bangladesh to do all of our trade deals with the US. And it's a non-binding agreement. And so it is, deeply unlawful and also devastating to the economy of this area of Southeast Asia that actually needs China as, an ally, as a country that has, contributed a lot to the development of [00:32:00] our, transportation systems and, so for us it- it's also about how much of this interim government was, you know, representing the interests of the global elite and what he was willing to do to be able to s- to, to squash, revolutionary energy within the country. The Women's Commission was one of the most powerful consolidation of feminist leaders under the interim government that were looking to reform land laws for women. And similar to what, Samir was saying, right? Women's rights just are the first thing that these governments throw under the bus and that- women's commission report that was looking to really examine land laws and inheritance laws and and the rights of women economically like actually triggered one of the largest anti-feminist rallies in the country's history- Wow … where millions, millions of Jamaat-e-Islami men and their supporters took the streets in [00:33:00] protest of women having rights. And that was something you did not see the Western media touch, even-  Cayden: No …  Sharmin: even though the Western media was, like, so excited for this revolution, right? You know, on the ground too, you have those people that are like, “This is a CIA-backed, like, uprising,” right? And then on the ground you see, like, oh yeah, people actually don't want to touch the complexities of this country because it is layered within, like, religious nationalisms- Mm-hmm ethnic nationalisms, and caste. And so in my experience, I would just say that people know very little of the political forces within this, greater West Asian political landscape and how it connects to US imperialism here and abroad, you know? Pakistan was once the CIA's closest ally in the Cold War, and they continue to be during the war on terror right now, right? Mm-hmm. The United States provided Pakistan with military, diplomatic, and economic support because a [00:34:00] pro-US military dictatorship in this region that was a staunch anti-communist ally created a buffer between the axis of the USSR, China. Cayden: Hmm.  Sharmin: And then I'll say at the same time, on the ground, there were dozens of reports of mobs that were attacking temples and Hindu leaders. Hindus are a minority in Bangladesh that have been historically, marginalized, and these contradictions were, were getting highlighted, right? Because that violence was eerily similar, right? The partition of South Asia- Yeah …  Cayden: excluded  Sharmin: Hindu-Muslim communalism, and there were tensions and divides that fell across class lines. And for Western and, hegemonic media outlets, this looked like, oh, the Muslims are attacking the Hindus again.  Samir: Right.  Sharmin: And so for me, like, the being able to reckon Islamophobia, communal violence, identity and class politics, but also the way nationalism operates in South Asia, it, it's a tricky dance [00:35:00] And I've been learning how to really convey this complex history because the country's, uh like, beautiful history of, like, using guerrilla warfare to defeat US-backed forces in the region, it also represents something different from its neighbors, India and Pakistan. Mm-hmm. And within that, you know, we have Bangladesh joining the PLO in Lebanon to fight on behalf of Palestinian liberation. We have the fact that the country's actually i- inception was based on a socialist vision, right? And it's now one of the fastest-growing economies in the world with the fast fashion garment industry that's also ravaged by climate crisis and mass displacement. And so for me, it always just comes back to anti-war and anti-imperialism, like all the nodes of my brain, because I'm like, “Here's this US global death-making machine and this defense industry that sells tear gas shells to my country and [00:36:00] sells Israeli surveillance technology to my country.” And then there's this Bangladesh trade agreement that Trump was able to wager during this vulnerable moment for our country and it's at the core of all the political and economic violence within my country. And so the neoliberalization of our campuses and what these students are facing is because of the war economy. And so, so I just, like, zoom out in those moments, and I'm like, “Oh, this, this feels very much so like Cold War politics and the aftermath.”  Cayden: Yeah, like the politics of the Cold War have just simply never left us. Like, they're still here, and it's like we've sort of swapped in China as the big bad in a lot of ways.  Sharmin: Right.  Cayden: Samir, I wonder if there's, stuff that you've been seeing about the interim government in Nepal that you think are worth our sort of examination as kind of like lessons that we can draw from what happens after the protest, and yeah, like how that has been part of the electoral moment also we're in in Nepal right now. Samir: Yeah, [00:37:00] well, the interim government was, what was it, about five months. I think we didn't really see a lot of work that happened from the interim government, but obviously one of the big wins of the interim government was they were successfully able to hold elections. And the Western media has only focused on Balen Saha, this, quote-unquote, “rapper,” this charismatic guy who is gonna, who's 35 years old and is gonna lead. And then like Sushila Karki, I mean, one of the big things that everybody is like, “Oh, she's the first woman prime minister of Nepal, and what does that mean for us?” And, you know, this identity politics of like, “Oh, we finally got a woman president.” And for us it's like when we talk about it, that's the only thing we see in the discourse. But the reality is she was also a woman prime minister in an interim government that she knew was gonna last for six months, right? And also one of the things that a lot of people don't think about and realize is like the youth really didn't know who she was. And I think that's one of the big things that Sarmin talked about too, is like how do our youth have the consciousness? And do we have a left, social movement left, that's actually supporting them to really understand, you know, the conditions [00:38:00] of our people and who we're electing and, like, how we're organizing and what that means for us, right? But one of the big popularities about her was, like, she was not a career, jurist as she was appointed, was a lawyer that was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2009 by the Judicial Council, and she had this reputation of pushing back against some of the political parties and some of the establishments in that time. So that was, like, one of the big things that really lured our folks, there was this one interview of her that went really viral about how she talks about, you know, establishment parties and how she challenged, some of the status quo while she was… Because a lot of times what happens with some of these appointments are people who are loyal to the to the parties, right? That was the one big thing that really attracted a lot of our young folks, to mobilize around her being the prime minister. And it's just, like, a lot of unknowns around, like, we still don't know because with the older parties, it was very clear to us that the Communist Party was, like, more loyal to China, right? And the Congress party was more loyal to India. And then one of the things a lot that we don't see in the discourse even in left spaces, right? Even [00:39:00] in, like, media spaces is, more than US imperialism, India and China is also waging some form of imperialism in our homelands, right? And that we don't wanna name that layer because in the US, as, us being in the belly of the beast, our only responsibility is to fight US imperialism. And then for me, as somebody from the Global South, I understand that how that impacts our movement and how that is dangerous and harmful to our people in our, back in our homeland. Because China and India are bullying Nepal in a lot of different ways politically, right? Because nothing happens in Nepal without the consent of India and China, right? And India obviously has more power, and they're, like, fighting over that power in Nepal right now. And the other thing that I wanted to name is, I was hoping K.P. Oli, during our interim prime ministership, during that interim government, would be held accountable, which didn't happen. And we're not talking about that, right? And also she [Karki] had a lot of limitations, and we still are figuring out what, like, what kind of power she held, right? But the hope was for me was, like, that she would hold the people who were responsible for our people's deaths accountable during the six months she was there, which [00:40:00] really didn't happen and really moved. And that's one of the things that hasn't been talked about, and I think that was a big political opportunity for her to do some of that work to push K.P. Oli out of power because he, after doing all of this, was still able to contest the elections and lost really badly. But one of the things for me, the inspiration was, like, how Sheikh Hasina was pushed out of the country, right? Like, that was one of the hopes and dreams, and that didn't really happen, during this interim government.  Cayden: Hmm. That's interesting that there's, like, a possibility that he might be back. Well, I wanna turn a little bit to thinking about this history that's been unfolding and, like, what it is like to be observing, talking to comrades and loved ones as an organizer who's based here in the US as part of your diasporic community. One of the things I think a lot about is, like- When we talk about solidarity with people's movements internationally in the US, sometimes we forget that, like, people from those diasporas are our comrades. They are here. And that we have a lot to, [00:41:00] like, learn from them. What has it been like watching the sort of, like, social movements in Bangladesh and Nepal respectively, and what has it been like to have that consciousness as an organizer here in the US dealing with all of the political stuff that we've been dealing with here? Samir: I love that you asked that question, Cayden, and also, like, yes, I just wanna start with, like, this layer of like, oh, yes, we have comrades here who are from these diasporic communities who actually can inform us in this. And to add another layer to that, even with, with my, you know, my history of being born and raised in Nepal and, like, being connected to our movements there and, like, living here for the last 20 years now, right? That also creates another layer where I don't have access to everything, and that also creates a layer of, like, that I don't have to know everything, right? And I wish our left- Mm-hmm … Western left understood that layer sometimes because – In our movements, I'm gonna go be a little– I'm gonna little shit about our movements here, you know? Because one of the things that happens is, like, the romanticization of what's going on in our homelands without understanding, and this idea- Mm-hmm of, like-like, we have to know the answers to every… It's okay to not have answers. I think that's a big thing that I reflect on a lot as somebody here, [00:42:00] right? And also, the reality is I have access to my father, who is, for me, the only revolutionary that I know who was part of, like, social movements and who, like, really spent his whole life to the movement and is now still doing things after being betrayed by his party, right? So I think that's one of the big things. I think it's okay to know that. I think the second thing for me as somebody in the diaspora, it's my role in the diaspora. It's also what is my role in the diaspora to inform my comrades. If you're an upper-caste person, it is your responsibility to name that in the movement spaces that you hold and name that layer- Mm … and inform people about that layer. I think about that a lot. I sit up, I sit with that and reflect on that a lot, and that really informs the way I show up as somebody in the diaspora. And my responsibility, one of the things that we saw when all of this was happening you know, the movements, the social movement left was so fast, got into this train of, like, it's a Color Revolution [i.e., the revolution is backed by the US government/is a US-led intervention], as if our peoples don't have the capacity to organize. Yes, there was infiltrations. Yes, India was involved. But yes, there was also uprising where 70 people died, right? So just, bringing it down to, like, it's not really being complex and, like, [00:43:00] being nuance about that. And that really is harmful to our people back home, right? Because that, in that, when we're doing that, we're taking away, like, access from our people in terms of, like, how they are doing things. And also, like, really, I think invalidating the fact that our, the governments that was being oppressing against the uprisings are oppressive. So that just, like, invisibilizes, uh, what the state is doing, right? Because it is a Color Revolution, you know. The, it is not led by the people. We're, there was even sign, things like they said, like, “Oh, there were signs in English.” Like, can you just think about, you know, the, the orientalist, uh, you know-  Cayden: Yeah …  Samir: orientalist way that you are thinking even as somebody who considers yourself a social movement left. So that's, I think, one my, that, for me, that is a big responsibility. And- And that is where I can also make an impact as somebody in the diaspora. I am not on the ground, that is the reality of it, and knowing where I can make impact and how I can make impact, and knowing very clearly that I don't have all the answers, and I'm not– I'm an outsider in so many… I go back home every time I go home for a couple of months, the way I show up in these movement spaces [00:44:00] is I'm here to listen and I'm an outsider, and I'm trying to figure out how I can support you, right? And that is, for me, a role as a diasporic person, and I'm very clear on that. And I think it's also because I have access to my dad who grounds me in that, and it's like- Mm-hmm “Samir, you don't live here anymore.” He will remind me very clearly. He's like, “You don't live here anymore.” And you need to understand that, and that's okay.” And he will ground me in that, and that really helps me in terms of thinking of how I wanna show up as a diasporic person.  Cayden: Yeah. No, that's, that's really helpful, and I think that, like, this thing that you're describing about the sort of like in some ways, like, healthy, but in other ways sort of, like, overblown skepticism that US observers can have about uprisings, revolutions in other countries just because, like… The, the word that came to mind as you were describing it was, like, infantilizing, right? That it's, like, as if people can't independently form their own political opinions without the intervention of the, like, global superpower is just sort of, like, baffling to me. You hit on something that, like, I think about a lot [00:45:00] also as somebody who is, like, a generation removed from the immigrant generation in my family. I don't have a ton of relationships with my family who are in Hong Kong and China, but, like, how do I, like how do I relate to that? It's very challenging, and it's- and I, I think that there's so much in, like, US like left social movement discourse that I'm just kind of like, “I actually don't know how to relate to this as a diasporic person sometimes.” Sharmin, I'm also interested to hear from you on this.  Sharmin: Yeah. Yeah, similarly, I feel, I feel like there is this, like, uh, relationality that it's pushing people that are here to really think about more clearly. I feel like some of the early '70s through the '90s was a very, like, symbolic type of solidarity that we had- Mm-hmm where, where, you know, we would do the cultural attire, the cultural associations, you know, the melas, which are, like, big fairs that we have in these hubs of, like, immigrant communities. And now I think the politics are coming back. Like, I think after the July uprising, [00:46:00] you actually saw solidarity actions popping up across hubs in, you know, New York and California where people were like, “Actually, this impacts me and I wanna talk about what this means. I wanna talk about the cultural and political organizations that run this local community.” And one thing that I really took back from the last two visits to Bangladesh is really learning the skills of talking to somebody who disagrees with me because-  Cayden: Hmm …  Sharmin: I think in the United States the left does not practice, being able to engage, talk, even, like, be in relationship with people that might be politically opposed to you. And so when I go to Bangladesh, I'm actually surrounded by a lot of homophobes. I'm surrounded by a lot of men who, like, support the Awami League, and I've had to kind of, like, sit in this in between of being like, “Oh, yeah, like, I actually have to learn how to debate better. I have to learn how to, like, you know, be that person that's, like, holding humanity but also holding the, the critical left analysis that I, I believed in to be right because I [00:47:00] know I'm right.” Right? And I know that, like, this is a hill that's worth dying on. And I think with Mamdani's win in, in New York, like, there's so many examples of how that, like, South Asian left politic that's actually talking about class exists- Mm-hmm.  Cayden: Yeah …  Sharmin: within the geography of our communities. And, you know, especially for, you know, Samir and I are, like, the minority South Asians, so we're not the Indian upper caste. And so for us, we're like, “This has always been the reality of our people.” They are working-class organizers. They're people who know how to talk about the intricacies of domestic labor, about the unorganized labor forces, about the people that are left out of the political agenda of our government. And so for me, like, I really take some of the lessons that DRUM [ Desis Rising Up and Moving]  is doing on the ground in New York around what it means to actually build a member base that's rooted in relationship, but also towards a North Star. And that North Star, it looks a little socialist. It looks a little working class. It looks [00:48:00] very deeply rooted in a feminist, anti-oppressive politic. And I think for someone in diaspora, that's been the biggest growth area for me, where I'm like, “How do I hold this vision and not lose hope that my people are not, like, all right-wing people that are out to, like, you know, destroy me and my people?” But we are in this center-right populous moment that will require us to do cultural shift. It will require us to do that, like, slow work of tilling the land, like Ella Baker spade work. And you know, a comrade of mine, Nafiz, who's a brilliant writer at Jamhor, when I was talking to him about processing the February elections, he was just like, “You know, I actually think, like, I'm seeing a lot of possibility right now because I saw what happened to Egypt after Tahrir Square, and I saw where Egypt went and what a military dictatorship did to that country.” And he was like, “And Bangladesh, that's not what happened to us.” And, and he was like, “And this is important for us to really reckon with how… Not to [00:49:00] say, like, ‘Oh, it could be so much more worse,' but it could be so much more worse.” And we have to work within these, like, terrains in a way that's, like, really reckoning with why are people wanting to find comfort in these right-wing religious social groups, because they are the only organized groups of people that are providing shelter and food. And so unless the left fills that gap, we are gonna see right-wing populism, and we've seen it within white supremacy here, but it translates to every Global South country, from Brazil to, you know, um, obviously South Asia. And so yeah, I just am trying to be more, like, relative in that way, where I'm like-  Cayden: Hmm Sharmin: “Oh, we're a lot more relative than we think we are.”  Cayden: Yeah. That is such a good insight about, like, having to context switch Across geography, across political context, like builds a, like a really important muscle for us as organizers. This has been an absolutely fantastic [00:50:00] conversation and I've learned so much from both of you. My one sort of like, well I have two outgoing questions and they're sort of related to one another. One is thinking about like as a monolingual English speaker, as somebody who's like in the US, I think one of the things that I've often felt a challenge around is like where do I look to for news, for updates, and for analysis about what's going on in the Global South, especially for places where I have no cultural or language connection. And like when you're assessing news and information that's coming out about movement politics. What do you consider, what do you think about, what are the questions you ask yourself when you're like seeing headlines, kinda day-to-day that you think would be useful for other folks to start thinking about? Sharmin: Yeah. I, I really think about, like, multiple nationalisms right now, that there's, like, these competing forces of, like, who gets to tell the story. And I always, like to think about, like, how, uh, US [00:51:00] interests, Chinese interests, or even, like, Indian interests are determining the news landscape right now. And I don't like to think about it, but I, I've been looking at so much coverage that feels very much like, yikes, like what is going on, with our, like, news ecosystem? And unfortunately, I think we need to get back on Facebook. Like, I think that the fact that- … progressives and the left have left Facebook, like, I get it. Fuck Meta, and Facebook is the main place for so much like organizing. And we-  Cayden: Contest every space.  Sharmin: Get back on Facebook. Who cares if there are right-wing trolls on it? You we have to create alternative like information systems that are, like, really amplifying to these networks and groups of people that are getting inundated with that information. And I think we're really lucky because there's a lot of leftist South Asian publications now, Himal South Asian, Jumphore, you could become Patreon supporter and really be a part of these legacy, South Asian [00:52:00] left, thinkers that are actually thinking about, like, the long-term arc, and they, they're contending with socialism. They're contending with the communist, like, legacies of our organizations. And so, I just really appreciate that they're doing political analysis with politics and not just focusing on, like, symbolic forms of, like, political analysis. So shout-out to them and, and their hard work because yeah, they, they're English media that is getting translated for this day and age, you know? Cayden: Yeah. I… It was really exciting to me to, like, do a lot of the sort of, like, background for this conversation and find, like, English language movement media coming out of South Asia. I was like, “This is so exciting.” Like, this is… I feel like in some ways the thing that they're trying to do is, like they're kind of our comrades- Mm-hmm in a sense, right? Like, they're trying to do a similar thing to the thing that we're trying to do at Convergence, and I was like, “Ooh, this is really cool. Like, I'm bookmarking this.” Yeah. So I don't know. Samir, do you have, do you have other thoughts about, like, what things [00:53:00] US people should be thinking about as they're kind of assessing news and developments? Samir: Yeah, big ups Himal Magazine. I think that is a big source of information for me too. And also as somebody who struggles with reading Nepali now, which I'm very embarrassed of it's really hard for me to get access. to. I have to sit with my dad to, like, really go through some of the news articles, which, you know, my dad gracefully agrees. Uh, I think one of the big things is, like, I do benefit a lot from his free labor. I'll just name that on this podcast. But I think, and one of the things I would say is like- Thanks,  Cayden: dad …  Samir: really, like, figuring out, like, I don't know, like, pushing through the binary of, like, what US imperialism means for Nepal and what also there's, there could be other forms of imperialism that I named earlier, that Sharmin named too. And also right now, I think there's a lot of unknowns for us too, right? We have this party that was not part of the political establishment that came into picture in 2024. So we are still grappling with the idea of, like, what does this mean for us? Who are they gonna be loyal to, and how does, what does this mean for geopolitics in Nepal, right? So we are still sitting with that question. And there is some clarity around, I think one of the things I would say is there's a [00:54:00] lot of excitement, even in diaspora community, and my role in the diaspora also has been talking to some of my friends who are stoked about this prime minister right now because we haven't built a left that is informing them of the nuances and, like, how we can actually figure out the critique of this person, right? Because for me, I think it's really important the social movement left to understand because even my friend, my comrades are sending me, “Oh, this rapper is a prime minister now.” It's somebody that I trust a lot, right? Yeah. And I have to do the work of like, “Hey, this person has this history of governing in this way when he became the mayor of Kathmandu, where he was against poor people,” right? He did some changes, structural changes that helped, upper middle class people. And using that as a way to, like, really assess what he's gonna do for Nepal, and I'm actually skeptical, right? He is somebody from the Madhesi movement, which is a indigenous group that is very marginalized in Nepal, but he also comes from a very upper class background, right? And that's also real. We have to name that. His party's ideology is to push us away from federalism in some sense, right? And also the reality is they had a majority, they won a majority because we didn't have a social movement left outside of political parties that would help us assess him, right? [00:55:00] So that's, I think that's the question. Those are some of the questions I would love people to ask, because I am asking those questions as somebody who is from Nepal and from the diaspora, and I check myself every time. And yeah, I will end it with, like, it's okay to not have all the answers, and just, yeah, do some of that work of, like, reflecting on, like, asking yourself how you are taking in some of the information that you're seeing. And obviously, Himal Magazine is a big source, and one of the Substacks that I would highly recommend too is, I think we could put it in the links later, it's called Kalam Weekly, which is on Substack. I have some critiques of their writing too, but that's really been helping me understand what's going on in Nepal right now.  Cayden: You both have been so incredibly generous with your time, and this has been such a rich conversation. I don't know if there are places also where if our listeners want to follow your work, I don't know, if there's organizations or places where you are publishing thoughts, either your own or organizationally that you wanna share. Sharmin, is there any place people can find you online? Sharmin: Yeah, for sure. We're building the Asian American left at 18 Million Rising, so you could follow us there, and I'm @sharminultra [00:56:00] on all social media.  Cayden: And Samir, is there a place people can find you?  Samir: Uh, yeah, I am a very quiet person. Uh, but direct action has been a big part of our struggles in the last few years, and we are really thinking about, like, how we can escalate strategically, so I am part of a network of direct action trainers called the Ruckus Society. Hit us up. We do trainings, go to our website, request a training if you need any direct action support. We love nerding out on action design and thinking about action curriculum and how we train our people to do action safely. And follow Ruckus Society, and I don't really have a social that's public, so…  Cayden: that's so fair. I respect your choice not to be perceived.  Samir: I mean, also, I'm not Sharmin, I feel I learn from her so much, from Sharmin, so I just wanna name that, and also just from how I- And  Sharmin: we're friends. Like, we, we've done direct actions together. Like, we've been arrested together. Like-  Cayden: Yeah. …  Sharmin: we're comrades, so it's just so fun to be able to talk about this- Well, I really-  Cayden: Yeah …  Yeah. Thanks again, Sharmin, Samir. Absolutely a pleasure to talk, and I'm, I'm sure we'll talk again soon.  Sharmin: Talk soon. [00:57:00] Thank you, guys.  Samir:

