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"How will you know who the father is if you don't ask the mother?" is a line I've been crediting to Ganesh Baba for years. Now I know that he was quoting a song by the great Baul singer, Lalon Shah.

One evening in Dehradun we watched a very beautiful Bangladeshi film Lalon, which, unfortunately, is not likely to make its way to the West any time soon. How I wish it would. Such stunning cinematography, such fine use of Lalon's songs to tell the story and to pass on the teachings, and such delightful caricatures of the people who didn't understand Lalon.

The Bauls are the wandering folksingers, singing sadhus, of Bengal. Their lineage, practice, and philosophy crosses the lines of traditional Hinduism and Islam, closer in some ways to Sufism, but a unique variant. Like all Tantric lineages, the Bauls believe that the way to God is through the human body.

I found it a tremendous relief to see the film after days of exploring the differences between belief systems rather than the commonalities. Here, among such poetic images and terms, I found myself sitting on my own magic carpet once again.

Yesterday, Robert Mack, the editor of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, wrote about cannibalism. Today Mack questions who the author of Sweeney Todd was. This post first appeared on Powell’s.

If you ask that question today, the answer you’re most likely to receive is ‘Stephen Sondheim’. That’s not sot surprising, since Sondheim’s musical version of the story, first staged in 1979, and now about to hit movie theatres in a Tim Burton-directed film version, has done most to popularize the legend in modern times. In fact no one knows who wrote the original story on which the Sondheim ‘musical thriller’ – and every other stage and screen adaptation – is ultimately based. (more…)

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On July 26, 1908 Attorney General Charles Bonaparte hired the first 34 FBI employees, 99 years later the Bureau employs over 30,000 people. To be honest, most of what I know about the FBI I learned from movies, so I went to Oxford Reference Online and found the entry excerpted below from A Dictionary of Contemporary World History. Love them, or hate them, the FBI’s goal is to protect the citizens of the United States and OUP wishes them a very happy birthday!

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