Hinduism: Rituals in the Himalayas (Satis Shroff)

American Chronicle | Voklstrauertag - Memorial Day Rituals in the Himalayas (Satis Shroff)

Tika, a Hindu symbol, A blessing from the parents, From the priest at the temple, During a visit to a shrine, After a puja, A ritual ceremony. Faith and belief in God, Spirituality in the Himalayas As old and strong, As the Abode of Snows, Undaunted by colonialism And conquests with the sickel sword. Om namo Shiva, Rituals reveal the unity, Between the self and the cosmos; A light in your innermost self. Through rituals you become one With your soul. You feel it within the molecules, Atoms and positrons in you. Be it big or small, In this eternally moving world, Nothing is without a meaning. The ancient rituals Have each a meaning, In the endless metamorphosis Of the individual, To be in tact with the universe. It is the daily rituals That lead us to unity, Growth of consciousness, That engulfs all. In rituals we bundle energy For the changes in the cycle Of Death and Creation. It is the litany of mantras Combined with ritual offerings, That create a work of art: the yantra. Dedicated to the Gods and Goddesses, In the shrine, temple and pagoda. Seasonal flowers plucked at dawn, To beckon and appease the Gods, Sandalwood tika paste, Cereals and herbs, Sweetmeat and fruits. The beauty of the yantra Creates harmony. The chime of the temple bells Evoke feelings of spirituality. There is a mingling Of cultural powers that be, In peace and balance. If you’re ill perform a ritual At the right time, To restore the balance, Between illness and recovery, Between right and wrong, Between holy and unholy, Between wealth and poverty, Between rain and sun, Flood and drought, Life, death and rebirth.

American Chronicle | Intercultural Reading Marathon

American Chronicle | Intercultural Reading Marathon

The Healing Power of Hope (Satis Shroff, Germany)

World Healing Poetry: 

The Healing Power of Hope (Satis Shroff)

Unto you that fear my name

Shall the sun of righteousness

Arise with healing in his wings

(Malachi)

Bridges of peace, friendship and togetherness

Are built on mutual respect,

Tolerance and Miteinander.

We must talk about the symbols

Of tyranny in your villages, towns and cities.

On Memorial Day we gather with earnest faces,

To honour and remember the people

Whose names are engraved on stones,

Who died in the two World Wars.

The suns and husbands have fallen,

But a new ghost raises its ugly head again,

The Neonazis who work for

The Bundesnachrichtendienst.,

Who receive money for their incompetence,

In Thuringen, Saxony,

Hessen and Lower Saxony.

The lesson of faschism taught us

Never to combine

The police with the secret service,

For it would be akin to the Gestapo,

The Geheimen Staatspolizei.

The sixteen secret services in Germany

Cannot coordinate and cooperate.

Since thirteen years have we given

Neonazis a free hand,

Who robbed banks,

Executed Turkish and Greek migrants.

The constitution makes it possible:

‘Germany for the Germany,

All aliens out!’

Long live the Freedom of Speech.

But prithee, where is the protection

Of the migrants and underdogs

Of the society?

Is a new holocaust in the offing?

Yet there is no way

But the path of peace and togetherness.

The ewig gestrigen and the neos

Are still licking the wounds of war,

Wounds that won’t heal,

For they are infected with hate anew,

With brown-propaganda.

War has always been ugly and brutal.

The widows of the on-going krieg in the Hindukush,

The survivors who don’t understand their own world,

After the trauma of Vietnam, Irak, Afghanistan.

When the NATO sirens are tested,

The air vibrates with a monstrous noise.

Fear makes the olde soldier’s heart beats faster,

His pulse races and he almost chokes.

The memories and the fury of war overwhelm him.

Who will restore the faces we’ve adored?

Love, faith, togetherness and peace

Haven’t been lulled to sleep.

We still hear the clarion call

To the dangers of war,

To the hoarse shouts

Of the Neos in the street,

Who strut and fret,

And believe Auschwitz was a lie.

A silence treads like clouds shadows,

Among the people of Germany.

Hope hasn’t abandoned us yet,

Despite the petite victories of the rightists,

In Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

The people in these lands

Think otherwise.

In every good person there is a bad part,

In every bad person there’s a good trait,

Like ying and yang.

We can only appeal to humans,

Hope and pray for peace,

And the old wounds to heal,

Between humans in this world.