This episode features a conversation with Carnatic vocalist, T.M. Krishna, who is also the author of two books on this musical tradition. We began with his first book's account of the modernization of Carnatic music through a set of social, technical, and spatial processes that transformed it from a more socially diverse practice into a predominantly Brahmin performative genre. We moved on to discuss a figure who is at the heart of his second book: the maker of the Carnatic percussion instrument, the mrdangam. This took us into an extended discussion of the changing relationship between mrdangam makers, who are predominantly Dalit, and mrdangam players, who are predominantly Brahmin, and what the complex mix of inequality, stigma, artistry, and pride suggests about the specificity of this inter-caste relationship. The episode ended with Krishna fleshing out his distinction between classical music and art music and the reasons why he rejects the former in favor of the latter. Read the transcript Guest T.M. Krishna is a vocalist in the Carnatic tradition and the author of two books and numerous articles. References T.M. Krishna, A Southern Music: The Karnatik Story (Harper Collins, 2016). T.M. Krishna, Sebastian and Sons: A Brief History of Mrdangam Makers (Westland, 2023). Devadasi: refers to a historical practice of “marrying” girls to a temple deity. In the pre-colonial period, Devadasis held a respected place in society as literate, land owning women who were highly trained in music and dance. During colonialism, their sexual relations with male patrons came to be seen as a threat to householder society and they became targets of moral reform. The Devadasi system was abolished in 1947. Sadir: a dance form historically performed by the Devadasi community that was the precursor to modern Bharatanatyam. Bharatanatyam: a modern dance form now widely performed by upper castes. Khayal: vocal genre of North Indian music. ICS: Indian Civil Service, the higher tier of colonial administration in British India that became the basis of the post-independence Indian Administrative Service. The Music Academy: the main performance space for Carnatic music in Madras (now Chennai), India. Kutcheri: term for the venue where Carnatic music is performed. Thanjavur: city in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu known for its art and architecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

This episode features a conversation with Carnatic vocalist, T.M. Krishna, who is also the author of two books on this musical tradition. We began with his first book's account of the modernization of Carnatic music through a set of social, technical, and spatial processes that transformed it from a more socially diverse practice into a predominantly Brahmin performative genre. We moved on to discuss a figure who is at the heart of his second book: the maker of the Carnatic percussion instrument, the mrdangam. This took us into an extended discussion of the changing relationship between mrdangam makers, who are predominantly Dalit, and mrdangam players, who are predominantly Brahmin, and what the complex mix of inequality, stigma, artistry, and pride suggests about the specificity of this inter-caste relationship. The episode ended with Krishna fleshing out his distinction between classical music and art music and the reasons why he rejects the former in favor of the latter. Read the transcript Guest T.M. Krishna is a vocalist in the Carnatic tradition and the author of two books and numerous articles. References T.M. Krishna, A Southern Music: The Karnatik Story (Harper Collins, 2016). T.M. Krishna, Sebastian and Sons: A Brief History of Mrdangam Makers (Westland, 2023). Devadasi: refers to a historical practice of “marrying” girls to a temple deity. In the pre-colonial period, Devadasis held a respected place in society as literate, land owning women who were highly trained in music and dance. During colonialism, their sexual relations with male patrons came to be seen as a threat to householder society and they became targets of moral reform. The Devadasi system was abolished in 1947. Sadir: a dance form historically performed by the Devadasi community that was the precursor to modern Bharatanatyam. Bharatanatyam: a modern dance form now widely performed by upper castes. Khayal: vocal genre of North Indian music. ICS: Indian Civil Service, the higher tier of colonial administration in British India that became the basis of the post-independence Indian Administrative Service. The Music Academy: the main performance space for Carnatic music in Madras (now Chennai), India. Kutcheri: term for the venue where Carnatic music is performed. Thanjavur: city in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu known for its art and architecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

This episode features a conversation with Carnatic vocalist, T.M. Krishna, who is also the author of two books on this musical tradition. We began with his first book's account of the modernization of Carnatic music through a set of social, technical, and spatial processes that transformed it from a more socially diverse practice into a predominantly Brahmin performative genre. We moved on to discuss a figure who is at the heart of his second book: the maker of the Carnatic percussion instrument, the mrdangam. This took us into an extended discussion of the changing relationship between mrdangam makers, who are predominantly Dalit, and mrdangam players, who are predominantly Brahmin, and what the complex mix of inequality, stigma, artistry, and pride suggests about the specificity of this inter-caste relationship. The episode ended with Krishna fleshing out his distinction between classical music and art music and the reasons why he rejects the former in favor of the latter. Read the transcript Guest T.M. Krishna is a vocalist in the Carnatic tradition and the author of two books and numerous articles. References T.M. Krishna, A Southern Music: The Karnatik Story (Harper Collins, 2016). T.M. Krishna, Sebastian and Sons: A Brief History of Mrdangam Makers (Westland, 2023). Devadasi: refers to a historical practice of “marrying” girls to a temple deity. In the pre-colonial period, Devadasis held a respected place in society as literate, land owning women who were highly trained in music and dance. During colonialism, their sexual relations with male patrons came to be seen as a threat to householder society and they became targets of moral reform. The Devadasi system was abolished in 1947. Sadir: a dance form historically performed by the Devadasi community that was the precursor to modern Bharatanatyam. Bharatanatyam: a modern dance form now widely performed by upper castes. Khayal: vocal genre of North Indian music. ICS: Indian Civil Service, the higher tier of colonial administration in British India that became the basis of the post-independence Indian Administrative Service. The Music Academy: the main performance space for Carnatic music in Madras (now Chennai), India. Kutcheri: term for the venue where Carnatic music is performed. Thanjavur: city in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu known for its art and architecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

This episode features a conversation with Carnatic vocalist, T.M. Krishna, who is also the author of two books on this musical tradition. We began with his first book's account of the modernization of Carnatic music through a set of social, technical, and spatial processes that transformed it from a more socially diverse practice into a predominantly Brahmin performative genre. We moved on to discuss a figure who is at the heart of his second book: the maker of the Carnatic percussion instrument, the mrdangam. This took us into an extended discussion of the changing relationship between mrdangam makers, who are predominantly Dalit, and mrdangam players, who are predominantly Brahmin, and what the complex mix of inequality, stigma, artistry, and pride suggests about the specificity of this inter-caste relationship. The episode ended with Krishna fleshing out his distinction between classical music and art music and the reasons why he rejects the former in favor of the latter. Read the transcript Guest T.M. Krishna is a vocalist in the Carnatic tradition and the author of two books and numerous articles. References T.M. Krishna, A Southern Music: The Karnatik Story (Harper Collins, 2016). T.M. Krishna, Sebastian and Sons: A Brief History of Mrdangam Makers (Westland, 2023). Devadasi: refers to a historical practice of “marrying” girls to a temple deity. In the pre-colonial period, Devadasis held a respected place in society as literate, land owning women who were highly trained in music and dance. During colonialism, their sexual relations with male patrons came to be seen as a threat to householder society and they became targets of moral reform. The Devadasi system was abolished in 1947. Sadir: a dance form historically performed by the Devadasi community that was the precursor to modern Bharatanatyam. Bharatanatyam: a modern dance form now widely performed by upper castes. Khayal: vocal genre of North Indian music. ICS: Indian Civil Service, the higher tier of colonial administration in British India that became the basis of the post-independence Indian Administrative Service. The Music Academy: the main performance space for Carnatic music in Madras (now Chennai), India. Kutcheri: term for the venue where Carnatic music is performed. Thanjavur: city in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu known for its art and architecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

