Signing Off for a Few Days

We're winding up our trip in Pune tonight, and tomorrow fly to Bangalore and then head by coach to an organic farm about 1 1/2 hours outside the city. I'm assuming they won't have any internet so you probably won't hear from me again until we get to our hotel in Chennai on, I believe, August 2.

I've posted here a short video clip from our visit to the village yesterday, a brief selection from the question and answer session we had with the village elders. If I have time I'll try to post the longer clip of the music they played for us.

Today we attended a day-long series of lectures, one from an activist who told wonderful stories to us about her meetings with Gandhi as a teenager in the last years of her life, another from a poet who talked to us about some of the differences between thinking of Gandhi as a political leader and thinking of him as a spiritual leader, a lecture on Islam with an emphasis on the distinction between seeing Islam in historical terms and as a set of doctrines and principles (and some discussion of the role of women in Islam, both historically and in our own time), and finally a discussion of Gandhi as a philosopher. It was a full and very thought-provoking day. Wish I could go into more detail here, but I'm shot and have to get up at 5:00 a.m. for the trip to Bangalore. More when I resurface in Chennai.