Mayuran saw to the culmination of another project today as he scanned the last of our Rajam art collection. These were all done on our new hi-resolution Epson scanner. A total of 923 scans!

This collection of art was rescued from oblivion from the Chennai loft of famed singer and artist S. Rajam. Renowned for his long and illustrious career in Carnatic music, his art work in the field of Hindu cultural paintings was not well known. When he was young, he decided he wanted to catch the spirit of Hindu India before the Muslims came; he went to study the pre-Islamic invasion art of Elephanta caves. There and later he developed a more purely Indian-Hindu aesthetic art form.

A passing pilgrim happened one day to show us his art on the back of a book and the long story of contacting him, acquiring his collection and then commissioning him for more work began, years ago.

He has since passed, but Himalayan Academy Publications will carry his legacy forward to coming generations.

Our new digital library upgrade to the Himalayan Academy web site will have these available for all.

Our book team is now in the final stages of preparing our upcoming book, The Guru Chronicles for the press. Final details being worked on at this stage include cover measurements based on a physical mock-up produced by our printer in Kuala Lumpur, checking all the layouts with the color-corrected artwork in place, applying for a Library of Congress Control Number, proofreading, finalizing the index and choosing a cover price. As promised, here is the front cover in its final form. Jai Ganesha!

Senthilnathaswami is hard at work color correcting the digital photos for our new book The Guru Chronicles. We bring to you a few special gems for your viewing pleasure. Here Gurudeva offers arati to a Saivite Saint at Nallai Aadheenam at Nallur, Jaffna, Sri Lanka, during the 1982-1983 Innersearch.

January 17, 1982: Gurudeva’s first visit to the village of Kopay in Jaffna. Boys pulled him in a Morris Minor convertible. “Golden days with a golden guru,” says Rishi Thondunatha, one of the boys on the ropes.

Gurudeva reviewing plans for Iraivan Temple with Selvanathan Sthapati at the carving site in Bangalore.

Today in the Ganapati Kulam Senthilnathaswami and Mayuran are working on digital imagery. Here, Senthilnathaswami is color correcting all the images that will be in our new book on the line of Guru's, "The Guru Chronicles".

This is Gurudeva in India on the 1983 Innersearch speaking at a temple in Tamil Nadu. Mr. Murti, who has since gone to Siva's feet, is translating for the audience. Mr Murti was our Indian liaison officer for several decades. He had amazing executive powers. There was nothing he could not get done. We will always remember him for his dedicated service.

Mayuran is scanning our whole Rajam Art Collection at high resolution. This utterly fantastic collection of art will eventually be available online in our new digital library website.

Much of this art is present in the Trilogy books, and we will show you large sized versions in the days to come.

The Ganapati Kulam is hard at work finishing up The Guru Chronicles, The Making of America’s First Hindu Master,a momentous 850-page tome, more than three decades in the making, compiling the stories of the Nandinatha Sampradaya’s Kailasa Parampara. The back cover will display the photo at left and the following paragraph:

Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami (1927-2001) sailed for Sri Lanka in 1947 to find his guru. After years of arduous training, he fell at the feet of the Tamil master, Siva Yogaswami. Following his guru’s orders, the illumined yogi returned to America to teach the path of enlightenment. Ultimately, he was recognized and befriended by India’s spiritual leaders as the first Hindu guru born in the West. Gurudeva, as he was affectionately known, founded the Saiva Siddhanta Yoga Order and established Kauai’s Hindu Monastery in Hawaii. Hinduism’s many guru lineages are the spiritual rivers that pass the power on through the ages. The lineage that he joined extends to his guru’s guru, Chellappaswami, and before him to Kadaitswami, then a nameless rishi and countless others, back to Rishi Tirumular and his guru, Maharishi Nandinatha, some 2,200 years ago in the high Himalayas.

Stay tuned for a peek at the front cover!

This past phase we have been compiling scans of paper manuscripts of old Saiva writings. These are turned into PDF’s for easy viewing. When the priest in Tamil Nadu, Professor Bhatt, set out to rescue scriptures held by the priests families, in many cases the families did not want to give up their collection, so arrangements were made to copy the original palm leaf and other manuscripts that were in the Granth script and transpose them into Devanagari.

This heritage included many Saiva Agamas and other very interesting and useful texts.

This text was written centuries ago by a Sivachariya priest who was also the Mathadhipati of an Aadheenam in Tamil Nadu.

Thanks to the generosity of the Digital Dharma Drive donors, we were able to hire our long time developer, Andre Garzia from Brasil part time on a regular monthly basis for a year. Andre went to California to a high-tech LiveCode developer conference and flew over to Hawaii to work with Sivakatirswami for three weeks.

He and Sivakatirswami are master-minding a back end database to contain the metadata for all our media assets: publications, audio, video, still images, and other web resources. These will be served dynamically on the new Himalayan Academy Digital Library web site.

We looked at all the content management systems available today and decided to build our own.

Last week Andre completed the framework for publications and delivery of ePub books. This week he is working on the framework for audio. He and Sivakatirswami review and discuss the diverse array of our requirements.