This episode features a conversation with Carnatic vocalist, T.M. Krishna, who is also the author of two books on this musical tradition. We began with his first book's account of the modernization of Carnatic music through a set of social, technical, and spatial processes that transformed it from a more socially diverse practice into a predominantly Brahmin performative genre. We moved on to discuss a figure who is at the heart of his second book: the maker of the Carnatic percussion instrument, the mrdangam. This took us into an extended discussion of the changing relationship between mrdangam makers, who are predominantly Dalit, and mrdangam players, who are predominantly Brahmin, and what the complex mix of inequality, stigma, artistry, and pride suggests about the specificity of this inter-caste relationship. The episode ended with Krishna fleshing out his distinction between classical music and art music and the reasons why he rejects the former in favor of the latter. Read the transcript Guest T.M. Krishna is a vocalist in the Carnatic tradition and the author of two books and numerous articles. References T.M. Krishna, A Southern Music: The Karnatik Story (Harper Collins, 2016). T.M. Krishna, Sebastian and Sons: A Brief History of Mrdangam Makers (Westland, 2023). Devadasi: refers to a historical practice of “marrying” girls to a temple deity. In the pre-colonial period, Devadasis held a respected place in society as literate, land owning women who were highly trained in music and dance. During colonialism, their sexual relations with male patrons came to be seen as a threat to householder society and they became targets of moral reform. The Devadasi system was abolished in 1947. Sadir: a dance form historically performed by the Devadasi community that was the precursor to modern Bharatanatyam. Bharatanatyam: a modern dance form now widely performed by upper castes. Khayal: vocal genre of North Indian music. ICS: Indian Civil Service, the higher tier of colonial administration in British India that became the basis of the post-independence Indian Administrative Service. The Music Academy: the main performance space for Carnatic music in Madras (now Chennai), India. Kutcheri: term for the venue where Carnatic music is performed. Thanjavur: city in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu known for its art and architecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

