Leela Gandhi's contagious crap

Leela Gandhi says she wants to generate a discussion on public or democratic art as the contagious effect of ethical self-work by submitting the following extract from her last book to scrutiny.

Obviously, she doesn't want that discussion to be either public or democratic because the public tends to be like me and views her to be a stupid gobshite. On the other hand, I can assure her that what she calls 'self-work' is actually a pathetic kind of self-abuse. It may indeed involve some 'contagious' type of discharge but it is the sort of thing fastidious people keep well away from. 

The Contagious Self

I’ve carried two items with me for a very long time now, believing they belong together as pieces in the puzzle of guru democracy. 

But guru democracy is about as real as pasta oligarchy or gangster theocracy. 

The first is a 1931 recording made by Gandhi (hereafter MKG) for the Columbia Gramophone Company while he was in London for the disappointing Second Round Table Conference on Indian constitutional reform.

Gandhi succeeded in uniting everybody against the INC- not just Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Dalits but also non-Brahmin Tamil Hindus. The Liberals, who were supposed to be allied to Congress, found a way to do a separate deal with Manchester. Gandhi's participation was an unmitigated disaster. Henceforth, the Brits would impose whatever arrangements they found most profitable and convenient. Gandhi & Co were simply jailed if they wagged their tail. 

Wryly claiming low expertise on political matters, 

Sadly, he didn't understand that this was perfectly true.

he offers his thoughts on religion instead.

He read out some slow-witted shite he had previously published. 

 In the course of a meditation upon existential interconnectedness, 

the guy was gassing on about how all things were subject to some universal Law coz God is really great- right? 

he endorses the “marvelous researches” of the physicist-turned-botanist J. C. Bose for giving evidence of a shared life-energy even among the most apparently inanimate substances.

Gandhi said ' thanks to the marvelous researches of Sir J. C. Bose, it can now be proved that even matter is life.' Obviously, Gandhi was wrong. Plants are alive. Coal isn't. Bose couldn't prove something which was false. 

 It is not surprising that MKG cites Bose (also much admired by Romain Rolland), who was an ardent follower of Swami Vivekananda and new Indian mysticism, and internationally famous in early twentieth-century science circles for his public demonstrations of acute affective sensitivity in tin foils, metal plates, mimosa plants, and palm trees. 

This sill woman thinks 'tin foils' have 'affective sensitivity'. Why not simply say they have traumatic sex lives and require rape counselling? The same is true of 'metal plates'- including the nice ever-silver thali from which Leela used to eat her din-din. 

Seeking to prove there was unity rather hierarchy in nature (no higher/lower forms, just shared livingness), Bose frequently 

used to ask plants to perform experiments upon him. Leela is too stupid to understand that Bose, as a scientist, thought he was smarter and a more evolved form of life than a cauliflower. 

records the vertiginous sensation of symbiosis

between himself and the bacteria in his gut? That's what symbiosis means. Leela may be thinking of communication- as when you imagine that a cauliflower said 'nice buns, dude!' to you as you walked past it in the produce aisle. 

 as he conducts experiments during which he finds himself catching the mood of the recording machine

it was in the mood for a pepperoni pizza. Stuff like that happens to me all the time. 

 or influencing, by his own psychic state, the disposition of the plant (or other substance) under observation.

Cauliflowers do grow smarter when under the influence of smart Bengalis. Sadly, they get quite sarky when addressing stupid Tamil peeps. 

At about the same time as Bose’s researches, MKG had also commenced similar

similar? Bose was an actual Scientist. Gandhi thought sleeping naked with young girls could get you super-powers. Radio-waves and Micro-waves and so forth genuinely exist. Gandhi's fads were based on sheer nonsense. 

 politico-spiritual experiments of his own to test whether work on the self had a communal effect—not by way of influence and example so much as by a spectral circuit: for example, did fasting not just symbolically but alchemically expiate the violence of others?

The answer was no. It is also not the case that wanking will make the world a better place. 

 Was there a sympathetic magic whereby acts of personal expropriation or self-reduction actually conjured gifts for the dispossessed?

Will shitting your cupped hands and flinging your feces about cure COVID? 

 Did the giving up of one’s own right to existence yield collateral for life itself? 

Collateral what? Benefit? Harm? Security for a loan? The truth is that behavior has a demonstration or 'mimetic' effect. It is not actually contagious, nor is any magic involved. Gandhi did stupid shit and others imitated him and though some may have personally profited by this playacting, the Nation as a whole suffered. 

In other words, was the self of sadhana contagious?

Genuine accomplishment is indeed inspiring and could have a 'field effect' as in the Vimalakirti.  But bogus accomplishment creates a social pathology. There are plenty of Professors at Brown whose work, over the last two decades, has helped the world. But Leela is not one of them. What she and other PoCo blathershites have done represents stupidity and a waste of resources. 

 Could you catch the self-work of those around you and, likewise, virally communicate yours across short and long distances? 

People who write sensible stuff do this by sending letters or publishing stuff. This cretin thinks she is doing some 'self-work'. It is merely masturbatory in character. 

Here are various comments from MKG: “How that chain can be established I do not know as yet. But I’m striving after it.”

This involved sleeping naked with his great niece. Not cool, mahatma dude. Not cool at all. 

 “Individuality is and is not even as every drop in the ocean is and is not. It is not because apart from the ocean it has no existence.” 

The fool had not noticed that you can take a drop out of the ocean and put it in a container and send it into Outer Space. It would still exist. 

“I am an irrepressible optimist. My optimism rests on my belief in the infinite possibilities of the individual to develop non-violence. The more you develop it in your own being, the more infectious it becomes till it overwhelms your surroundings and by and by might oversweep the whole world.”

English wasn't Gandhi's first language. Infection really isn't the mot juste here. Still, it is sad that Gandhi's enthusiasm for celibacy was not at all infectious amongst those of his descendants who chose to devote themselves to talking virtue signaling bollocks.