Word: gita
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...morning last week, Nathuram Vinayak Godse, the young fanatic who shot Gandhi (TIME, Feb. 9, 1948), drank his last cup of prison coffee. While jailers waited, Godse and his accomplice, Narayan Dattatraya Apte, recited from the Hindu Holy Writ, the Bhagavad-Gita ("Fight, and have no fear. The foe is yours to conquer"). They walked to the scaffold, clutching their Gitas between the palms of their tied hands...
Ryder taught Oppenheimer to read the Hindu scriptures in Sanskrit, his eighth language. Oppie still reads them, for his "private delight" and sometimes for the public edification of friends (the Bhagavad-Gita, its worn pink cover patched with Scotch tape, occupies a place of honor in his Princeton study). He is particularly fond of one Sanskrit couplet: "Scholarship is less than sense, therefore seek intelligence...
...held on to a post to steady himself . . . When the announcer shouted 'Now!' and there came this tremendous burst of light, followed ... by the deep-growling roar of the explosion, his face relaxed into an expression of tremendous relief." Oppenheimer recalls that two lines of the Bhagavad-Gita flashed through his mind: "I am become death, the shatterer of worlds...
...India radio broadcast Gandhi's favorites: extracts from the Gita, the Upanishads and the Koran; the Lord's Prayer; the Christian hymn, When I Survey the Wondrous Cross. Then, after midnight, Gandhi's youngest son Devadas (who insisted that Gandhi be cremated, as he had wished) helped wash the body. He and Gandhi's secretary Pyarelal then wrapped the body in pure white khadi. They put a yellow paste of sandalwood and water on his face...
...goodness. He called himself "a Hindu of Hindus," and yet he put many a professing Christian to shame. "The spirit of the Sermon on the Mount," wrote the man who fitted the rubrics of the Beatitudes more comfortably than most Christians, "competes almost on equal terms with the Bhagavad-Gita for the domination of my heart...