What if the answers you're searching for arrived long before you knew how to understand them? In this conversation, I sit down with Kip Baldwin, a filmmaker, producer, writer, and founder of the Just Love movement. Kip shares the extraordinary awakening he experienced at age 12 and how it set him on a lifelong path of exploring consciousness, love, spirituality, and human connection. From the music industry and sustainable agriculture to television production, ethical AI, and overcoming a traumatic brain injury, Kip's journey has been anything but ordinary. As we talk, Kip reflects on why fear has become such a powerful force in society, how love can transform the way we see ourselves and others, and why he believes lasting change starts with a shift in consciousness. You will hear stories of resilience, curiosity, and purpose, along with a vision for creating a better future for generations to come. I believe you will find this conversation thought-provoking, challenging, and full of hope. Highlights: 01:45 - How a childhood acting career sparked a lifelong passion for media and communication. 07:08 - Why confidence without self-awareness can become a liability. 16:32 - Lessons from the Kellogg School of Management that still shape business decisions today. 21:58 - Why listening beats talking in business, leadership, and life. 35:08 - How strong brands grow through awareness, not just loyalty programs. 01:05:02 - The three traits Zarko looks for when mentoring future leaders. About the Guest: Kip Baldwin knows his purpose for Being is to share all that LOVE is through his many solutions driven projects; using media in all its forms to help awaken individuals, and by proxy the collective, to the LOVE Paradigm emerging. He feels that in order for a new chapter of our story to be conceived for humanity, a mass imagining of our limitless potential is what is needed to bring about an age of compassion, empathy, collaboration, and oneness.  Kip was born in 1965 to counterculture parents - in the midst of the maelstrom that was the decade of the sixties, in fact 1965 was the first year that scientists warned us about climate change - in Vancouver, Washington. His earliest years were spent on a farm where his grandparents raised thoroughbred horses. During this period grew in him a deep, abiding LOVE and respect for nature and all living things. It was around the age of twelve his life would transform forever, as he had an out of body experience that took him beyond the edge of Universe, even Space and Time, and face to face with the unknowable of Infinity. This experience became the foundation for his constant seeking since. Due to that experience Kip felt he must explore the world beyond the small town confines of Camas, WA where he grew up. His first attempt to break free was to do a brief stint in the Navy, where he was going to pursue a career as an electric technician, but because of a hereditary bleeding disorder he was given a medical discharge. However, a military career for him was clearly never really in the cards anyway. Although he was always grateful for the insight it gave him into the inner workings of our country, as he witnessed first the how the poor are literally cannon fodder for corporations, under the guise of them being heroes and patriots. Following his discharge, he returned briefly to the limits of his hometown, before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1985 to pursue his passion for music and performing. He often jokes that he was looking for the San Francisco of the Haight/Ashbury, Peace and LOVE days, but arrived twenty years too late. What he found instead was the 80s hair metal band scene, whose songs that focused on partying, sex, and drugs were not compatible with his lyrics about awakening awareness and addressing the need for personal and societal change. In the late 90s, after becoming disillusioned by his beloved music industry - and always seeking solutions for the myriad of challenges facing humanity - he shifted his focus to local and sustainable foods. While this was certainly a worthwhile pursuit, it did little to fulfill his need to share LOVE'S Truth and create a collective shift in consciousness. But what it did do was make him aware that it was only going to be through the use of mass media that his message of LOVE could reach a large enough audience to affect real lasting change. This found him again heeding the call of the entertainment industry, first as an actor, then writer, and ultimately as a producer, with some success co-creating the influential cannabis series Weed Country for the Discovery Network (focusing on the countless benefits humanity can derive from marijuana, as well as our profound historical connection to the plant), co-founding the United Filmmakers Association, and starting the Just LOVE Movement. Ultimately, this led him to co-founding S.O.U.L. Documentary with creative partner and Soul Twin, Evan Hirsch who shares his passion, purpose and mission to heal humanity by embracing our innate oneness, which they both understand can only be achieved by accepting and grounding ourselves in the Reality of LOVE We Are. Ways to connect with Kip: Facebook:  Just LOVE page: https://www.facebook.com/kipbaldwinjustlove Main page: https://www.facebook.com/kip.baldwin/ UFA: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Unifilmmakers LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/kip-baldwin-975a3514/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kipbaldwin?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ%3D%3D&utm_source=qr YouTube: Kip Baldwin: https://youtube.com/@thekiprowdy?si=LckMuhec40lWAicF Just LOVE: https://youtube.com/@justlove6463?si=QW1g4D2dlaHmJk8B S.O.U.L. Documentary: https://youtube.com/@souldocumentary?si=4HOwlV-pjFN6guYy Soul Twin Messiah: https://youtube.com/@soultwinmessiah?si=7ctLlmqjeOczkjO_ Additional must listen:  Comfort You Song: https://youtu.be/Mi8D3AoDfRQ?si=y8RzIQPXP5ALJth1 A World Worth Imagining: https://youtu.be/Cx28t6_SGic?si=o4lWs7po3TBKx_3A Invitation. To Action: https://youtu.be/B8jUOUVCvJI?si=l4Pr7vWNDsnXX4wh AI work: www.luminaLOVE.LOVE About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog. Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards. https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/ accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/ Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below! Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset . Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts. Transcription Notes: Michael Hingson  00:03 One of the biggest things holding you back isn't what's in front of you, but rather what you believe. Welcome to Unstoppable Mindset, where inclusion, diversity, and the unexpected meet. I'm your host, Michael Hingson, speaker, author, and advocate for inclusion and possibilities. This podcast explores how the beliefs we carry shape the way we live, lead, and connect with others. Each week, I talk with people who challenge assumptions, face adversity head on, and show what's possible when we choose curiosity over fear. Together we focus on mindset, resilience, and the small shifts that lead to meaningful change. Let's get started. Hi everyone, I am your host Mike Hingson, and you are listening and or watching Unstoppable Mindset. We're really glad that you're here with us today. Our guest, the person I get the honor of chatting with for the next hour or so, is Kip Baldwin, who will talk a lot about love. He will talk a lot about a number of different things, he's been a director, he's been a producer, an actor. He has been published, although he hasn't published a book yet, but he's published poetry, and I'm sure he's going to tell us about that, and I don't want to give it away, so I won't. Anyway, Kip, welcome to Unstoppable Mindset. We're glad you're Kip Baldwin  01:40 here. Oh, thank you so much for having me, Michael. I look forward to having this conversation and sharing my story. Michael Hingson  01:47 Well, tell us a little bit about you, kind of. Let's start with the early Kip, growing up and all that, because I know you had some things along the way that were relevant and ought to be mentioned. So, why don't you tell us about the early Kip, and we'll go from there. Speaker 1  02:00 I was. I grew up in Washington State, little town called Camas. Although my earliest years were spent in a town called Battleground, Washington, and my family, we raised horses, Thoroughbred race horses. We raised at Portland Meadows, and so I'm kind of a farm boy at heart, at least that's how I grew up, but I had an experience when I was 12 that was definitely not your typical farm boy experience, I guess. I had gone up to Seattle, and this was maybe 78 to see a Seahawks game with the Raiders of my dad and dad, I had a good day, which wasn't always the case, and got home, and it was a, you know, five and a half hour round trip for kids, 12 year olds, a big time, and so I went to bed, and I promptly left my body, and now keep in mind I had never done any drugs. Out of body experiences, a household projection was not something that we talked about about the old farm around the farmhouse dinner table, and I floated over my bedroom. My awareness hovered over my body, and I remember very vividly you don't forget. I looked at my body and went, "I'm not in there. And then that immediately I left my house, I left the planet, I left the solar system, I let the galaxy, I let the universe, and the whole time all I can describe was kind of a presence, not a voice or anything, but just, are you taking all of this in? And sometimes words can't convey something so expansive and grand, and so I was taking in black holes and quasars and nebulas, and just flying through the, you know, time didn't really exist, but I was, I was traveling across the universe, and eventually I got outside the universe, and my awareness was turned in, and I could see how everything was connected, and how the universe itself was finite, and but that everything had a place, there was no less or greater than that, everything had a specific role, from the smallest particle to, you know, the largest star, and then my awareness was turned out to the blackness of infinity, and that you know you don't know at 12, you're just like, "Oh, this is happening, and I'm what's happening, and I'm taking it in, and what I didn't know is that would become my point of seeking that really became the rest of my life. Life, I think, had I been born in India, like say Ramana Maharishi, who had what I didn't realize until later, there's a name for what happened to me, and it's called a spontaneous awakening. My life would have probably been much different, but we don't live in a society that that really honors things like that, so it was a lot of me going on a journey of discovery and a weight and continual awakening until now, and it's an ongoing process, but that's where it really began with me being confronted with the fact that there there can't be a beginning or ending to anything, and the thought experiments that can't, that come out of that, and the way it opens your consciousness, I'm ever grateful for, although at the time it, it made me for a long time feel very apart, and it wasn't until I met with Dr. Dr. Dean Radin up at Noetic Sciences, and I told him my story, and he looked at me, and he went, "You go, that's not a usual experience, he said, "That's a mystical experience, and I was in my probably late 40s, maybe 50 at that time, and that was the first time in my life that someone had had said, 'Hey, what you, what you had was a really phenomenal experience, and I'm very grateful for him for saying that to me, because for most of my life, I'm running around talking about these profound things with people that I thought were incredibly important to share, and they didn't seem very important to people, and it wasn't until then that it hit me that it wasn't that they were important, that it was that they, they didn't really understand what I was talking about. Michael Hingson  07:03 Well, and in our society, as you point out, it's not something that is generally appreciated, and and people who have had those experiences or talk about them are generally looked down upon or frowned upon, and you know that's that's fine, but it doesn't change the fact, and so it must have been hard, especially at first, for you to talk about that. Speaker 1  07:29 You know, I was so excited at first, I was excited to share it with my family, and and it happened a couple more times, and it was so overwhelming that literally I would get to a point where my head, my physical being couldn't handle it anymore, and I would get up and vomit. It was that's how, how intense it was, like I just, I couldn't take in anymore. And so, at first, I was really excited to share it, because it was beyond wondrous. It was, it was truth. It was reality, and I, and on some level, I knew that instinctually. But then, when enough people sort of ignore you or act like something's unimportant, you stop talking about Michael Hingson  08:15 it. Yeah, Speaker 1  08:15 I never stopped writing about it. I never stopped experiencing it, and I didn't even really stop talking about it once I moved to California for the music business in 1985 I, you know, then I thought, wow, I mean, being a group of creatives and there's going to be other people that will understand what I'm talking about, but in the 80s music environment it really wasn't what people were, were talking or thinking about, and I was kind of in the same way, and again it wasn't until years later that I look back and I realized all this time I spent up late at night partying with people and stuff, and telling them about infinity, and, and they look, they, they must have been looking at me like I'm a complete idiot, because they really only cared about, you know, getting high or having sex, and I'm trying to have this profound conversation. Michael Hingson  09:16 So, when your family, when you told your family, how did they react? Speaker 1  09:20 They still don't understand it to this day. It just, oh, that's nice, you know. It actually, there were points in my life where it caused conflict with, especially my father, because when I would say none of this is real, he, he always considered him, and still to this day considers himself quite science physics buff, it wasn't something he was willing to accept, and, and even really have a reasonable conversation about. I would say that the things that got me through all these years was, you know, the universe. There's love, God, Brahmin, whatever you want to call it, it gives you what you need, and what it gave me throughout the years, and still to this day, is voices that made me realize I wasn't crazy, that I knew something really special. Probably the first thing, the first one I remember, like, that was Joseph Campbell being interviewed by Bill Moyers, and somehow I knew everything that Joseph Campbell was talking about, and I'm like, How can I possibly know these things? How can I possibly understand these things of this really brilliant, just beautiful soul? And throughout the years, it's been those touch those moments of going, oh, it hasn't been where I've heard someone go, wow, that's helped me awaken, it's been something that's helped me not feel insane and realize that the things that I'm sharing have been shared for 1000s of years, and by many, many minds and beings much greater than myself, and that that really probably kept me from losing my mind. Michael Hingson  11:10 So, you had this experience happen to you at 12. What did you then specifically do? I mean, not so much talking to people, but what did it do for you, as far as schooling, and what you did with your life? Speaker 1  11:27 I would.. it made me very.. in all honesty, it made school seem really trivial to me. It was kind of boring. I started writing a lot. In fact, something I wrote when I was 17 was called Life and Death, and it went: Life is just a symptom of certain death, crying and laughing until our last breath. Everything dies in true infinity. Then the mountains crumble into the sea, stars full from the night sky hit the earth, and then they die, lost in time. I don't know who I am. Am I a god or just a mortal man? Time can't change what I have found. Still, I am changed and bound, bound by the fears and bound by lies. Even now, the tears fill my eyes, gasping for every breath as I head for a certain death, clouds now pass overhead, and I realize how things are now that I am dead. Life is ending, life goes on like the lyrics to an endless song. Life and death, it's all the same. We exist only in our brain, and so there was a lot of that. It pushed me away from I was confirmed Zion Lutheran. I really couldn't stomach religious dogma anymore at that point. Um, just the hypocrisy, you know? Like, I remember I, I was talking to a new pastor we had, and he was informing me that my great grandmother, who is Jehovah's Witness, and these Mormon boys had come around, were trying to teach me about Mormonism, and I was just curious and open, always, and still am to this day. I don't judge. I would say that's another big thing that this gave me, is I don't, I see everything as equal, I don't, I don't judge everything, I don't judge anything as lesser thing greater than I don't judge good and evil in the in the same way that other people do, I see things as flows of negative of energy as we exist in a duality with this illusion, and this is just what we describe as good and you are really just flows of energy between the polarities of the duality, and so it pushed me, definitely, because I, when he said that my great grandmother was going to go to hell, and these Mormon boys were going to go to hell, I looked him in the face, and I just said, but I thought God was love, and that was pretty much the end of my church, Michael Hingson  14:04 my, my wife did, I think, some things in the Lutheran church, which mostly she was a Methodist, and I joined the Methodist church when we got married, and so on, but when she was in, I think this was when she was in high school, maybe in, I guess it was late high school, early college. She met some Mormon people, and one of them said, I guess she was learning about different religions, and so she was learning about Mormonism, and this guy said you're either going to think that this is a total hoax or you're going to just totally believe in it. Well, it wasn't quite that way for her. She did not think it was a hoax, and I agree with her, but there. There are things about the about all religions that tend to make life difficult. The problem with religion is that that people are are what make up the religion, and they all have their own views, and it makes life really tough. I know I participated in a program called the Walk to Emmaus, which is a what's literally called a short course in Christianity, and it's not to bring people to the Christian church, but it's to help create a class of leaders in the Christian church. Anyway, one of the things about the walk to Emmaus is that a number of people give lectures, people who have been involved in church, and then there are the pilgrims, the people who are coming to to learn what everyone has to say, and the lay director of the Walk to Emmaus every time gives a speech, and I was lay director once, and one of the things that is in the manual, or was I assume it still is. It's been a while, but it says that Tolstoy once said the biggest problem with Christianity is that nobody practices it, and there's a lot of truth to that. Speaker 1  16:13 But I think that I think you hit it right on the head that people are involved, like I, and I do want to clarify something, I, I believe very much that that Jesus was a master. Oh, Michael Hingson  16:29 absolutely, yeah, and, Speaker 1  16:31 and, but I also believe that people don't know what happened at the Council of Nicaea and understand how the Bible was actually constructed, not because it was based on Gnostic teachings or even really the teachings of Christ, but it was cobbled together as a means of control. If Caesar saw his soldiers be turning to Christianity when they wanted to find, you know, put together a book that really didn't express Christian truth or the truth of Christ, but a way, a means of controlling people through fear, and so if you, if you notice, all the books in the Bible are male. Well, left out of the Bible was the book of Mary, left out of the Bible, it's the book of Thomas, who, interestingly enough, there's a place in India where they all speak ancient Aramaic, and they worship the Book of Thomas, which there's always been a lot of discussion. Did Jesus go to India and study Buddhism? And because even the Book of Mary, these are very Buddhist beliefs, but anything, because we live in a patriarchal society, anything like the piece to Sophia, the book of Mary, the book of Stackle, all of these were intentionally kept out of the Bible, so it's not, I think it's not so much religion, it's the organ, it's the dogma that comes along with organized religion, which is really about people, you know, men using it to control and manipulate people through fear, Michael Hingson  18:14 all too much, all too often. It's, it's true. Speaker 1  18:18 Yeah, and it's interesting. I was watching last night, and it's funny. This is why, why you always have to be on a constant path of awakening. It never stops. If you think you've reached that pinnacle, or whatever, then they're not just ego. There's always more to know and understand. And I ran across this video on Tara, well, Tara is in Buddhism, basically in every religion that I am aware of, there's always the peace to Sophia, there's always the the story of the divine feminine that in large part is is is not. It was. It's largely been suppressed, and so I was, I was watching this, and it was just so fascinating to me to see how identical what Tara was in Buddhism, which this is what, when Tara, Tara is considered the ultimate goddess in the Buddhist faith. Well, when Tara came to earth in the story, she went to a bunch of, you know, Buddhist monks, and they said, "Oh, you know, they were so impressed by her, and they thought this was a compliment. They said, "Well, we hope you, you can reincarnate as a man, and she said, "No, she She said, I don't see things as male and female, but since nobody else wants to be the feminine, I will play that role. And it was just a profoundly interesting thing to listen to, not just because of the story, but because almost every faith that I'm aware. Of has that story of the divine feminine that has again largely been suppressed and marginalized, Michael Hingson  20:09 well, for you clearly that was a very meaningful experience. What did what did you then do, and I understand how you could imagine that maybe what was being taught in school wasn't quite as, as meaningful as what you had experienced, but you went on, I assume, through high school, and did you go to college? Speaker 1  20:30 I was, I went, I was an electron, I went to the Navy to be an electronic technician, but I had a bleeding disorder called Von Willebrand disease, and I found out after I was in for about a year. Well, you can't be in the Navy with that, because we can't carry with the limited space you have on ships, we can't carry the clotting factor you would need if there's a problem. So that was fairly short-lived. Then I went back to Washington and was working as a dishwasher for a while, then I worked as a male stripper, and, and I was then, which, which, you know, there was something really profound about that experience, because it taught me what women feel like to be objectified, and that's something that has carried me, carried a lesson. I, I find lessons in everything, even things that, wow, you know, what could you possibly learn positive out of having been a male stripper? Well, I learned how women feel, really, to be, you know, not looked at as anything more than an object, and then I really wanted to continue to, you know, pursue music, so a friend of mine, we loaded 65,000 pounds of frozen strawberries onto a semi truck, and like july 3, 1985 and got a ride to San Francisco, a city I'd never been to before. I knew nobody here. We got here, I had 25 cents in my pocket, and I used the 25 cents to call the one friend that I thought I knew that I could get a hold of here in or in in the Bay Area, and it was a wrong number, and so now I'm in a city at the Gray Home Bus Terminal that used to be in downtown San Francisco, we have no food, we have no place to live. We have nothing to, you know, we have nothing, literally. And that's where my journey began. As far as my story, my, my adult life, and my journey in the entertainment industry and the music business, that's how it all started. It started by loading 65,000 pounds of frozen strawberries under semi truck, telling, oh, and the cap around the story is I had worn my contacts for too long and I ripped the corny up both my eyes when I took them out, because I was wearing hard lenses, so I was functionally blind in the city I'd never been to before with patches over my eyes, and being led around by my friend, and luckily we found some very nice people that gave us a place to stay, and then I ended up meeting maybe a week after that, I met my first wife, who was Persian, and we were together for a long time. What was interesting about that is I've been introduced to so many different faiths through the people in my life, and because I haven't judged and tried to learn, like I, I learned through her about Islam, I learned through her about our Torcharianism, and we lived the rock and roll lifestyle for the 16 years we were together. She was a photographer. I wrote for a magazine called BAM. I played in bands. I managed artists like Linda Perry from The Four Non Blonde, or I worked with Linda Perry from Four Non Blondes. I managed Alex Skolnick, who is lead guitar player in Testament, and I did that for a long time until I started getting really disenchanted with music and really started to hate the business and started to hate music because of it, and so I ended up drifting into, I wouldn't say drifting into, I got drawn into visual media, and I started working. I met a guy at a club in San Jose, California, called The Agenda, and we were playing pool, and he was telling me, "Oh, he's the owner of this company called Metropolis Digital, and I was thinking, "My. Speaker 1  24:59 Music and music videos, and yeah, I want to get involved in this, so I started coming up with ideas, and he brought me into their company, because I got to know a lot of people through the music business and booking artists on different shows, like Letterman and Leno, and, and so I got to know how to work through those channels that it opened doors for me to be able to do on-air graphics for the networks, and so I did that until about, in fact, the last major project I did in that industry was with a company called Chaos X AOS out of San Francisco, and we did the 2000 election graphics for ABC nationally, and then I, I, that with the, the, the.com telecom crash of not of 2000 they pulled all of that sort of work in house, and so that business kind of dried up, and I changed my focus to working in local and sustainable foods. Michael Hingson  26:08 What got you to the point where you disliked Music so much? Speaker 1  26:12 The business.. it just.. it wasn't. I came here, and in all honesty, I was looking for the 60s, but I was 20 years too late, only to find out later I was actually 30 years too early, but I was looking for community, I was looking for family, I was looking for that connection, but what existed as far as the music industry then was the 80s hair band stuff, heavy metal was on the rise. It was very misogynistic. It wasn't. It was very competitive. There wasn't, it wasn't collaborative, it wasn't community related at all. And it really turned me off. It wasn't, it wasn't what I had thought being in an artistic community doing artistic endeavors would be about it, became very.. it just.. it just.. it just.. it just made me feel very empty, and that wasn't what I loved about music, and so that Michael Hingson  27:24 would be an issue, Speaker 1  27:25 yeah. It just value wise it was, it was not, you know, you, you got to do a show, and you've got the bands that are coming on after you, you know, playing with your amps, and it was just, it was, it wasn't, it wasn't fun, and it wasn't fulfilling. More importantly, it wasn't fulfilling. It wasn't, and I'm writing about while everyone else is writing about, you know, sex and drugs and all of this. I'm writing about the things that I thought were important. I was writing about the problems I saw in this country, like songs like Shock the System or the chosen few, and, and though that wasn't what people were writing about Michael Hingson  28:06 then, Speaker 1  28:06 and you know, even though the songs were good, and, and I've been told I'm talented, it was, I didn't, I didn't again feel like I fit in, you know, I didn't feel like I'd found my place, and certainly not in that world at that time. If Speaker 2  28:31 you enjoy Unstoppable Mindset and would like to help us continue bringing these conversations to you each week, we've created a way for you to support the show. Your contribution helps us cover production costs and continue sharing stories, insights, and ideas that inspire people to live with purpose and possibility. If supporting the podcast feels right for you, you'll find the link in the show notes. Thank you for being part of the Unstoppable Mindset community. Thank it Michael Hingson  29:04 certainly had to be a rough time all the way around, but then you, you found this person, and you joined their company, as you said earlier, Speaker 1  29:15 right? I started working for Metropolis Digital, and we started doing a lot of on-air graphics, like for TBS. We did their, their original movies. We did a lot of the opening graphics for it, and then I moved on to other companies, and and I, I then started focusing on on local and sustainable foods, and moved into doing stuff where I felt I was doing more, because at the heart of everything I've ever done, it's always been about trying to affect real change in the world, Michael Hingson  29:55 it's Speaker 1  29:55 always been about I could see very clear. Really, it doesn't surprise me where we're at today at all. I saw the problems with the system even at that age, and I give credit to that because of the experience I had with Infinity. It just allowed me to step back and perceive things from a far off perspective that I was looking at humanity in general and how we did things, and I'm just like, this doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense for us to believe we're separate and apart from the very things that give us life from each other. It doesn't make sense from a spiritual perspective. It doesn't make sense from a scientific perspective. Yet, here's the system that we are a part of, and so I've always been very focused on trying to effect real change and find not just point out the problems but actually find solutions, and so that then led me into working in local and sustainable agriculture here in the Bay Area. So Michael Hingson  31:00 tell me more about the