Triology on Martin Heidegger (Satis Shroff)

Martin Heidegger Triology:

The Silence of Existence I (Satis Shroff)

Plato once said:

Megala panta episphale,´

Questionable,

Destined to fall,

Endangered.

This was Plato´s philosophic answer

To the tyrant Syracus,

Who was doomed to fail.

But why did I follow

Plato´s words,

And took them

To a heroic sturm-and-drang?

It is true,

I sympathised with the inner truth

Of the National Socialism,

For a short while.

But this short episode cost me

My very existence.

The human being has to grow big

In his own self,

In order to see big movements

And to be aware of it.

I came from a small family,

Didn´t want to be involved

In petty matters,

Donning the mantle 

Of stubbornness and refusing

To accept new challenges.

I wanted to understand

The secrets of powerful men,

To ultimately be a part of them.

But in the course of time,

The powerful persons for which I yearned,

Changed their countenances.

My philosophic thoughts

Dwelled on my homeland,

God, 

Existence,

Being, 

Nothingness,

The German folk,

Original thought and great poetry.

Towards the end came the planetary technology,

Which grew big.

My works of philosophy

Went through the illusions and catastrophies

Of the 20th century.

All striving for greatness

Leads to downfall.

At the beginning of the war

The German nationalism was awakened.

The people were collectively enthusiastic,

Hitting us all,

Like a tidal wave.

I didn´t care much 

About what was happening

Around me.

In my thoughts I was living,

Thinking about people in the Middle Ages.

I was following a metaphysical imperative.

In the battlefield of Verdun,

Half a million soldiers perished.

But I was disappointed 

For I didn´t get a professorship

At the University of Freiburg.

The Führer once wanted to be an artist.

I wanted to be a priest

The Jesuits and the Catholics in Freiburg

Turned me down.

Similar to Friedrich Nietzsche´s

Forty-year old Zarathustra,

Who after ten years of solitude

In his mountain cave,

Went down to the humans,

To teach them the incredibility

Of being,

The meaning of their being,

I also wanted to reveal and teach

The essentials of human existence,

Which deals with one´s own being.

For the world of being or Sein,

Is not only the self-world,

But also the world of togetherness,

In which the being-in 

Is always the being-together.

Existence is threatened by anxiety,

Behind which lies 

The temporality of existence.

The aim of philosophy

Is to listen to the silence of existence.

***

The Führer of the Mind II (Satis Shroff)

In his ‘Seventh Letter’ Plato wrote

About his three journeys to Syrakus and Sicily

Between 389 and 361 BC.

Plato had close relations to the ruling tyrann:

At first with Dionysios I,

Later with his son Dionysios II,

Who he tried to educate and lead.

Among other philosophic questions,

Socrates had to answer this one:

In which way does a state have to use philosophy,

In order not to go under,

For all greatness is questionable.

Platon was defeated in Syrakus,

Because Dionysios II refused to overtake

His ideas about State,

Education, laws and constitution.

Plato became frustrated.

His state-philosophical plans had failed.

I hoped that history would repeat itself,

This time with a happy result.

So I chose Plato as my own hero,

For the political battle,

With Adolf Hitler in the role of Dionysios II.

On January 19,1933 after the big elections victory

In Lippe,

A great storm has come over me,

In which I’ve set out my full sail.

With this, a lot of old ties

Were torn or broken.

I can’t mend them now.

O what a storm it was,

In which you and I and all

Were swept away.

It was the greatness and exemplary Greek philosophy,

Waking up anew,

Albeit, the dark orders of a state and society,

Undergoing a massive change.

After Hitler was given the right

To govern by the old Reichspresident

Paul von Hinderburg,

My will to work for the Third Reich

Became stronger.

In order to stabilise the NS-rule,

My philosophy became a part

Of the Nazi ideology.

I had my doubts when deeds were done,

To lift the needs

Of the folk and the Reich,

But I believed that the political changes

Were a challenge to me,

My country needed me.

Between the Greek philosophy

And the NS movement,

I wanted to fight

Against the dying spirit of Christendom,

And the spectre of the communist world.

The Greeks and the German folk,

A politic of Being and Führer-state,

Platon and I myself.

I was a convinced National Socialist,

At the beginning of the Third Reich.

It was in the solitude

Of the autumnal and wintry Black Forest,

That I decided to be involved

In building a world,

Created by a folk.

That was the new reality.

The ‘Being’ I’d learned from Parmenides,

Platon and Aristoteles,

Should be used to make the NS-spirit,

A part and parcel of German history.

