‘Mindshare’

By B. V. Prathyusha - Deccan Herald - Bangalore, India
Thursday, January 10, 2008

A quiet group of people sit in a circle waiting for the session to begin.

The wooden floors and wall-to-wall shelves filled with books seem to add to the calm that one could sense in the room.

Definitely the right setting for a meeting of the philosophy group ‘Mindshare’ that meets every month at Easylib, a library in Koramangala.

The group has its regulars but is basically open to anyone, so there are new people in every session. A topic and a moderator are chosen by the group for the coming month’s discussion. Initially, moderated by Geeta Ramanujam of Kathalaya, the group is now self-sufficient and one of the members volunteers to be the moderator.

An interesting aspect of the group is that they are not a reading group or a book club in the true sense.

Says Vani Mahesh, proprietor, Easy Library, “People these days don’t have time to read half a dozen books on the subject and come prepared for a book club meeting. So instead, we have a moderator who will research the topic and bring books to the meeting.

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The group has covered subjects like the Upanishads, philosophy of Osho, J. Krishnamurthy, Tibetan book of the dead, Western philosophers, and much more. This month’s discussion was a comparison of Buddhism and Hinduism - the differences and similarities.

They read from books like ‘Buddhism and Christianity in light of Hinduism’, ‘Sarvadarsanasangraha of Madhavacharya’, ‘Basic ways of knowing’ and various others and then went on to discuss these theories of knowledge and the differences in both the philosophies.

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The group meets every month at Easy Library in Koramangala. The next month’s session is on Sufism in the first week of February. For exact details, visit www.easylib.com