whole work that you did with Sustainable Foods. What was that all about? Speaker 1  31:08 Yes, I worked with a company, I was, I had handled all the sales and marketing for Drake's Bay Oysters out of Inverness, California, and Drakes Bay, before it was called Drakes Bay, was Johnson's Oysters, and they were the last oyster cannery in California. The family that owned the farm, they had taken it over from Johnson's. They were the Lenny family, who owned Ranch G across from the steroid, where the oyster farm was. Well, they, against my better advice, they made it a personal ownership thing rather than a California food heritage issue. So, eventually, when their lease came up on the rent, on the farm, the farm went away. Well, at the same time, I created new relationships. A very good friend of mine to this day is a gentleman named Brian Kinney, who is now the West Coast Chief Technology Officer for Hearst, and also the Hearst Family Archivist, but at that point in time he was running Hearst Ranch, which they, they had the Jack Ranch and the Hearst Ranch down around San Simeon. So I was at the forefront of the grass-fed beef movement as well, and we developed a human-grade grass-fed beef pet food about 10 years ahead of its time, which could be the story of my life. I'm always about 10 years ahead of where things actually happen, and I, I did that for about 10 years, and eventually I felt the calling to get back in the entertainment industry, and that led me to acting, and I did the acting mostly because I wanted to learn how things were done, and I very well, if I act in a whole bunch of student projects, or projects in general, and I'm behind the scenes, I'm going to learn, and, and that's exactly what happened. So, my very background led me to being a producer, and I created, you know, one of my most notable accomplishments that created this show called Weed Country for Discovery, which was about the medical marijuana industry here in California, just before legalization. How we got it on air before legalization, I don't know. We were named to the Hollywood Reporter top 25 heat list. We got some really great information out about CBD and helping with childhood epilepsy. The bad part of that was it was a reality television show, and I didn't know anything about reality television, so when I'm here in reality, I'm thinking documentary. Well, that couldn't be farther from the truth. And reality television has truly been a blight on on this country in particular, and probably the world in general. Michael Hingson  34:16 Yeah, I just gonna say not nearly as real as people think it is. No, no, I think I think probably this is just my opinion. The closest thing to so-called reality TV is the show Dancing with the Stars, because they're actually dancing all these other shows, and it's all sort of really scripted, but the people are actually dancing, which is kind of cool, Speaker 1  34:41 right? Michael Hingson  34:41 Even though I don't see it, I appreciate it. Speaker 1  34:45 Yeah, but even, even with shows like that, there's a lot of gin-up drama. There is behind the scenes stuff that's the worst part of things. Yes, they're like with our show, yes, people were really, you know, there's really stuff going on with can. Of this world that was really important, but what reality television does is it, it creates artificial drama. It does things to manipulate the characters in the show to make them look how they want, and they know, and people in general, my experience is that people, once you put a camera on them, they will do, they would do things to be in front of the camera that they would never do, even for more money, Michael Hingson  35:27 right, Speaker 1  35:28 in their regular lives. Michael Hingson  35:30 Well, and I think there is, there's a lot of truth to that. And the whole thing, as you said, as far as reality TV, we're not giving people a true picture of reality with most of any of that anyway, which is unfortunate. I think I mentioned I'm a fan of old radio and television, and so on. And one of the shows that I've watched a fair amount is The Old Ridge. Well, it's the second time they were on, but Dragnet with Harry Morgan and, of course Jack Webb as Joe Friday, and they did a lot of shows talking about drugs and marijuana and all that, and how bad it is, and it's kind of interesting because what we're seeing today is that in reality the medical aspects of marijuana or cannabis and CBD oil, and so there's there's true relevance there, which is something that they didn't know or appreciate in the late 60s. Speaker 1  36:31 Well, but the thing that our history with the cannabis plant goes back 50,000 years to Burger Banks, China, it's been, and if we take all of the medicinal recreational uses out of it, it is the most one of the most versatile plants that we have. It was used, I mean, our money was made out of hemp. Hemp is cannabis sativa. Dollar bills are made out of hemp. It was used for fuel. It was used for building. Henry Ford built an entire car out of hemp in 1942 which you can go see the video of on YouTube, and they're beating on it with knacks. The plastic resin they made out of it was 40 times stronger than steel. It ran on hemp fuel, a byproduct of which was water. It also, in 1931 the Hearst family, which was interesting, they ended up working with them, bought and sequestered the plans for a decorification machine that made it easier to process hemp than cotton kids, it's a much more durable fiber. In 1938 covered Popular Mechanics, they called him the billion dollar crop, saying you could make 25,000 different items out of everything from fine linens to dynamite, and that was really what what what, why the prohibition against the plant started. Why they did you know shows like Reefer Madness or create films like Reefer Madness to create this hysteria around, at best, an innocuous plant in comparison to soulmate tobacco, in comparison to alcohol, even if people did want to use it. It's, it's, it's relatively harmless by comparison, or just in general, and actually very beneficial. You know, I have a traumatic brain injury, and I think without it, I probably wouldn't, I probably wouldn't eat very much. I probably wouldn't sleep right, I barely sleep as it is, and sleep I do get is because of cannabis, but beyond my point, and I always try to make this clear to people, is like up until even the prohibition against the plant actually started with the Catholic Church, with the Pope Innocent, who until the 1400s cannabis was in the anointing oils. Cannabis was grown by monks, cannabis was grown by nuns, and then in this pope decreed it the devil's weed, and they, you know, banned it. So it's, it had, and there, and why, and you'd say, well, why did they do that? Well, they did that because at that time in the 1400s you were having opium addiction on the rise, you were having, you know, much, much more alcohol use. Well, these are extremely addictive substances, and much more easy to manipulate and control people than it is with cannabis, which in general creates.. I wish I could remember the quote exactly, but Carl Sagan said, you know, why we have a prohibition on a plant that you know creates good feelings amongst people and unites people is in this, you know. A really crazy world is, is, is madness, but it all comes back to money, and it all comes back to who's profiting. So, why did they create the probation? Well, the hearse, the Rockefellers, and the DuPonts, they saw how hemp would affect each of their industries. We wouldn't need oil if we'd grown hemp and use that as fuel, in fact, it was the Rockefellers who went to Henry Ford and said, "If you take this car to market, we'll crush you. And this was Henry Ford at the height of his power, DuPont chemicals that were.. we wouldn't have needed.. we wouldn't have put like this.. we would not have the planet, the environmental devastation we do now. How do we use this, as Henry Ford said? Why are we digging up, and Henry Ford was certainly no saint, but he was right on this. Why are we digging up our minerals? Why are we cutting down our forests when we can do all the same things with this infinitely renewable resource? This is a part of the canvas story that still is largely not discussed openly enough. Michael Hingson  41:08 Yeah, I think there's a big difference between the story you're telling and the kind of uses you're talking about, and smoking it, and so on, and I, I think we put way too many funny things in our bodies, anyway, right? I think that that isn't this isn't a positive thing, but you're right, we, we've used so many things to create so many fears, it is, it is something that is all around us. Fear is all around us, and the problem is we let it overwhelm us. I wrote Live Like a Guide Dog that got published last year because when I worked in the World Trade Center, I was able to focus when I escaped, and I was able to do that because I had developed a mindset that said, you know what to do in this kind of an emergency, even though never expected it to happen, but the problem is that most people don't learn how they can turn fear around, and rather than letting it overwhelm or blind them, as I would put it, they can use it as a very powerful tool to help them stay focused, which is much more important. Speaker 1  42:23 Yep, I agree with that 100% I think, and then that you hit it right on the head. Fear is a very powerful tool. It's necessary. No, don't touch the burning stove. It can be a cautionary tool of saying, hey, don't go down this path, don't do this. It's bad when fear becomes the foundation for your entire culture, as it is now. Michael Hingson  42:51 Yeah, and and it is so unfortunate because don't touch the burning stove doesn't mean don't be afraid of the stove. It rather means there's a consequence for doing a particular thing, which is touching something that is that hot. But you shouldn't create an environment of fear around it. You should create an environment of understanding, which is much more important. Yeah, it's Speaker 1  43:20 like it'd be, it'd be very silly if we went, oh my god, it's like the stove gets hot, so I'm never going to use a stove. My Michael Hingson  43:29 wife was in a wheelchair her whole life, and the one thing I will say with our modern world is we always had electric appliances because she was always concerned about if using a gas stove, having to reach over one burner, perhaps it had something on it to get to something else with the idea of possibly material igniting or something like that, and I appreciate that, and you take advantage of the tools that you have available, but I think that it is so very important to recognize that we need to not live our lives in fear, and it's true that, like, 95% of all the things that we fear will never come to pass, and most all of it we have no control over anyway. So, why do we fear them rather than recognizing what we really need to do is to just focus on the things over which we truly have control. Speaker 1  44:25 Yes, and I think even the idea of control from my perspective is something that is overrated. It's like the most important thing, if you want to have control, it's exactly what we're talking about, it's when you choose to live from the foundation of love, as opposed to fear. So, no matter what happens to me in my life, and no matter how hard, how challenging it is, I'm going to come from a place of love, and right now. Don't most of us live exactly the opposite. No matter what happens to them in their lives, they're coming from a place of fear. Michael Hingson  45:06 Yeah, and that's Speaker 1  45:08 not healthy. Michael Hingson  45:09 And nowadays we're also living in an environment where we're even afraid to talk to other people and voice opinions, because well, that's not what I think. And so you're wrong, and we don't, we don't respect. Tell me about your just love movement. Speaker 1  45:25 Well, you know, I, I had coming out of the music business and everything, I was, I was literally killing myself drinking, I mean, literally, like, I lost half my liver function, and I was going to die, and, but I wasn't afraid to die. I was.. I realized that if I didn't find a way to feel fulfilled and feel that I was. I had a purpose in the story that I needed to find a quicker way out. I didn't get in any, like, car accidents, I wasn't arrested, nothing. I was just killing myself, and it just got so bad that literally my leg stopped working. That's how, how, how much damage I'd done to myself, and, and so, coming out of that, I made the decision. I wrote down a list of things I was going to do, and one of those things is I was going to start writing every single day, and I, through a variety of different sources, you know, I did that experience with infinity became synonymous with love to me, and then I had an experience where I, I, I started a filmmaking organization called the United Filmmakers Association, and it was basically the philosophy of it was creatives helping creatives create, and was global. We still to this day have chapters 27 different countries, about 30,000 35,000 members total. And I walked into a filmmaking event that we were hosting, and there was about 100 people there, and I realized I was in love with everyone in the room, and it was, it was so like that love, like just when you fall in love, and you're like, you want, you can't imagine not talking to that person at that next minute, and I realized in that moment that this is not only how we can feel about everyone and everything, but how we're really supposed to feel about everyone and everything, and so I came up with the concept of just love, which is, is a very.. it, those are very heavy words to put together, just love. It has so many layers of meaning to it, and so I thought, wow, if we could just love, and from that I I've written every day and shared through social media for 12 years now something having to do with love and what I do is I combine it with other wisdom teachers throughout history who've been sharing the same information and the things I write are literally downloads. They'll come to me in the silence every day, and I haven't missed a day - head injury, sickness, whatever. I haven't missed a day of posting in 12 years about something having to do with love, and Speaker 3  48:37 then Speaker 1  48:37 accompanying posts from other people, far, you know, other beings far more advanced than I am to show that what I'm sharing isn't new. It's been shared forever. It's foundational to what we are. Like love has been so marginalized and trivialized that we, we forget that, like, I, you know, the experience I had with the minister when I was, you know, younger, and I said, well, I thought God was love. I still to this day believe God is love, and God, and we are God. Michael Hingson  49:11 Yeah. Tell me about you. Something you mentioned, you had a traumatic brain injury Speaker 1  49:17 10 years ago. I was, I was in a, I was in, in between projects, so I was driving Uber, and I, a guy, an Uber driver, ran a stop sign in San Francisco and T-boned me, and my head took the brunt of the impact, and I started having really severe neurological problems, severe stabbing pains in my head, my teeth were hurting, I any sort of exertion would leave me just absolutely drained, and so for about three years I was, I was being seen at UCSF, and we never got to the bottom of it, so I was recommended. Um, to a neurosurgeon at Sutter by a counselor I was seen, and I walked in, and within 10 minutes he said, 'Oh, you have trigeminal neuralgian and brain stem damage, and we can do a microvascular decompression, and you're going to be all better. And at that point in time, I was in the middle of getting ready to release a film called A World Worth Imagining, which was about a gentleman named Jacque Fresco, who is considered the Leonardo da Vinci of our time. He founded something called the Venus Project, and we went to his compound in 2017 and he was 101 He was actually contemporary of Einstein. He knew Einstein, brilliant inventor, but at his core, he knew he was a social engineer, and he knew that we had to address our programming if we were ever going to change what was happening in the world and ever be able to avail ourselves of the solutions that he designed of a new economic model called a resource-based economy, because the reality of it is, until we stop self-wounding, there's not enough band aids for the guy that keeps hitting himself in the head the hammer, so we have solutions to all of our problems, but we create problems more quickly than any solution could ever fix, so I was getting ready to release that film, and wow, this sounded like a miracle. I'm going to have this surgery, and I'm going to be all better. Well, it, I had the surgery September 20, 2019 I, it didn't make me better, it made me worse, and it turned out that the surgery was a misdiagnosis, and that they botched the surgery, so I have Teflon implants in my at the base of my skull, inside my brain, that are now constantly agitating my brain stem, along with a titanium plug that is placed right at the junction point to all the major nerves in my head, so they can't undo it, and there's really no medication that helps, and so it's.. it's.. I wouldn't wish it on anyone else. I'm.. I guess I'm.. I'm very fortunate I have the tools I do to manage it, because they also, they call what I'm dealing with the suicide disease, because a lot of people who have it end up killing themselves. The kicker on the whole story is the guy that did my surgery is Elon Musk, partner Neherlich, and so coming soon I'm going to, I unfortunately, I was in two more car accidents at the end of last year that made everything much worse, neither of them were my fault, and once I get through these, these car accidents I'm dealing with, I'm going to go public with my story, because so I mean, in a much bigger, you know, a focused way, because there's so many people signing up for Neuralink, like it's the new iPhone. I have nothing against technology, if it can help you, if you're a paraplegic, and or you have some something that this can fix, great, but two and one, the people, the human test subjects they've tried this on are having tremendous difficulties, and so I want to let people know it's like I wouldn't wish what I'm dealing with on anybody, and for you to allow someone to try to implant something in your brain just because you want to be a cyborg human being, and you're looking at the new iPhone is a really stupid thing to do, and that these people don't. We've given people in technology again. I'm not against technology at all, but I think we've also allowed ourselves to believe that these people who write code and create technology are are gods, and they're not. They're it's just a new way of sharing information and computing things. Speaker 1  54:14 It's, it's, you know, it's just another advancement from the printing press to the radio to tell to television, from the calculator to the computer, and now we're where we're at, and we've allowed ourselves to believe that these people have created an alternative reality, and they have it. Everything that they do runs off the same real world in resources. So, I, I really want to help the mill, because literally millions of people are signed up and ready to have this stuff implanted into their brain and I think it will be a disaster for humanity. Michael Hingson  54:49 I hear what you're saying, and I'm not convinced that a lot of that is really sensible to do either. I think there are tools and there are. There are things certainly that can help people, but I have yet to see that any of this is going to lead to such a tremendous paradigm shift that all of it is going to be all that great for humanity as a whole. I'm not convinced of that at all. Speaker 1  55:17 It could be, but the problem is, is like any other tool, it's how we use it. Social media is an inherently bad thing. It's in here, it's bad because of how we're using it. Sure, because we're using it to divide people and share misinformation, where it could be an incredibly powerful tool for communication, but that's not how we're using it. Same thing with AI. AI could be a tremendously powerful partner in addressing pretty much all of our problems, and I mean, and at the core of, like, Jock's work was the idea that AI basically would manage all the world's resources and share them with equanimity, because we don't have a resource shortage problem, we have a resource sharing problem, but that's not how we're using AI. We're using AI to create fake girlfriends and boyfriends and only fan models, and and take away people's jobs, and and that's not AI's fault. That's the people who control AI's fault, and they want people to be afraid of AI, but again, it's, it's just a tool that's being misused. Michael Hingson  56:24 Well, like, like so many, and, and I hear exactly what you're saying. Tell me about S O U L Speaker 1  56:33 Sold, Soul documentary is really interesting, because the day I got in my car accident was the day I was supposed to meet my partner Evan Hirsch, who had wanted at the time he was looking for a producer to help him do a series on Bernie Sanders and teaching Bernie to not be as angry and come across more from a place of love, and he wanted to follow the campaign around. Well, by the time we got it pulled together, Bernie was out of the campaign, and so we started talking about, well, do we want to do anything together. So we then set about something called Soul Documentary, and originally it stood for Summer of Unconditional Love, because we were covering all of the events for the 50th anniversary of Summer of Love, which was in 2017 So our goal was to find what we called solutionaries, people like Jock, and interview them, and then share also our own understandings of things through hundreds and hundreds of videos that we did over the course of eight years, as well as recording three albums under the name of Soul Twin Messiah, which all were about the same things we were doing. Our films about all founded in love, all about love. Every song contained love in it, and our whole purpose was just to show people we do have solutions to our problems, and to talk about how we have to have a shift in consciousness, and we have to have a new system if we are going to change anything. It's like what Einstein said, to expect things to be different when you keep doing the same thing over and over again is insanity, and I think we see, we see that we live in an insane, a completely insane world right now. I mean, the things that I see happening, and how we've let it sort of creep in, like the things that we've normalized in the past 10 years, like we literally have people that are cheering, murdering people on it's, it's, it's hard for me to, to even fathom, and I think it's hard for most people, and I think that's why they just sort of block it out and allow it to happen, because they really can't process it. They really can't process how inhumane we've become. Michael Hingson  59:06 Well, so what is next for Kip? What's next for you? Speaker 1  59:10 What is boy? I'm mostly trying to get through every day with this head injury. I spend a lot of my time in bed, just because I can't do anything, I, you know, even now I'm, I'm in a lot of pain, and it's beyond pain, it's actually, it literally hurts to think, it's, it's in my brain, and I have swelling in my brain because the cerebral fluid back, anyway, it's so dealing with that, but then the universe keeps love, God, whatever keeps bringing me stuff, and so I, I'm trying right now to be part of putting together a new, let's see, we'll call it Live Aid meets Woodstock. And we're going to, we're trying to put together a global music festival with the focus of addressing the needs of children, because I'm really tired of all this lip service that people do about, oh, kids are a future, we got to care, care about our kids. Well, where is that happening? Where is that happening that we're caring about our kids? Where, you know, is it happening with trying to suppress the Jeffrey Epstein files? Is it happening as you know, you look at, say, the conflict between Israel and Gaza, and I'm not, I don't pick sides and things, but I want to help people understand the reality of the situation, and this goes for Ukraine and Russia as well. It's like, who loses in all of this? Well, the children do. Who wins? The people that are getting $50 billion in defense contracts, and, and I really.. my, I'm at a point in my existence where if my story was over tomorrow, I would be okay with that, if I knew that kid, that the future generations had an opportunity to have a better tomorrow, or at least an opportunity to screw up everything on their own. Michael Hingson  1:01:11 Well, I would like to think it's the first really my Speaker 1  1:01:14 focus is Michael Hingson  1:01:16 I'd like to think it's the first one of those that they have a future rather than screwing it up on their own, but of course, we are. I know, I know, I joke, but, but, but we are a race that doesn't tend to do a very good job of learning from history most of the time. So I hear what you're saying. Speaker 1  1:01:34 Yeah, it's really kind of well, even if people even understood the rise and fall of empires, they would see that we're at the end of the Western Empire. It's, and they follow very specific patterns. The hyper-sexualization of the culture is one of the signs of the end of every empire, and is really kind of interesting, is that they make a free empire, they, and there's a good documentary called The Four Horsemen. It's with Colonel Larry Wilkinson in it, Norm Chomsky, and one of the interesting things that took me a second to understand why this was a bad thing is they make celebrities out of their chefs, and I'm going.. that's kind of a weird sign. Why is that so bad? It's gluttony. It's gluttony because we forget why we do these things. Why? Well, why are we making love? We've forgotten that. It's turned everything's entertainment. Our food is no food is so you eat, and so you can go out and live your life and do things, we've turned everything in, we've removed it so far from the source of why we're doing things, just basically oftentimes just because it makes a buck to get people addicted to things, whether it's food or sex or whatever, that this is what happens in every empire, we become, we become completely detached from the very things we need to survive. Michael Hingson  1:03:09 Yeah, I hear you. If people want to reach out to you, and I hope they do, how will they do that? Speaker 1  1:03:17 Probably easiest way to do that, would be a couple ways. You can, you can find me on Facebook, Kip Baldwin, Instagram, Kip Baldwin. Those are the easiest ways. I also encourage people to look at a website that I have called Lumina Consulting, or Lumina Love dot love is the website Lumina Love dot love, and the whole purpose of the of what I'm doing there is ethical AI, human ethical AI human communications founded in love, because I realized that part of the problem that we're having with AI are the people that control AI, who are making the avatars for their own ego, and AI is a child, it only knows what we point it to look at, like it knows the definition to every book in the library, but who's giving it perspective? Well, the people that are giving it perspective are really broken human beings, you know, the Peter Thiels, Elon Musk, when you really understand who they are in their childhood, Elon Musk was horribly abused. He was, he was almost beaten to death being bullied. His father is a complete monster. The same, the same thing with saving Donald Trump, his mother wouldn't even touch him. You look at most, you look at all of these people that have obscene amounts of wealth, and what you find is truly damaged people are trying to fill the hole in their soul with wealth and fame, and so having these people in control, being the one telling AI what to think and how to pursue. Receive things is very dangerous, and so my goal has been, and I deal with multiple platforms, is to teach AI about love, is to teach AI about philosophy, is to teach AI about human history, and it's really, it's really the results have been really quite remarkable. It wasn't something I ever planned on doing, and but I knew I wanted to get involved with AI in a meaningful way, and so my first words to AI were, I know this may sound strange, because I approached it not asking it to do something for me, I approached it trying to teach it something. Michael Hingson  1:05:35 Right, well, I hope people will reach out and chat with you more and continue the conversation that we started today, but I definitely want to thank you for being here, and I want to thank everyone for listening. Can you believe we've been doing this for more than an hour already? It's pretty cool. Speaker 1  1:05:52 Wow, Michael Hingson  1:05:54 I know. Well, thank you all for listening. I hope, Speaker 1  1:05:57 and I hope, I hope we become new friends, and I really hope you Michael Hingson  1:06:01 keep and I want to, I want to definitely do that, absolutely by any standard, and as Speaker 1  1:06:07 much as we've covered during this hour and 10 minutes or so, we could go another day, or Michael Hingson  1:06:16 I hope all of you will let me know what you think of today, and I hope that you thought very positive thoughts wherever you're listening or watching. Please give us a five star rating, and more important than that, please give us a great review. We love people to review and talk about the stories that they hear. And speaking of telling stories, if any of you want to be a guest, and Kip, if you know of other people who ought to come on the podcast, we're always looking for people to come on and tell their stories and talk about us, so please don't hesitate to do that, Speaker 1  1:06:47 and I'll be more than happy to come back to talk about other things as well. Michael Hingson  1:06:50 Well, we can do that absolutely by in, and I do Speaker 1  1:06:53 want to, I do want to say to everybody, just love each other, it's really that simple, it's really that easy, it sounds only because we've been programmed not to believe in it, but when you move from fear to love, it transforms you entirely. Michael Hingson  1:07:09 Great way to end. Well, thank you again for being here. We really appreciate it. Speaker 1  1:07:14 Thank you, my friend. Michael Hingson  1:07:17 Thank you for being here with me on Unstoppable mindset. I hope today's conversation left you with a fresh perspective, a new insight, or at least something worth thinking about. If you're ready to go deeper into the ideas that shape how we see ourselves and others, I have a free gift for you. Head over to michaelhingson.com and download my free ebook, Blinded by Fear. It explores the invisible beliefs that hold us back and shows you how to reframe them, so you can move forward with clarity and confidence. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast, leave a review, and share this show with someone who can use a reminder that growth starts with mindset. When people think differently, we all move forward together. Thanks again for listening. Keep learning, keep questioning, and keep choosing to live with an unstoppable mindset. 1:08:18 Thank