The NSDAP became my political home.

The Rectorat gave me the institutional confirmation.

I became a member of the NSDAP

On May 1, 1933

With the No. 3125894,

Gau Baden.

* * *

BACK FROM SYRAKUS III (Satis Shroff

My first act as the Rector

Of the Freiburger University,

Was to send a circular letter

To all lecturers.

The construction of a new mental world,

For the German folk is the essential duty

Of the German university.

This is national work

Of the highest meaning and priority.

In 1933 I craved for power,

In the field of Political Science.

I wanted to be a Führer of the Mind,

To create a real geistige world

For the German folk.

I found a suitable forum

In the NS-Führer-State.

I greeted the Freiburger students

With the authoritative imperative words:

‘Not teachings and ideas

Are the rules of your being.

The Führer himself alone

Is the German reality

And your law today

Till hereafter.’

The teachers had to be taught again,

So I transformed my philosophical thoughts,

To political activities.

Again and again,

The being, the Germanvolk,

And the Führer were connected

In all my speeches.

At the beginning of 1934 ,

It became clear to me,

That the greatness (Hitler) which I desired,

Was destined to fall.

I noticed that the liberals and conservatives

Were disgusted with Hitler’s propaganda.

Erich Jaensch characterised my philosophical thoughts

As ‘tamundic-rabulistic,’

Which would have a magnetic attraction

For Jews and people of Jewish descent.

To Erich Jaensch,

I was a dangerous schizophrenic

And my pathologic writings

Would only be admired by weird people.

Ernst Krieck saw in my philosophy

A ferment of decay and decomposition

For the German folk.

I saw in the Führer not the egocentric powerful man,

But an instance of political knowledge,

With a concentration

Of the new spirit of state-and-folk community.

There is only one will for the state to exist.

The Führer has awakened this desire

In the entire folk and made it

To a common goal.

In lieu of the objective he-she-it,

I preferred the meaning of being ‘I am.’

I became a follower of the NSDAP,

The propagandist of national socialism.

I wanted to see people who had the will,

The inner power to make greatness even bigger.

Most people made the usual snarls

Of ordinary citizens,

Who cling to small and half-things;

They don’t want to see,

Never can see the big and farthest,

The unique and all-powerful.

My friends wrote to me on my 80^th birthday:

‘Mr. H.,

Are you back from Syrakus?’

Back from my escapade.

I felt like Plato,

Who was disappointed by Dionysios II.

My disappointment was much bigger

Than that of Plato,

Because the tyrant and his victim,

Were not beyond the seas,

But in my own country.

My thoughts moved to Being,

Das Sein.

In my search for heroes I came across:

Parmenides, Heraklit, Holderlin and Nietsche.

I abandoned political thought,

Embraced the thoughts of the poet,

Poetic thoughts,

For in the language of poetry,

You find the purest essence of language,

Which can begin and develop.

I wanted to show that language

Is not an expression of biological-racist humans.

The essence of humans through language,

Is the basic reality of the mind.

To the Nazis I became suddenly

A suspected person,

Who needed to be shadowed.

 

The Agony of War (Satis Shroff)

THE AGONY OF WAR (Satis Shroff)

Once upon a time there was a seventeen year old boy

Who lived in the Polish city of Danzig.

He was ordered to join the Waffen-SS,

Hitler’s elite division.

Oh, what an honour for a seventeen year old,

Almost a privilege to join the Waffen-SS.

The boy said,

 “Wir wurden von früh bis spät

Geschliffen und sollten

Zur Sau gemacht werden.”

A Russian grenade shrapnel brought his role

In the war to an abrupt end.

That was on April 20, 1945.

In the same evening,

He was brought to Meissen,

Where he came to know about his Vaterland’s defeat.

The war was lost long ago.

He realised how an ordinary soldier

Became helpless after being used as a tool in the war,

Following orders that didn’t demand heroism

In the brutal reality of war.

It was a streak of luck,

And his inability to ride a bicycle,

That saved his skin

At the Russian-held village of Niederlausitz.

His comrades rode the bicycle,

And he was obliged to give them fire-support

With a maschine-gun.

His seven comrades and the officer

Were slain by the Russians.

The only survivor was a boy

Of seventeen.

He abandoned his light maschine-gun,

And left the house of the bicycle-seller,

Through the backyard garden

With its creaky gate.

