Suzy Bell attends the annual celebrations of the appearance or birth of Lord Krishna, the supreme deity who revealed the Bhagavad Gita Steeped in sacred ceremony and ritual, over 50 000 Hare Krishna devotees, some from as far afield as Poland and Australia, immersed themselves in the three-day festival of Sri Krishna Janmastami last weekend. […]
Ron Sakolsky is an academic, journalist and activist whose main interest is the cultural politics of music. He’s not a serious musician although he “dabbles” in several instruments. Sakolsky is visiting South Africa until the end of the year. While he is here he plans to interview Mzwakhe Mbuli in jail to talk about his […]
Neil Manthorp in Birmingham Cricket At last, some justice. The final moment of any significance, the last memory of the tour of England, was positive. Not just the victory, but the catch by Jonty Rhodes in the covers. So often we see great feats of athleticism diminished by the television replay. Occasionally they remain untarnished, […]
Karlin Lillington For most earthlings, just finding a hotel with Internet access is a challenge. Nasa, however, thinks big. The space agency intends to have Mars “Internet-enabled” in the next three to four years. Last week at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Dr Vinton Cerf, a senior vice-president at telecom company MCI, joined […]
Jon Qwelane Right to Reply The trouble with the Mail & Guardian’s editor and his small coterie of executives is their apparent obsession with the fallacy that they hold copyright on what is true and correct. Pontificating from their lofty ivory tower, they seem to have forgotten (or actually never even knew) two simple points: […]
No child has ever fallen in love with reading from being given a textbook, argues Jay Heale It is well known that there is a crisis in education in this country. But there is one aspect of this agonising situation which seems to have been overlooked. We are so anxious to teach children how to […]
Digby Ricci THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION by Gore Vidal (Knopf) One hates to bow to conventional wisdom, but Gore Vidal really is a far better essayist than he is a novelist. In his essays, the erudition is elegantly startling, but never obtrusive, and the much-vaunted “mordant wit” is a rapier, not a bludgeon. Thus, Susan Sontag’s […]
Robert Kirby: Loose cannon I have it on the best authority that Monica Lewinsky is actually what is known in the espionage business as a “high-grade deep mole”. In truth Monica works for Saddam Hussein who personally coached her in the finer points of presidential seduction. The entire oval office sexual farrago is a brilliantly […]
Simone de Beauvoir described her companion and fellow philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, as her `greatest achievement’. But it was the American writer Nelson Algren who was the great love of her life. They began a passionate affair just as she was embarking on her landmark feminist text, The Second Sex. In her letters, she tells of […]
William Boot A secret commission of inquiry into the collapse of Namibia’s copper mining industry wrapped up its proceedings in Windhoek this week and is expected to move on to Johannesburg. It was established to investigate the role of Goldfields SA, owner of the Tsumeb Corporation Limited (TCL), in the closure of all four of […]