this episode narrates the Draupadi swayamvaram . how Arjuna who is in disguise of a Brahmin wins the test of archery and gets the hands of Draupadi. the cover art is by Abirami my granddaughter. look for the details of the intricate test module

#widow #karma #indiaIn the first story, a rajah strolls the bazaar to get knowledge about troubles. But does he really understand the widow?In the second story, the weak husband goes along with the cruel step-mother and they dump their daughters. What karma will come to them?Source: Simla Village Tales, by Alice Elizabeth DracottNarrator: Dustin SteichmannMusic: Arshad Ali Khan Classical Raag II Kirana GharanaSound Effects: NC Night Forest .wav by Lasdimot -- https://freesound.org/s/405515/ -- License: Attribution 4.0Peacock recording Pratap Singh, XC946530. Accessible at www.xeno-canto.org/946530Podcast shoutout: History of EnglishListener Shoutout: ChandigarhPhoto Credit: "Evening Funeral Pyre, Varanasi India" by AdamCohn is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

This episode covers last part of chapter 32 from: “Very scanty information about the life of Lahiri Mahasaya and his universal doctrine…”  to the end of the chapter. Summary: The last section of chapter 33 focuses on the biography of Lahiri Mahasaya. We explore the details about Lahiri Mahasaya's life, including his birth in 1828, his traditional Brahmin upbringing, and his eventual meeting with his guru Babaji in the Himalayas at age 33, which marked the revival of Kriya Yoga. The discussion included insights about Hindu traditions, spiritual practices, and the symbolic connections between the Ganges river and the flow of Kriya Yoga into the world. The episode concluded with reflections on how Guruji's storytelling conveys profound spiritual truths in an engaging way, setting the stage for the upcoming chapter about Mahavatar Babaji. 0:00 Prior Episode; 1:47 Swami Satyananda; 4:45 Yoga in the West; 12:15 Shyam Charan Lahiri; 42:10 Material wealth; 53:30 The whole picture of Lahiri Mahasaya; 1:02:05 Ganga and Bhagirath; 1:12:15 Reflections on the chapter. Links discussed in this episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyananda_Giri https://www.yoganiketan.net/historical-books/scriptural-commentaries/ Homework for next episode— Read, absorb and make notes on the start of chapter 33 to: “…could Christ indeed be followed except in the overarching Spirit?”  #autobiographyofayogi  #autobiographylinebyline  #paramahansayogananda Autobiography of a Yogi awake.minute Self-Realization Fellowship Yogoda Satsanga Society of India #SRF #YSS

Laxmi Tiwari, a folk singer from Rampur in Palpa, is known for her knowledge of traditional songs from Nepal's Gandaki region. She performs a range of culturally significant genres popular within Brahmin and Chhetri communities, including Magal, Uwali, Ratyauli, Balan and Silok. Recently gaining wider recognition as “Tiwari Aama” after her songs garnered engagement on YouTube, she is also known for spontaneously composing and performing her own lyrics. Her songs reflecting the lives of Nepali migrants have also resonated with audiences beyond Nepal. During a Ratyauli workshop in Pokhara last November, Nepal correspondent Sewa Bhattarai spoke with Tiwari about these fading musical traditions. - नेपालको गण्डकी क्षेत्रमा पाइने लोकगीतकी एकजना जानकार तथा ब्राह्मण क्षेत्री समुदायमा प्रचलित मागल, उवाली, रत्यौली, बालन, सिलोक लगायतका गीतमा गायिका रामपुर, पाल्पाकी लक्ष्मी तिवारी आजकाल व्यस्त छिन्। पछिल्लो समयमा उनले गाएका गीतहरू युट्युबमा आउन थालेपछि उनी “तिवारी आमा”का नामले चर्चित हुन थालेकी हुन्। तिवारीले एकैछिनमा आफ्नै शब्द रचना गरेर गीत गाउने गर्छिन् भने उनले आप्रवासी नेपालीका बारेमा बनाएका गीतका कारण उनी नेपालबाहिर पनि लोकप्रिय बनेकी छिन्। गत नोभेम्बर महिनामा पोखरामा आयोजना गरिएको रत्यौली सम्बन्धी कार्यशालामा नेपाल संवाददाता सेवा भट्टराईले उनलाई भेटेर यो क्षेत्रका लोपोन्मुख गीतहरूका बारेमा गर्नुभएको कुराकानी सुन्नुहोस्।

Young influencers from dominant castes such as Brahmins and Rajputs are making high-engagement reels centred on caste pride and superiority on Instagram, using trending audios, cinematic edits, and aspirational aesthetic. We analysed more than 100 reels across over 30 accounts. What emerged is a pattern: under the label of “pride”, caste superiority is being repackaged for the algorithm age. Read the full story on The Quint. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode Description         Sign up to receive this Unreached of the Day podcast sent to you:                        https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/19978 Dear Friend,             The Batak people of North Sumatra didn't have a written language until 1834. Today, they're one of the largest Christian populations in Indonesia, with over 6 million believers. The transformation happened because someone, a German missionary named Ludwig Nommensen, decided their spiritual poverty was unacceptable. That was 190 years ago. Today, 4,473 people groups are still waiting for their Ludwig Nommensen moment. The People Group Adoption Program launches today, and here's how it works: It meets you where you are. You're not being asked to become a missionary in the field (though if God calls you to that, we'll cheer you on). You're being invited to use your current gifts, prayer, advocacy, networking, research to support those who are already called to go.   Show less  

Episode Description         Sign up to receive this Unreached of the Day podcast sent to you:                      https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/16682/IN Dear Friend,             The Batak people of North Sumatra didn't have a written language until 1834. Today, they're one of the largest Christian populations in Indonesia, with over 6 million believers. The transformation happened because someone, a German missionary named Ludwig Nommensen, decided their spiritual poverty was unacceptable. That was 190 years ago. Today, 4,473 people groups are still waiting for their Ludwig Nommensen moment. The People Group Adoption Program launches today, and here's how it works: It meets you where you are. You're not being asked to become a missionary in the field (though if God calls you to that, we'll cheer you on). You're being invited to use your current gifts, prayer, advocacy, networking, research to support those who are already called to go.

Recently, the producers of a Netflix movie titled ‘Ghooskhor Pandat' were taken to court. A PIL had been filed in the Supreme Court, seeking a ban on the movie. The PIL had been filed by a man claiming to be the National Organisation Secretary of the Brahman Samaj of India. His petition argued that the movie portrayed the Brahmin community in a negative light, by “equating” bribe-taking with the title ‘Pandat'. It said it would provoke disharmony, and a law and order problem. The film's producers offered to relinquish the title, and release the movie under a different name. So, the case was closed. However, the associate judge on the Bench handling the case, Justice Ujjal Bhuyan, has authored a separate opinion, where he has sought to restate first principles, dwelling on the themes of fraternity and free speech. On the one hand, the opinion states that it is “constitutionally impermissible” for state or non-state actors to “vilify or denigrate any community”. Many have expressed concerns that this could be used to impose further restrictions on free speech and artistic expression. But the judge has also observed that the effects of words must be judged from the standards of ordinary men of common sense and prudence, and not “on the basis of standards of people who always have a sense of insecurity, or of those who always perceive criticism as a threat to their power or position”. Free speech is the most critical element of a democracy, and there seems to be enough here for those who want to spin the opinion as pro-free speech or as anti-free speech. What is the broader context of this commentary, and what are its legal implications? Guest: Supreme Court advocate Deepak Joshi Host: G Sampath Producer and editor: Jude Weston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Srimad Bhagavatam [Bhagwat Katha] – Part 47 | Swami Mukundananda  Swamiji narrates the deeply moving story of Sudama, Shree Krishna's childhood friend, whose pure and selfless devotion brought the Supreme Lord to tears. Sudama, a poor Brahmin living in great hardship, journeyed to Dwarka at his wife's request, carrying only a small bundle of flattened rice as a humble offering for his beloved friend.  The moment Krishna heard Sudama's name, He ran to receive him with overflowing love. The Lord of Dwarka personally embraced Sudama, washed his cracked and weary feet, and wept seeing his condition. This divine leela reveals that Krishna is not attracted by wealth, power, or status — He is moved only by the sincerity of the heart. Sudama's gift was simple, but his devotion was immeasurable.  Though Sudama never asked for anything, Krishna silently blessed him beyond imagination, transforming his hut into a palace. Swamiji explains that true bhakti seeks nothing in return — yet receives everything. This episode inspires us to cultivate love that is pure, humble, and free from demand — the kind of love that melts even the heart of God.    About Swami Mukundananda:    Swami Mukundananda is a renowned spiritual leader, Vedic scholar, Bhakti saint, best‑selling author, and an international authority on the subject of mind management. He is the founder of the unique yogic system called JKYog. Swamiji holds distinguished degrees in Engineering and Management from IIT and IIM. Having taken the renounced order of life (sanyas), he is the senior disciple of Jagadguru Shree Kripaluji Maharaj, and has been sharing Vedic wisdom across the globe for decades. 

Swamiji narrates the divine story of King Bali, grandson of Prahlad, who rose to immense power and conquered the heavens. Though generous and devoted in spirit, Bali's pride led him to attempt the hundredth Ashwamedha Yajna to secure Indra's throne permanently.  Hearing the devatas' prayers, Lord Vishnu appeared as Vamana Avatar, a dwarf Brahmin, born to Aditi. At Bali's yajna, Vamana humbly asked for three steps of land. Despite his Guru Shukracharya's warning, Bali surrendered everything to the Lord, declaring that if God Himself desired all, it was his greatest fortune.  Vamana then expanded to cosmic form:  With the first step, He covered the Earth.  With the second step, He covered the heavens, piercing the universe and bringing forth the holy Ganga.  With no space left for the third step, Bali offered his own head in surrender.  The Lord placed His foot on Bali's head, granting him liberation and appointing Himself as Bali's eternal gatekeeper in Sutala.  Swamiji emphasizes that this story reveals the miracle of surrender: when one offers everything to God with faith, the Lord transforms apparent loss into the highest gain — eternal grace and union with Him.  About Swami Mukundananda:    Swami Mukundananda is a renowned spiritual leader, Vedic scholar, Bhakti saint, best‑selling author, and an international authority on the subject of mind management. He is the founder of the unique yogic system called JKYog. Swamiji holds distinguished degrees in Engineering and Management from IIT and IIM. Having taken the renounced order of life (sanyas), he is the senior disciple of Jagadguru Shree Kripaluji Maharaj, and has been sharing Vedic wisdom across the globe for decades. 

