"For the progress of humanity, work alone is not adequate, but the work should be associated with love, compassion, right conduct, truthfulness and sympathy. Without the above qualities, selfless service cannot be performed."
On
Sunday morning, Indian guru Sri Sathya Sai Baba
passed away. He leaves behind a massive
empire, several million
mourning devotees worldwide, an
extensive religious philosophy, a great deal of
controversy and a legacy of large-scale philanthropic projects in India, including
free hospitals and mobile medical facilities,
a free university and schools, and other efforts which included supplying
clean water to hundreds of rural villages.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Apr 25, 2011 -
41 comments
Journeyman Pictures has uploaded nearly 4000 videos to YouTube. Many of these are trailers for the documentaries they sell, but they have also posted hundreds of full-length videos. Most are for short documentarie, but there are a lot of features too. It's somewhat daunting to explore, but the
playlists are a good place to start, and so are the shows:
Features,
Shorts,
News and
Savouring Europe, a European travelogue series. Here's a few interesting ones:
Gastronauts, about French culinary students working to make astronaut food more palatable,
Demon Drummers, about student Kodo drummers,
India's Free Lunch, about the effects of free school lunches on Indian society,
The Twitter Revolution, about YouTube and Twitter's role in the 2009 Iranian uprising,
Europe's Black Hole, about Transnistria, the breakaway region of Moldova,
Small Town Boy, about a gay male carnival queen in a small town in England,
The Vertigo of Lists, Umberto Eco talks about the ubiquity of lists in modern culture and
Monsters from the Id, about scientists in the science fiction films of the Fifties.
posted by Kattullus
on Aug 24, 2010 -
10 comments
The IDEA - The Indian Documentary of Electronic Arts - Seven somewhat dated collections of essays, music, videos, and thought curated and designed by Shankar Barua, backed by totally awesome early Internet-era graphics, and hosted at
Laurie Spiegel's also-rad
retiary.org.
Please note that many individual pages of The IDEA gazettes are very-very heavily loaded, by [2001's] WWWeb standards, with images/audio/video. In other words, if you can get past ugly old broken HTML and auto-playing music, you may find a lot to like in here.
posted by carsonb
on May 4, 2010 -
3 comments
Hippie Masala [masala is the Hindi word for spice mix] is a documentary which poignantly depicts the lives of a handful of old hippies from different countries, who not only remained in India but also remained in the caricature roles of a small few in those days. These are, in some ways, lost souls stuck in the amber of the 1960's and 70's and this movie offers glimpses into their lives now.
SnagFilms also has 510 other excellent documentaries to watch for free online.
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posted by nickyskye
on Dec 27, 2008 -
24 comments
Bollywood, the 1960s and 70s:
"For years, the favorite setting for the big dance number has been a cabaret, with its atmosphere of forbidden liquor and sexual permissiveness, with its mixed audience of privileged Indians, industrialists, playboys, princes, and its foreign decadence..." And no one was more at home this exotic milieu than an Anglo-Burmese refugee who began dancing in films at 13 to support her family. Her pale skin and vaguely foreign looks, along with a collection of colored contacts and wigs, allowed her to play white women, Asian women, whatever titillating role was called for. She was
Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls (
part 2,
part 3,
part 4).
[more inside]
posted by bookish
on Aug 10, 2008 -
24 comments
