Weekend Dialogue

If you ever question life, you might realize that most questions spur from a sense of deep disturbance about what is happening with you and the rest of the world. So a delicate, sensitive, and earnest person would ask the inevitable – ‘How is one to live in this world’? Perhaps, there is no formula to follow, but definitely, there is a living that is right and harmonious. What is that living? Is it practical and not ensconced in some fairy tales? Based on the teachings of J. Krishnamurti, let’s consider it and explore. The exploration will include K videos, dialogues, and some other self-discovery activities.

J. Krishnamurti: “The mind is the past, the brain is the past, the feelings are the past, and action coming from these is the positive activity of the known. So when you ask how you are to live in the world, you are asking for a change of prisons … To live in this world sanely, there must be a radical change of the mind and of the heart.”

Nandini Patnaik has been associated with the work of J. Krishnamurti for more than four decades. A longtime teacher of English language and literature, Nandini has authored four books on Krishnamurti in English, including two biographical works, J. Krishnamurti: The Making of a World Teacher, Beyond the Pathless – Anecdotes from the Life of J. Krishnamurti, Living Is Not a Choice: You, Me, and Krishnamurti, and Awareness in Daily Living. Her latest book, Living Is Not a Choice is a collection of short stories that are seamlessly appended by excerpts from Krishnamurti literature. The stories highlight universal existential relationship problems and offer to approach them nontraditionally.

Nandini has also written several books in Odia (an Indian language) including a biography of Krishnamurti.

A member of KFI, Cuttack Centre, Nandini has contributed to the dissemination of the Teaching by translating into Odia a total of twenty-five publications of Krishnamurti. She is passionate about bringing the Teaching to people in self learning by offering them opportunity to ‘try it’, ‘do it’, and ‘see it’. She is now building a series of workable models that can be used in Krishnamurti Study Centers to let people live the teaching.