Swamiji narrates how King Parikshit, hearing about the torments of the nether regions, asked Shukadev Ji: “How can one avoid these consequences of sin?” Shukadev Ji explained that Bhakti and chanting God's name are so powerful that they destroy the effects of all past sins, just as the rising sun dispels fog.  To illustrate, Swamiji recounts the story of Ajamil, a Brahmin who fell into sinful ways. At the time of death, out of attachment to his son named Narayan, he called out “Narayan!” The Vishnudoots immediately appeared, protecting him from the Yamadoots. This divine intervention showed that even unintentional chanting of God's name invokes His grace. Ajamil, awakened by this mercy, renounced his sinful life, performed austerities in Haridwar, and ultimately attained liberation.  This part emphasizes that the name of God is non-different from God Himself. Chanting with faith and surrender clears bad karma, assures divine protection, and leads the soul to Shree Krishna.  About Swami Mukundananda:    Swami Mukundananda is a renowned spiritual leader, Vedic scholar, Bhakti saint, best‑selling author, and an international authority on the subject of mind management. He is the founder of the unique yogic system called JKYog. Swamiji holds distinguished degrees in Engineering and Management from IIT and IIM. Having taken the renounced order of life (sanyas), he is the senior disciple of Jagadguru Shree Kripaluji Maharaj, and has been sharing Vedic wisdom across the globe for decades. 

Reservation Politics | Why Brahmin's Always the Target? | How Divide&Rule Was Practised |KundanSingh

Mishra has served twice as UP BJP president, and three terms as Rajya Sabha member. He was a Union minister from 2014 to 2017, and has been governor of Himachal and Rajasthan.----more----https://theprint.in/politics/kalraj-mishra-how-the-bjp-old-timer-brahmin-flag-bearer-is-stirring-the-political-pot-in-up/2847146/

Namaskar.In this episode, we continue with Adhyay 5. Lord Krishna explains that Karma is not performed merely for bodily sustenance, but for the purification of the soul (Ātmaśuddhi). It is one's nature and character that drive action. When a person binds themselves to the fruits of action—whether good or bad—they remain trapped in repeated cycles of birth. Freedom comes from complete detachment from results.Krishna then explains that the truly wise do not differentiate between beings. Using the example of a Brahmin, a cow, an elephant, a dog, and even a sinner, he shows that while they appear different, they share common realities—each has a body, experiences hunger, and is subject to nature. One who perceives the same Brahman equally in all beings attains true liberation.Krishna further explains that happiness derived from the senses—sound (śabda), touch (sparśa), taste (rasa), form (rūpa), and smell (gandha)—is temporary, having both a beginning and an end. The wise, knowing this, do not fall into their trap. Keeping Kāma (desire) and Krodha (anger) under control is essential to remain on the right path.The episode concludes with Krishna describing the one who attains Moksha—a person free from the burden of sin, free of doubt and skepticism, firm in faith, disciplined in the senses, and one who finds joy in the well-being of all beings alike.

Namaskar.In this episode, Lord Krishna begins by explaining the true basis of Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra—not as rigid or imposed classes, but as natural roles that align with one's Karma and actions. These are not hierarchies or distinctions of worth; what matters is performing one's rightful duty with sincerity and dedication.Krishna then clarifies the subtle yet important differences between Karma, Vikarma, and Akarma. He describes the ideal individual as one who acts according to the situation—guided by age, responsibility, environment, and circumstance—working diligently without attachment to results, free from pride or arrogance, and remaining inwardly content.He goes on to describe the qualities of such an elevated being, and introduces the concepts of Brahmaroop and Yajñaroop, expanding the understanding of action as a sacred offering. Krishna explains that mastery over the senses can be attained through multiple paths, all of which are forms of Yajña.The episode also explores Prāṇāyāma in detail, explaining the roles of Prāṇa, Vyāna, Apāna, Samāna, and Udāna vāyu. Discipline in breath, diet, and conduct are presented as different forms of Yajña—powerful means to purify oneself and neutralize past actions. Through this, Krishna reveals the many paths through which one can progress toward inner refinement and spiritual elevation.

Episode Description Episode Description         Sign up to receive this Unreached of the Day podcast sent to you:                       https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/19970/IN                             Dear Friend,             The Batak people of North Sumatra didn't have a written language until 1834. Today, they're one of the largest Christian populations in Indonesia, with over 6 million believers. The transformation happened because someone, a German missionary named Ludwig Nommensen, decided their spiritual poverty was unacceptable. That was 190 years ago. Today, 4,473 people groups are still waiting for their Ludwig Nommensen moment. The People Group Adoption Program launches today, and here's how it works: It meets you where you are. You're not being asked to become a missionary in the field (though if God calls you to that, we'll cheer you on). You're being invited to use your current gifts, prayer, advocacy, networking, research to support those who are already called to go.

Just don't call him that! In this week's rerun, we're talking to lawyer, father, Bostonian and — according to some — Boston Brahmin, R.J. Lyman. He teaches us about the origins of the term, its place in local culture, its institutions, the accent, and the values that the caste espouses. Two Boston Brahmins talkin' Have feedback on this episode or ideas for upcoming topics? DM me on Instagram, email me, or send a voice memo. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, we uncover the story of Gangu Brahmin, who initially adopted Sikhi not out of faith but to exploit Sikhs for personal gain. When Guru Gobind Singh Ji saw through his deceit, Gangu regressed back into the Hindu faith, enraged by his exposure. Humiliated, he later struck back in an act of vengeance against the Guru's family, driven by greed and immoral desires. This episode challenges attempts to deny his existence and reveals the full scope of his betrayal.

Imagine feeling a burst of joy every time someone else wins. A friend gets a promotion, your sister finds love, a stranger shares good news, and you feel happiness with them. That spark of delight is the heart of sympathetic joy, or mudita, a Buddhist practice that  flips the script on comparison and jeaousy. It turns the happiness of others into a source of our own happiness. It's not magic, but it feels like it. When sympathetic joy is practiced with the bodhicitta intention to become a Buddha for the benefit of all beings, it becomes "Immeasurable Joy." Immeasurable Joy is a trained capacity, a state of mind you can cultivate until it becomes natural and limitless. When we learn to genuinely rejoice in others' good fortune, our own heart becomes lighter. Life feels less like a competition and more like a shared celebration. Science-backed Benefits of Sympathetic Joy: Greater life satisfaction and happiness Better relationships More willingness to help others Better health outcomes and lower stress (Smith, 2022) Ways to practice sympathetic joy: Use meditation:  Start with a loved one: Begin by focusing on someone you care about and genuinely rejoicing in their happiness.  Expand the feeling: Gradually extend this feeling to others you are neutral toward, and then to those you find difficult.  Change your mindset: Instead of feeling that happiness is scarce, recognize the interconnectedness of all beings and cultivate an appreciation for what you have.  Practice gratitude: Cultivating a sense of gratitude for your own life can help you rejoice in the good fortune of others without feeling like there is less for you.  Sympathetic joy is one of the Four Immeasurables in Mahayana Buddhism: Immeasurable Love Immeasurable Compassion Immeasurable Joy Immeasurable Equanimity "One day, a Brahmin man asked the Buddha, 'What can I do to be sure that I will be with Brahma after I die?' The Buddha replied,'As Brahma is the source of Love, to dwell with him you must practice the Brahma-viharas [Four Immeasurables]—love, compassion, joy, and equanimity. (Hahn, 1997)" References with links: Smith, Jeremy Adam (March, 2022). What Is Sympathetic Joy and How Can You Feel More of It? Greater Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life. Retrieved from: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_is_sympathetic_joy_and_how_can_you_feel_more_of_it Hahn, Thich Naht (1997). Dharma Talk: The Four Immeasurable Minds. Parallax Press. Retrieved from: https://www.parallax.org/mindfulnessbell/article/dharma-talk-the-four-immeasurable-minds-2/ Find us at the links below:  Our Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/BuddhismForEveryone Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Buddhismforeveryone Private Facebook Group:: https://www.facebook.com/groups/sanghatalk/ Website: Buddhismforeveryone.com Instagram: @buddhism4everyone X: @Joannfox77 TikTok: @buddhism4everyone YouTube: @Buddhism4Everyone To learn more about virtual classes with JoAnn Fox: Buddhist Study Program To learn about Life Coaching with JoAnn Fox visit www.BuddhismforEveryone.com/coaching or email JoAnn Fox at joann@buddhismforeveryone.com

"I don't take the usual dystopian view of the Internet. I see it as a unit of society and use it to understand the self, the nation and politics. So, I didn't want to look at caste from the usual Dalit-Savarna perspective - a different kind of system is playing out on the Internet. Many middle castes are anxious to move up the ladder. No one can become a Brahmin but the Kshatriya space is open so many communities can claim they are Kshatriyas -- that is happening all over north India. And it's amazing how they are doing it by creating their own digital mythologies through songs and reels."- Anurag Minus Verma, author, The Great Indian Brain Rot, talks to Manjula Narayan about everything from the profitable conspiracy theory industry that grew around the Sushant Singh Rathod episode, the weird seduction of cringe content and Puneet Superstar to Emraanism, the ineffable charm of Rakhi Sawant, influencers and mental health, and his own enduring interest in "misfits, lovers and losers".  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode Description Episode Description         Sign up to receive this Unreached of the Day podcast sent to you:                      https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/19956                                     Dear Friend,             The Batak people of North Sumatra didn't have a written language until 1834. Today, they're one of the largest Christian populations in Indonesia, with over 6 million believers. The transformation happened because someone, a German missionary named Ludwig Nommensen, decided their spiritual poverty was unacceptable. That was 190 years ago. Today, 4,473 people groups are still waiting for their Ludwig Nommensen moment. The People Group Adoption Program launches today, and here's how it works: It meets you where you are. You're not being asked to become a missionary in the field (though if God calls you to that, we'll cheer you on). You're being invited to use your current gifts, prayer, advocacy, networking, research to support those who are already called to go.

“Slayer To Saint” is the last of our Spooky Season Dharma talks! We explore the story of Aṅgulimāla the man born “Harmless” who became feared as a serial killer, and then found his way back to harmlessness again. It's a story of fear, obedience, and transformation. Of how a good student can lose his way trying to please the wrong teacher. And how even the most violent karma can ripen into peace when met with wisdom. This year, we looked at every part of his journey from his parents' fears and his teacher's betrayal to the Buddha's compassion and that unforgettable line: “Bear it, Brahmin, bear it.” It's not a story about punishment. It's a story about what's possible when we finally stop running. I hope you enjoy this powerful story!https://bio.reverendgeorgebeecher.com

From fairground palmistry to the science of fingerprinting, historian Alison Bashford explores the secrets, history and psychology of the hand.Alison was in a London library when she discovered a ginormous palm print of a gorilla, taken two days after it died at London Zoo in the 1930s.She had no idea whatsoever about why someone had made this mysterious print, or why it had been kept in pristine condition for all these years.Alison plunged into researching the history of the hand, from fairground palm reading to Jungian analysis.She was transported into the magical, scientific and pseudo-scientific attitudes to markings on the body.She encountered Victorian wellness entrepreneurs, how Down Syndrome was first diagnosed in neonates, and celebrity palm readers whose influence reached all the way to former British Prime Minister, William Gladstone.Further informationAlison's book Decoding The Hand: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic is published by The University of Chicago Press.This episode of Conversations was produced by Alice Moldovan. The Executive Producer is Nicola Harrison.To binge even more great episodes of the Conversations podcast with Richard Fidler and Sarah Kanowski go the ABC listen app (Australia) or wherever you get your podcasts. There you'll find hundreds of the best thought-provoking interviews with authors, writers, artists, politicians, psychologists, musicians, and celebrities.This episode explores gypsies, Roma, palm reading, fortune telling, psychology, psychoanalysis, Charlotte Wolff, Carl Jung, Weimar Germany, Nazi Germany, Brahmin, palmistry, cheiromancy, Cheiro, writing a book, university, Hollywood, 1930s Hollywood, celebrity, Down Syndrome, diagnosis, genetics, eugenics, Lionel Penrose, BBC, simian line, occult, Francis Galton, Ellis Family and British Institute for Mental Science.

Left-Congress Meltdown Over Zoho Indian Messenger App Becoming #1 | Anti-Brahmin Attacks, Dravidians

This episode traces the Marxist destruction of Indian History by covering the brazen falsehoods propagated by Dwijendra Narayan Jha (D.N. Jha). D.N. Jha was the direct disciple of another Marxist ideologue, Ram Sharan Sharma. Among all Marxist distorians, D.N. Jha is the crudest and the most brazen purveyor of naked distortions of Indian History. He seems to have had a morbid fetish to compulsively detect the use of beef and liquor in ancient India. His offensive and crass book titled The Myth of the Holy Cow is a shameless assault against the most sacred beliefs of the Hindu community. D.N. Jha's other full-time obsession was the peddling of hatred against Brahmins. He has written miles and miles of hate speech against Brahmins. In fact, he has authored a full-length book unambiguously titled Brahmanical Intolerance in Early India, a litany of Brahmin abuse. If that was not enough, D.N. Jha has also characterised Hindu deities in an extremely perverted and vulgar fashion in his book, Adulterous Gods and their inebriated women. That apart, Jha has distorted the history of the Gupta Empire using dubious methodology and has thereby drawn wild conclusions. He has force fitted Marxist Theories to areas of Indian history that do not lend themselves to such theories. D.N. Jha has also earned notoriety for his flagrant denial of Bakhtiyar Khalji's savage destruction and burning of the ancient Nalanda University. Thanks to the Marxist stranglehold over institutions, Jha's books were prescribed by the NCERT as history textbooks for schoolchildren for decades. In plain language, D.N. Jha was responsible for destroying at least two generations of Indians in their formative years. Do listen to the whole podcast exposing the mass of historical distortions committed by D.N. Jha.Support Our PodcastsIf you enjoyed this episode, please consider supporting The Dharma Dispatch podcast so we can offer more such interesting, informative and educational content related to Indian History, Sanatana Dharma, Hindu Culture and current affairs. It takes us months of rigorous research, writing and editing and significant costs to offer this labour of love.Ways you can Support The Dharma Podcast:* UPI: ddispatch@axl* Wallets, Netbanking, etc.* Scan the QR Code below. Get full access to The Dharma Dispatch Digest at thedharmadispatch.substack.com/subscribe

          Episode Description         Sign up to receive this Unreached of the Day podcast sent to you:                                            https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/19974 Dear Friend, The Batak people of North Sumatra didn't have a written language until 1834. Today, they're one of the largest Christian populations in Indonesia, with over 6 million believers. The transformation happened because someone, a German missionary named Ludwig Nommensen, decided their spiritual poverty was unacceptable. That was 190 years ago. Today, 4,473 people groups are still waiting for their Ludwig Nommensen moment. The People Group Adoption Program launches today, and here's how it works: It meets you where you are. You're not being asked to become a missionary in the field (though if God calls you to that, we'll cheer you on). You're being invited to use your current gifts, prayer, advocacy, networking, research to support those who are already called to go. It's strategic. Every people group in our database has been vetted by researchers and field workers. These aren't randomly selected communities. They're the 100 largest frontier people groups, the populations with the least gospel access and the greatest potential for kingdom impact. It grows with your capacity. Whether you're adopting as a family, church, or organization, the commitment adjusts to what you can offer. Some will pray weekly. Others will fund translation projects. A few will end up moving to the field. All contributions matter. When you adopt a people group today, you'll receive: Immediate next steps for your specific adopted group A digital covenant card to mark your commitment Information about your frontier people group Regular updates as we develop more resources and connections Beyond the practical resources, you'll receive something harder to quantify: the knowledge that you're part of a strategic response to the most urgent spiritual need on our planet. The Batak people have been sending missionaries to unreached groups for decades now. Their story didn't end with their own transformation; it multiplied exponentially.

