Word: fakirs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Tobias Schneebaum. tall (6 ft.), lean and brown, took a deep breath, brought the mallet smashing down on the rock placed on the fakir's chest. An appreciative cheer rose from the Peruvian natives...
Tobias liked being a fakir's helper; he got paid for it, and he needed the money. But it scarcely seemed a suitable way of life for an artist on a Buenos Aires Contvention grant. Tired of Lima, he set off over the Andes and made his way down Madre de Dios River toward the Brazil-Peru-Bolivia frontier. Unarmed, and with only a Roman Catholic lay missionary as companion, he finally pushed right off the known map into the green unknown. Three days out, the two found themselves surrounded by naked Amarakaires...
...Matched against Jämsä in a contest to see who could stay buried alive longer in a coffin, a Finnish fakir was dug up in hysterics after 21 hours, subsequently gave up fakiry. Jämsä stayed down for 50 hours, showed no ill effects other than a determination never to try it again...
...startling spectacle of the Indian fakir snuggled down on his bed of nails, or the martyr thrusting his hand into the flames, has often been explained by medical science on the basis of emotional disturbances (usually hysteria). In other cases, failure to react to pain may be due to severe mental retardation or physical damage to the nervous system. But there remains a baffling group of individuals to whom none of these explanations can be applied, and who show no reaction to pain of virtually any kind...
Daoud also made friendly contact with the Pathan independence leader in West Pakistan, frail, bearded, lumbago-plagued Mirza Ali, also known as the Fakir of Ipi. The Fakir of Ipi's impetuous followers, who love their girls second only to their guns and woo them with a ditty which begins, "Your eyes are two loaded pistols," thereupon increased their pressure on the Karachi government. By now, Prime Minister Daoud, expanding his notion of Pakhtoonistan to include more than half of West Pakistan, was demanding all the territory west of the Indus River, right down to the Arabian...