Audio is tricky. For a single Natchintanai song we may have 10 different versions by different artists, one of which is the model to be used for learning… then we have the lyrics in Tamil, a transliteration and a literal translation and PDF’s to along with each one. Creating a data structure to contain all this and keep it clear, uncomplicated and efficiently coded for super fast delivery, easy data entry, editing and update is a big challenge.

Hmmm. For Bodhinatha’s talks we have something called “location given” and we will need another field for that… let’s call it “geo_location” and we can use it for other media asset that my relate to place on the planet.

Andre has years of experience and watching him write LiveCode is like watching a musician play music.

Andre is creating desktop client applications that Sivakatirswami and the team here can use to upload subject, titles, descriptions, language, category etc information for every single media asset on the server in California.

“Getting the data out to a web page is the easy part. Getting it in and making it maintainable, flexible and easy to update… that’s the hard part and that’s what we need to be thinking about….”

Oh No! The unicode titles for Spanish, Russian and French publications are breaking everything!

No problem… Andre doesn’t believe in problems. At the end of the day he only has solutions.

When the new web site is up you will have no idea all the man hours that will have gone into the “back end” of the site. We look forward to providing you deeper richer access to all the resources on the web site and after that some cool new features which we will keep under wraps until they appear later this year.

Andre is also interested in the teachings and reads Gurudeva’s books. Here he is attending our Sun One Homa.

Thanks to all the Digital Dharma Drive donors and thanks to Andre for his hard work and focus.

Today the Ganapati Kulam gave their report. The editorial team finished the work on Hinduism Today last phase and is moving on to new project, which we do each quarter in the first two months after the last issue was produced.

Paramacharya Sadasivanathaswami has been working on the image galleries that will be in the back of the new Parampara book. He is also working on new signage to go along with the major upgrade to the front area of our property.

Acharya Kumarnathaswami has been working on our monthly newsletter. Acharya Arumuganathaswami is working collecting artwork for an Indian History Illustrated section of the magazine which will include visuals that will accompany each of the five Chapter of on Indian History that he already produced. This will all eventually for a fabulous single book.

Sivakatirswami picks up the ball for the magazine after the editorial is finished, produces PDF, sends these to the printer and prepares the production guide for each issue Just today he signed off on the files and next week the July issue will go to press. He is has also been working with Andre Garzia who is here at the Aadheenam for three weeks, developing the server side database and delivery systems for our upgrade of the Himalayan Academy web site to a fast, accessible Digital Library.

Senthilnathaswami has been doing video of Bodhinatha, capturing the video we took of Sri Sri Jeyendra Puri Swami’s two-hour long Sri Chakra puja that he does every day of his life, even when traveling. Swami is also coordinating the kulam’s initiatives to upgrade our web.

Sadhaka Satyanatha was involved in the closing production of the magazine, carefully reading and proofing all the pages, fixing some last-minute issues. He has also deeply involved on the advance planning for the web site upgrade, from micro details to macro decisions.

Many more projects were mentioned, more than than we can remember!

We have tested on iPhone and iPad and the RSS feed works just fine:

Go to this page on your iPhone or iPad in Safari.

http://www.himalayanacademy.com/podcasts

Then you scroll down, click the “RSS Feed” link under Gurudeva’s section. Your iPhone will switch to reader.mac.com in Safari. Book mark this page and add it to your home screen. Now you can return to this URL and listen to any of the talks posted here since January 1st. You will see the name of the talk e.g. “gr_taka-1425.mp3” and right above. It is a small link to click, it takes a few seconds for the arrow to appear after you select a talk and it will play the audio for you. A new talk is added at the top every day.

Enjoy.

Years ago we had a collection of 365 talks by Gurudeva. These were the best of his TAKA upadeshas in answer to Cybercadet questions along with his recordings of Merging with Siva. The RSS feed was to roll-over and start again each year, but it did not. We finally have it working again. For those who are facile with RSS use this URL in your favorite reader to play the latest “episode”

http://www.himalayanacademy.com/audio/podcasts/gurudeva_taka_mws.rss.irev

If you are not facile with RSS you can listen to these on your computer and also get a different image of Gurudeva every time you load the talk. (quicktime required on your machine)

Just download our small application to your desktop. And we also have a linux version, finally!

Inspired short talks by a Mystical Master

RSS Feed

This podcast features short daily episodes, from one to seven minutes long, of talks given by one of the most influential and inspiring spiritual leaders of our time. Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami’s discourses range from deeply esoteric subjects to everyday human concerns, always revealing the enlightened perspective of a Hindu mystical master.

Gurudeva’s Daily Podcast player: A small application that plays Gurudeva’s Podcast for the day.

•   Gurudeva’s Daily Podcast player for Mac OSX
•   Gurudeva’s Daily Podcast player installer for Windows
•   Gurudeva’s Daily Podcast player for Linux

These are newly issued apps and we have tested the Mac and Linux versions, if you are a windows users, we have made a proper Windows Installer. We would appreciate feedback that it is working well or not. Please email “studyhall@hindu.org” with your comments. Be sure to tell us what system you are using.

We are not making mobile apps at this time. Android users may be able to just run the RSS feed. Right now these talks are not available at the Apple store. When they do become available there we will let you know and you can get them on your iPod. Meanwhile the above application will get the day talk for you on your desktop.