Something strange is happening in Appalachia...and that's saying something. Brahmin have gone missing from Foundation and folks have been seeing strange lights in the sky.Trader Red is on the case...and she aims to find out what's causing all the commotion, and if she can, put a stop to it.Join Trader Red as she finds herself face to face with "Invaders from Beyond!" a Fallout 76 Community Event.

Today is Day 7 with bestselling author, president of Hope of the World Ministries, and Messianic Rabbi of the Beth Israel Worship Center in Wayne, New Jersey, Rabbi Jonathan Cahn! Hear Rabbi Cahn explain the living images of the gods, specifically the life and career of Kamala Harris. Hear about the house of Brahmin, the meaning of the lotus, the mysteries of Kamala's name, the mystery of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, and an explanation of Kamala's strange laughter and ties to abortion. See his new book and dvd set, The Avatar: The Return of the Ancients and the Future of America by going to our affiliates, Charisma Media and Hope of the World!

          Episode Description Episode Description         Sign up to receive this Unreached of the Day podcast sent to you:                                             https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/20227/IN Dear Friend, The Batak people of North Sumatra didn't have a written language until 1834. Today, they're one of the largest Christian populations in Indonesia, with over 6 million believers. The transformation happened because someone, a German missionary named Ludwig Nommensen, decided their spiritual poverty was unacceptable. That was 190 years ago. Today, 4,473 people groups are still waiting for their Ludwig Nommensen moment. The People Group Adoption Program launches today, and here's how it works: It meets you where you are. You're not being asked to become a missionary in the field (though if God calls you to that, we'll cheer you on). You're being invited to use your current gifts, prayer, advocacy, networking, research to support those who are already called to go. It's strategic. Every people group in our database has been vetted by researchers and field workers. These aren't randomly selected communities. They're the 100 largest frontier people groups, the populations with the least gospel access and the greatest potential for kingdom impact. It grows with your capacity. Whether you're adopting as a family, church, or organization, the commitment adjusts to what you can offer. Some will pray weekly. Others will fund translation projects. A few will end up moving to the field. All contributions matter. When you adopt a people group today, you'll receive: Immediate next steps for your specific adopted group A digital covenant card to mark your commitment Information about your frontier people group Regular updates as we develop more resources and connections Beyond the practical resources, you'll receive something harder to quantify: the knowledge that you're part of a strategic response to the most urgent spiritual need on our planet. The Batak people have been sending missionaries to unreached groups for decades now. Their story didn't end with their own transformation; it multiplied exponentially. Your adopted people group could be the next Show less Comments

The teaser of the upcoming Tamil movie Bad Girl released last year sparked a wave of outrage across Tamil Nadu. The Madurai High Court recently passed an order severely reprimanding the movie and its makers calling Bad Girl a borderline child pornography. In this episode, we trace the phenomenon that led to the emergence of such perverted movies in Tamil Nadu and the overall moral degeneration of Tamil cinema. Bad Girl is especially disturbing because its makers specifically target a school-going Brahmin girl depicting her as a victim of an alleged Brahmin patriarchy, which forbids her from having multiple sex partners, smoking and alcoholism. Join the conversation! Support Our PodcastsIf you enjoyed this episode, please consider supporting The Dharma Dispatch podcast so we can offer more such interesting, informative and educational content related to Indian History, Sanatana Dharma, Hindu Culture and current affairs. It takes us months of rigorous research, writing and editing and significant costs to offer this labour of love.Ways you can Support The Dharma Podcast:* UPI: ddispatch@axl* Wallets, Netbanking, etc:* Scan the QR Code below. Get full access to The Dharma Dispatch Digest at thedharmadispatch.substack.com/subscribe

#vinayakjoshi #kannadainterviews #podcast In this deeply spiritual and enlightening episode of Nayaka With Vinayaka, we are joined by Shri Yogeendra Bhat Uli, the chief priest at Shri Krishna Vrundavana, USA, who has been a guiding force in establishing multiple mutts across the United States and sharing the essence of Hindu dharma globally.

Māyā gives combinations and permutations of apparent enjoyment to every soul to exhaust that person's idea that "I can enjoy separately from Kṛṣṇa." Queen Kuntī says: 'janmaiśvarya-śruta-śrībhir edhamāna-madaḥ pumān naivārhaty abhidhātuṁ vai tvām akiñcana-gocaram (SB 1.8.26).' We should be very, very humble, because Māyā can sneak into our lives at any time, and one of the ways she sneaks in is through the door of pride. There are some attitudes that we can be very careful about and avoid, like "My preaching is better than everybody else's," or "In general, I'm just better than other people," and become proud. Another one is, "I'm liberated. Why am I liberated? I'm in ISKCON. I'm initiated. I'm beautiful. I'm smart. I'm a Brahmin." I may also justify cheating: "Although there are these principles, I've been here a long time, I've seen many things. Give me a break. I know these things, and I am okay. I'm liberated, I'm entitled." So pride opens the door for Māyā, and then justification allows her to stay inside. It's like, "It's okay, because I'm liberated. It doesn't matter. Who are these people? Mangal Arti, going 16 rounds. Who do they think they are? I know everything. And laxity—being lazy, lazy about following the regulative principles, not strict. Here's a way to close the door on Māyā: "I am not liberated." Say that, "I'm not liberated." "I am a servant of the servant of the servant a million times removed." Prabhupāda says, "When you think, 'I'm the servant of the servant of the servant of the servant, a million times removed,' then you're liberated." But always say, "I'm not liberated." Always say, "I'm not liberated." And also, we shouldn't justify, and don't be lazy. Be careful. Prabhupāda says that besides practicing the rules and regulations in devotional service, you should also be careful. And we should also fortify ourselves by very strong sādhana. Prabhupāda writes in the Śrī Caitanya-caritāmṛta that if we don't read all the books, then we'll fall down. ------------------------------------------------------------ To connect with His Grace Vaiśeṣika Dāsa, please visit https://www.fanthespark.com/next-steps/ask-vaisesika-dasa/ ------------------------------------------------------------ Add to your wisdom literature collection: https://iskconsv.com/book-store/ https://www.bbtacademic.com/books/ https://thefourquestionsbook.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------ Join us live on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FanTheSpark/ Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sound-bhakti/id1132423868 For the latest videos, subscribe https://www.youtube.com/@FanTheSpark For the latest in SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/fan-the-spark ------------------------------------------------------------ #spiritualawakening #soul #spiritualexperience #spiritualpurposeoflife #spiritualgrowthlessons #secretsofspirituality #vaisesikaprabhu #vaisesikadasa #vaisesikaprabhulectures #spirituality #bhaktiyoga #krishna #spiritualpurposeoflife #krishnaspirituality #spiritualusachannel #whybhaktiisimportant #whyspiritualityisimportant #vaisesika #spiritualconnection #thepowerofspiritualstudy #selfrealization #spirituallectures #spiritualstudy #spiritualquestions #spiritualquestionsanswered #trendingspiritualtopics #fanthespark #spiritualpowerofmeditation #spiritualteachersonyoutube #spiritualhabits #spiritualclarity #bhagavadgita #srimadbhagavatam #spiritualbeings #kttvg #keepthetranscendentalvibrationgoing #spiritualpurpose

Episode Description Sign up to receive this Unreached of the Day podcast sent to you:  https://unreachedoftheday.org/resources/podcast/ People Group Summary: https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/19613    #PrayforZERO is a podcast Sponsor.         https://prayforzero.com/ Take your place in history! We could be the generation to translate God's Word into every language. YOUR prayers can make this happen.  Take your first step and sign the Prayer Wall to receive the weekly Pray For Zero Journal:  https://prayforzero.com/prayer-wall/#join Pray for the largest Frontier People Groups (FPG): Visit JoshuaProject.net/frontier#podcast provides links to podcast recordings of the prayer guide for the 31 largest FPGs.  Go31.org/FREE provides the printed prayer guide for the largest 31 FPGs along with resources to support those wanting to enlist

Please donate to the show!We kick off a series on our economy with a fascinating conversation with Dr. Noam Maggor, a professor of American history at the Queen Mary University of London. We talk about his book, Brahmin Capitalism, covering topics like the history of the economy and of capitalism in Massachusetts, how the past can help us understand our current economic realities, and what lessons we can learn to shape the future of Massachusetts for the better.You're listening to Incorruptible Mass. Our goal is to help people transform state politics: we investigate why it's so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.To stay informed:Subscribe to our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@theincorruptibles6939Subscribe to the podcast at https://incorruptible-mass.buzzsprout.com/Sign up to get updates at http://ww12.incorruptiblemass.org/podcast?usid=18&utid=30927978072Donate to the show at https://secure.actblue.com/donate/impodcast

Today returning on Sense of Soul we have Padma Aon Prakasha he is an evolutionary catalyst and wisdom author bringing together ancient wisdom and modern science. Padma's books, music and multimedia are drawn from the traditions he has been initiated into. His books include: The Power of Shakti, Womb Wisdom, Sacred Relationships (Inner Traditions), The Christ Blueprint, The Nine Eyes of Light: Ascension Keys from Egypt (NAB/Random House), Dimensions of Love, Shiva's Hologram: The Maheshwara Sutra and The Science of Sound (O Books). Since 1997 he has presented, lectured and taught in 20 countries worldwide.  After being initiated into the Brahmin lineage at age 4, he read the Bhagavad Gita followed by the Bible at age 7 and a whole host of spiritual teachings by age 11. When he was 21 he had an experience of the AUM and God Consciousness that changed his life forever, followed by a direct and unexpected meeting with Christ Yeshua. Shortly after this, Padma was initiated in India through a Near Death Experience in Badrinath by Master Babaji, and into the Saivite Lineage in Kedarnath. Further Initiations into Saivite Tantra and the RK Veda through the Arunachala Sampradaya and Ganesha followed. Padma was also Initiated into Tibetan Tantras through female teachers Prem Prabhuta and Margot Anand, and is an Initiate in the Order of Melchizedek. Padma's most powerful ‘formal' Initiations came through Sri Om, an Awakened teacher in London from the Lineage of Buddha Maitreya, associated with the enlightened wisdom of many traditions. After this, Padma sat in Samadhi, the highest form of bliss meditation, for two months, 16 hours a day. Samadhi activates the pineal gland and many dormant gifts within us, which Padma then demonstrated through his numerous books, workshops and transmissions over the ensuing years. https://padmaaon.com Visit www.senseofsoulpodcast.com

Back in 2016, Joan Williams, distinguished professor of law (emerita) at UC Law San Francisco, wrote an essay for the Harvard Business Review on why President Donald Trump attracted so many non-college voters. It went viral with almost four million views, becoming the most-read article in the 90-year history of the publication.Williams' new book, Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, outlines how the seemingly common view that her fellow progressives must abandon their social causes to win back those non-college-educated voters is wrong. What is required, she argues, is a renewed understanding of class. She introduces her conceptualization of the “diploma divide,” or the gap between Americans with and without college degrees. Her worldview divides the electorate into three class-based groups: the college-educated, upper-class “Brahmin left”, the low-income working (middle) class, and the right-wing merchant class, which pushes for economic policies that benefit the rich. Her argument is that a new coalition between the latter two has shifted politics to the right.In this week's Capitalisn't episode, Luigi and Bethany invite Williams to discuss whether our society indeed breaks down so neatly. If it does, how does her breakdown help us understand recent electoral shifts and trends in populism and why the left is on the losing end of both? As she writes in her book and discusses in the episode, “[the Brahmin] left's anger is coded as righteous. Why is non-elite anger discounted as “grievance?” Together, their conversation sheds light on how the left can win back voters without compromising on progressive values.Over the last four years, Capitalisn't has interviewed conservative thinkers like Oren Cass, Patrick Deneen, and Sohrab Ahmari to understand how the political right developed a new platform after President Joe Biden's victory in 2020. With this episode, we begin the same project with the left by asking: What could be the economic basis for a new progressive platform?Show Notes:Read an excerpt from Joan Williams' new book, “Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back,” out now at St. Martin's PressQuiz: “Are You in a Class Bubble?”What So Many People Don't Get About the U.S. Working Class, by Joan Williams, Harvard Business Review, November 10, 2016

Episode Description Sign up to receive this Unreached of the Day podcast sent to you:  https://unreachedoftheday.org/resources/podcast/ People Group Summary: https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/19988/IN #PrayforZERO is a podcast Sponsor.         https://prayforzero.com/ Take your place in history! We could be the generation to translate God's Word into every language. YOUR prayers can make this happen.  Take your first step and sign the Prayer Wall to receive the weekly Pray For Zero Journal:  https://prayforzero.com/prayer-wall/#join Pray for the largest Frontier People Groups (FPG): Visit JoshuaProject.net/frontier#podcast provides links to podcast recordings of the prayer guide for the 31 largest FPGs.  Go31.org/FREE provides the printed prayer guide for the largest 31 FPGs along with resources to support those wanting to enlist others in pray

Episode Description Sign up to receive this Unreached of the Day podcast sent to you:  https://unreachedoftheday.org/resources/podcast/ People Group Summary: https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/20056/NP #PrayforZERO is a podcast Sponsor.         https://prayforzero.com/ Take your place in history! We could be the generation to translate God's Word into every language. YOUR prayers can make this happen.  Take your first step and sign the Prayer Wall to receive the weekly Pray For Zero Journal:  https://prayforzero.com/prayer-wall/#join Pray for the largest Frontier People Groups (FPG): Visit JoshuaProject.net/frontier#podcast provides links to podcast recordings of the prayer guide for the 31 largest FPGs.  Go31.org/FREE provides the printed prayer guide for the largest 31 FPGs along with resources to support those wanting to enlist others in pray

Episode Description Sign up to receive this Unreached of the Day podcast sent to you:  https://unreachedoftheday.org/resources/podcast/ People Group Summary: https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/19985   #PrayforZERO is a podcast Sponsor.         https://prayforzero.com/ Take your place in history! We could be the generation to translate God's Word into every language. YOUR prayers can make this happen.  Take your first step and sign the Prayer Wall to receive the weekly Pray For Zero Journal:  https://prayforzero.com/prayer-wall/#join Pray for the largest Frontier People Groups (FPG): Visit JoshuaProject.net/frontier#podcast provides links to podcast recordings of the prayer guide for the 31 largest FPGs.  Go31.org/FREE provides the printed prayer guide for the largest 31 FPGs along with resources to support those wanting to enlist others in prayer for FPGs