What were the chances in the days of the Third Reich

For a 17 year old boy named Günter Grass

To understand the world?

The BBC was a feindliche radio,

And Goebbels’ propaganda maschinery

Was in full swing.

There was no time to reflect in those days.

Fürcht und Elend im Dritten Reich,

Wrote Bertold Brecht later.

Why did he wait till he was almost eighty?

Why did he torment his soul all these years?

Why didn’t he tell the bitter truth,

About his tragi-comical role in the war

With the Waffen-SS?

He was a Hitlerjunge,

A young Nazi.

Faithful till the end.

A boy who was seduced

By the Waffen-SS.

His excuse:

„Ich habe mich verführen lassen.“

The reality of the war brought

Endless death and suffering.

He felt the fear in his bones,

His eyes were opened at last.

Günter Grass is a figure,

You think you know well.

Yet he’s aloof

And you hardly know him,

This literary titan.

He breathes literature

And political engagement.

In his new book:

Beim Häuten der Zwiebeln

He confides he has lived from page to page,

And from book to book.

Is he a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?

Doctor Faustus and Mephistopheles,

In the same breast?

Grass belongs to us,

For he has spent the time with us.

It was his personal weakness

Not to tell earlier.

He’s a playwright, director and actor

Of his own creativeness,

And tells his own tale.

His characters Oskar and Mahlke weren’t holy Joes.

It was his way of indirectly showing

What went inside him.

Ach, his true confession took time.

It was like peeling an onion with tears,

One layer after the other.

Better late than never.

* * *

Copyright © 2009, Satis Shroff. You may republish this article online provided you keep the byline, the author's note, and the active hyperlinks.

* * *

The Chance to Change (Satis Shroff)

THE CHANCE TO CHANGE (Satis Shroff)

“Education is the best thing in the world for Nepal’s children, be they Gurkhas, Sherpas or Madeshis. And what Nepal needs most in this crucial transitional period is peace, co-operation between the different ethnic groups, a craving to mend ways, build bridges between its cultures, connect and find common goals.”Satis Shroff

Mr. Swaroop Chamling, who is a Rai and ex-Gurkha settled in UK, is gathering signatures for a Gurkha petition on www.Darjeeling Forum (google or yahoo search will do) and I find it interesting that the Gurkhas, civilians and military, are getting organised to fight for their rights at last, after years of discrimination, hiring and firing, and low-pay on the part of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) in Britain. What I found interesting was the inference of a Gurkha reader on www.Gurkhas.com that it was Bahuns and Chettris all the way in Nepalese history and even today, whether in the opposition or in the ruling parties. The same sort of infighting that you see in Delhi between the Punjabis, Bengalis and other Indian ethnic groups is to be seen in Catmandu’s ministries. It’s always Newars versus Bahuns and Chettris, with the rest of the ethnic groups as onlookers. If you want to make a career in Catmandu you have to learn the local lingo, which is a language with monosyllables---Nepal Bhasa. 

It is a fact that there are only bahuns and chettris of the higher caste on both sides: among the maoists and political parties in Nepal. The reason why bahuns and chettris dominate the political, economic and other landscapes in Nepal is that they have been privileged through Hinduism,  its raja-praja set-up and caste-system, with its purity and pollution implications that have swept and divided the families in Nepal and the Nepalese diaspora for centuries (as in India even today), and I think that Dor Bahadur Bista has illustrated this amply in his writings, and was cursed wrongly by critics in Catmandu and elsewhere as a 'Nestbeschmutzer.'

One can combat this discrepancy by uniting to create a new, ethnic-friendly Nepal by decree of law, and by observing the new democratic developments in Nepal as a chance to change the old, federal structures and bringing in a secular state, like our big neighbour India. India did, what Nepal is in the process of doing, by introducing Privvy Purse for the Royals fifty years ago. The king has been sacked and the Narayanhiti Palace now a museum, just like the Hanuman Dhoka palace which can be viewed by Nepalese and tourists alike, and should act as an incentive for young Nepali school-kids to preserve the democratic rights of the country, lest it fall in the wrong hands, and not let history repeat itself.

The Nepalese society finds itself in a period of transition and has yet to decide which form of government is suitable and practicable for the society. Naming the former anchals or zones as cantons alone won’t make a Switzerland out of Nepal, but the will of the people to live under a governmental form based on public opinion and votes might bring this Himalayan country closer to the wishes of its people.

