Word: fakirs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Half-Naked Fakir. The situation was unimaginably complex-and utterly hopeless. Freedom at Midnight focuses on the four men who plunge ahead anyway, haggling out the new terms under which one-fifth of the world's population will live. Perhaps because Mountbatten is one of their primary sources, Collins and Lapierre cast him in heroic mold. The great-grandson of Queen Victoria faces his task with a stiff upper lip and a trembling lower one; he relishes the pomp of the viceroy's office while struggling to give it away...
...book's best portrait is of the man who dwarfs the other three-Mohandas Gandhi, that tiny ascetic who for 30 years harried his British rulers with fasts and passive resistance. The mystic whom Winston Churchill once scorned as a "half-naked fakir" is a saint to his followers. "How can you say one thing last week," an associate asks him, "and something quite different this week?" Replies Gandhi: "Ah, because I have learned something since last week." The Mahatma continues to learn; he becomes at last India's soul and conscience. The most moving pages of Freedom...
...world that do it," he adds, if he is asked whether harm might not come to people trying to break the "duration record for lying on a bed of nails (needle-sharp 6-inch nails, 2 inches apart)" which is "25 hours by Vernon E. Craig (Komar, the Indian fakir...
...atom, the sin of Prometheus and Castaneda's search for a "power spot" near Los Angeles can all be remotely linked. A good deal of the magic Don Juan works on Castaneda in the books (making Carlos believe his car has disappeared, for instance) sounds like the kind of fakir rope trickery that gurus think frivolous. Yet all in all. the books communicate a primal sense of power running through the world, arranging our perceptions of reality like so many iron filings in a huge magnetic field...
...aquarium-like interior of Box 17 (Box C). Then the eye discerns the contents, wavering amid their reflections from the walls: a glass goblet filled with a bouquet not of flowers but of vicious glass shards; a morbified pink foot; a small geometrical plastic construction, reclining like a tiny fakir on a bed of nails...