Satish Kumar

Desert Island Discs: Archive 2005-2010

BBC

Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 804 Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2005

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the peace campaigner Satish Kumar. He has dedicated his life to promoting a peaceful, measured way of living; walking thousands of miles to raise awareness for his cause. Satish was born in Rajasthan, India, in 1936. As a child he decided to follow a spiritual life and, until he was 18, Kumar lived the life of an itinerant Jain monk, travelling from village to village with no more possessions than a begging bowl and a change of clothes.

Then in 1961, news from Britain reached Kumar. The 90-year-old philosopher and peace campaigner Bertrand Russell had been arrested for his anti-nuclear activities and sentenced to a week in prison. Kumar saw it as a call to action - if a 90-year-old man was prepared to go to jail for peace, what could he, a young man in his 20s, contribute to the struggle? Together with his friend Prabhakar Menon, Satish walked to the four nuclear capitals - Moscow, Paris, London and Washington. Their journey began at the grave of Mahatma Gandhi and ended, two and a half years later at the grave of John F Kennedy. For the past 30 years Satish has edited the magazine Resurgence, which promotes an ecological way of living - and he has pioneered the Human Scale Education movement.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Ma Solitude by Georges Moustaki Book: The Collected Writings by Mahatma Gandhi Luxury: A spade

Transcript

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0:42.2	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:45.3	The program was originally broadcast in 2005, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.
0:50.7	Music was Sue Lolly.
1:09.0	My castaway this week is a man of peace.
1:28.8	For the last 32 years he's produced a magazine that argues for the virtues of nonviolence and ecological awareness and against speed, size and the relentless pursuit of the individual. The growth of the magazine, resurgence, from a homespun newsletter to a quality production mirrors the life of its editor.
1:30.0	He was born in India.
1:34.9	At the age of nine, he became a monk, devoted to a totally ascetic way of life.
1:39.4	He left the order at 18 to become a follower of Gandian principles,
1:46.6	and in 1962 he set out with a friend to walk from Gandhi's grave in New Delhi to the four nuclear capitals of the world, Moscow, Paris, London and Washington. The walk established him as a pioneer
1:52.8	of ecological humanism and friends of many like-minded people, Bertrand Russell and later
1:59.0	Yehudi Menouin and Prince Charles to name but three.
2:02.6	We have become human doings rather than beings, he says. Slow down, you will go further than you ever
2:09.6	imagined. He is Satish Kumar. So slow is beautiful, Satish, but it's difficult to achieve in a society that's taught itself that speed is the essence.
2:20.6	And frankly, it's a lovely thought, but it's hopelessly impractical, isn't it?
2:25.0	It is impractical as we live today.
	...

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