I remember the first page of The Rising Nepal bore the latin words: vox populi, vox dei. That was a time when a king and reincarnation of Vishnu ruled the land. The king had to sadly realise that the voice of the people was not the voice of God. And the voice of the king was certainly not the voice of the people. It was perhaps the voice of the ghost-writer. And thereby hangs a tale.

Education is the best thing in the world for Nepal’s children, be they Gurkha, Sherpa or Madeshi.  And what Nepal needs most in this crucial transitional period is peace, co-operation between the different ethnic groups, to mend ways, build bridges between its cultures, connect and find common goals.

But there’s the beginning of democracy in Nepal now, and the tribes and castes that were neglected in the past should get their rights by creating a federal form of government, like in German or in Switzerland, whereby the country has to be formed administratively as federal, local government with the power to carry out trade and commerce with neighbouring countries or states. Only then will there be a freedom of trade and commerce in all geographical and ethnic sectors.

The way it has been in the past: Kathmandu was Nepal. It was too centralised, the King lived in Kathmandu, the parliament was, and still is, in Kathmandu. Even for small things one had to have Kathmandu’s blessings. I hope the new governments will see to this matter and think of Nepal holistically, and not like in the past. I say government, because the political situation hasn’t shown much stability in the past for observers abroad.

Nevertheless, there is hope, and this torch of hope will be carried by the children and youth of Nepal. Whether we are Gurungs, Tamangs, Chettris, Bahuns, Bhujels, Kirats or Madhesis we have to unite and make Nepal a land that we can be proud of through our own endeavours. To borrow a line from JFK ‘ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’ After all, we are a republican democracy, aren’t we?

The comity of nations would only be too willing to see a politically and economically stable Nepal and render assistance as in the past, before the war between the government troops and the maoists began.

So let us unite above the communal feelings and ideologies, and think in terms of Nepal as a nation, and not in terms of the opposite of democracy, namely anarchy. Let the children of Nepal from the plains and the hills have the same educational opportunities and work under human conditions. Let us show the world that we have a word for negotiation in our language, and that we also have the ability of carrying out a dialogue in the parliamentary sense of the word.

Peace, trust, faith, character, integrity, tolerance, dignity are qualities that cannot be attained by nurturing communal feelings and ethnic hatred. It is only through peaceful means, trust, honesty, cooperation and coordination that the long arduous task called development can be attained and the people can attain mental, physical and social wellness in the tedious march towards progress. To this end, we have to decide to change. Revolution is change, and the young men and women who were fired by their imagination during the decade long krieg have to do so in a constructive way, or else Nepal will forever remain ‘a yam between two rocks’ and a perpetual member of the least developed countries, in every sense of the word.

Change or perish should be the battle-cry of democracy loving Nepalese.

 Yes we can, if we want it strong enough.

About the Author:

 Satis Shroff teaches Creative Writing at the University of Freiburg and the VHS Freiburg, and is the published author of four books on www.Lulu.com/satisle : Im Schatten des Himalaya (book of poems in German), Through Nepalese Eyes (travelogue), Katmandu, Katmandu (poetry and prose anthology by Nepalese authors, edited by Satis Shroff). His lyrical works have been published in literary poetry sites: Slow Trains, International Zeitschrift, World Poetry Society (WPS), New Writing North, Muses Review, The Megaphone, Pen Himalaya, Interpoetry. Satis Shroff is a member of “Writers of Peace,” poets, essayists, novelists (PEN), World Poetry Society (WPS) and The Asian Writer. He also writes on ecological, ethno-medical, culture-ethnological themes. He has studied Zoology and Botany  in Nepal, Medicine and Social Sciences in Germany and Creative Writing in Freiburg and the United Kingdom. He describes himself as a mediator between western and eastern cultures and sees his future as a writer and poet. Since literature is one of the most important means of cross-cultural learning, he is dedicated to promoting and creating awareness for Creative Writing and transcultural togetherness in his writings, and in preserving an attitude of Miteinander in this world.

He lectures in Basle (Switzerland) and in Germany at the Akademie für medizinische Berufe (University Klinikum Freiburg) and the Zentrum für Schlüsselqualifikationen (Lehrbeauftragter für Creative Writing, Albert Ludwigs Universität Freiburg). Satis Shroff was awarded the German Academic Exchange Prize and the Culture Prize of Green City Freiburg for his social engagement for the refugees and asylum-seekers.