A Very Old Ping Pong Game of Ideas

Christopher Lydon’s Radio Open Source, channeling Suketu Mehta (author of Maximum City, highly recommended), mentions something that I’ve been thinking about for a while now:

a deep ping-pong game of ideas runs long and strong under the US-India connection: from Thoreau’s ecstatic reading of the Bhagavad Gita to Gandhi’s reading of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, from Martin Luther King Jr.’s reading of Gandhi to Barack Obama’s reading of Gandhi through King and his White House embrace of Prime Minister Singh last week.

I’ve lived all but one year of my life in three states: Obama’s, Gandhi’s and Thoreau’s. Though Hawai’i, Kansas, Indonesia, and Kenya claim Obama as their own. Which says a lot.

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3 thoughts on “A Very Old Ping Pong Game of Ideas

  1. If they had blogs back then, Gandhi would have commented and guest posted on Thoreau’s, Luther would have commented and posted on Gandhi’s, and Obama would have commented and posted on King’s.

  2. whether prayogshala or game of ping pong, it is leaving its own imprints, YES on Walls as well as noFRY food bites.
    I can add a few pages in that blog/wall fiction.

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