In WTF News: Holy Man Claims He’s Gone Without Food or Water for 70 years

video report via Al-Jazeera‘s Imran Khan

The 83-year-old yogi says he hasn’t consumed food or water for seven decades, and the doctors in India are trying to learn his secrets – either to train a batch of meditating super soldiers or at least prove this 70-year fast has been nothing but than a lengthy hoax.

According to Dean Nelson of the Daily Telegraph (published April 28, 2010):

Prahlad Jani is being held in isolation in a hospital in Ahmedabad, Gurjarat, where he is being closely monitored by India’s defence research organization, who believe he may have a genuine quality which could help save lives.

He has now spent six days without food or water under strict observation and doctors say his body has not yet shown any adverse effects from hunger or dehydration.

Mr Jani, who claims to have left home aged seven and lived as a wandering sadhu or holy man in Rajasthan, is regarded as a ‘breatharian’ who can live on a ‘spiritual life-force’ alone. He believes he is sustained by a goddess who pours an ‘elixir’ through a hole in his palate. His claims have been supported by an Indian doctor who specializes in studies of people who claim supernatural abilities, but he has also been dismissed by others as a “village fraud.”

India’s Defence Research Development Organisation, whose scientists develop drone aircraft, intercontinental ballistic missiles and new types of bombs. They believe Mr Prahlad could teach them to help soldiers survive longer without food, or disaster victims to hang on until help arrives.

“If his claims are verified, it will be a breakthrough in medical science,” said Dr G Ilavazhagan, director of the Defence Institute of Physiology & Allied Sciences.

“We will be able to help save human lives during natural disasters, high altitude, sea journeys and other natural and human extremities. We can educate people about the survival techniques in adverse conditions with little food and water or nothing at all.”

So far, Mr Prahlad appears to be standing up to scrutiny. He has not eaten or drunk any fluids in six days, and similarly has not passed urine or a stool in that time. He remains fit and healthy and shows no sign of lethargy. Doctors will continue observing him for 15 days in which time they would expect to see some muscle wastage, serious dehydration, weight loss,and fatigue followed by organ failure.

It is common in India for Jains and Hindus to fast, sometimes for up to eight days, without any adverse affects, as part of their religious worship. Most humans cannot survive without food for 50 days. The longest hunger strike recorded is 74 days.

According to Dr Sudhir Shah, who examined him in 2003, he went without food or water for ten days in which urine appeared to be reabsorbed by his body after forming in his bladder. Doubts were expressed about his claim after his weight fell slightly at the end of the trial.

posted by: Harold Johns III

Music Archive: Johnny Cash “At San Quentin”

At San Quentin is a recording of a live concert given by Johnny Cash to the inmates of San Quentin State Prison in 1969. In addition to its release on record, the concert was also filmed by Granada Television for a 60 minute documentary, producing the footage shown above.

In 2000, Sony Legacy issued an expanded CD/DVD version of this landmark 1969 live LP, which included “A Boy Named Sue”, the Shel Silverstein novelty number that became one of Cash’s biggest hits. The original LP contained ten songs from Cash’s show, which actually ran far longer; the re-release added eight additional Cash performances. This 2-CD set presents the entire concert, start to finish. Not only assembling all Cash’s performances, but those by the other members of his stage show: June Carter, her mother and sisters (performing as the Carter Family), Cash’s buddy Carl Perkins of “Blue Suede Shoes” (and “Daddy Sang Bass”) fame, and the Statler Brothers, known then for their 1965 hit “Flowers on the Wall”.  Among the high points is their unreleased, spine-chilling gospel medley of “He Turned the Water into Wine”, “Daddy Sang Bass” and “The Old Account.”

posted by: Harold Johns III

Style Icon: Anna May Wong

Via Wikipedia:

Anna May Wong (January 3, 1905 – February 2, 1961) was an American actress, the first Chinese American movie star, and the first Asian American to become an international star. Her long and varied career spanned both silent and sound film, television, stage, and radio.

Born near the Chinatown neighborhood of Los Angeles to second-generation Chinese-American parents, Wong became infatuated with the movies and began acting in films at an early age. During the silent film era, she acted in The Toll of the Sea (1922), one of the first movies made in color, and Douglas Fairbanks’ The Thief of Bagdad (1924). Wong became a fashion icon, and by 1924 had achieved international stardom.

Frustrated by the stereotypical supporting roles she reluctantly played in Hollywood, she left for Europe in the late 1920s, where she starred in several notable plays and films, among them Piccadilly (1929).

She spent the first half of the 1930s traveling between the United States and Europe for film and stage work. Wong was featured in films of the early sound era, such as Daughter of the Dragon (1931) and Daughter of Shanghai (1937), and with Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932).

In 1935 Wong was dealt the most severe disappointment of her career, when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer refused to consider her for the leading role in its film version of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, choosing instead the European Luise Rainer to play the leading role in “yellowface”. Wong spent the next year touring China, visiting her family’s ancestral village and studying Chinese culture. In the late 1930s, she starred in several B movies for Paramount Pictures, portraying Chinese-Americans in a positive light. She paid less attention to her film career during World War II, when she devoted her time and money to helping the Chinese cause against Japan. Wong returned to the public eye in the 1950s in several television appearances as well as her own series in 1951, The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong, the first U.S. television show starring an Asian-American. She had been planning to return to film in Flower Drum Song when she died in 1961, at the age of 56.

For decades after her death, Wong was remembered principally for the stereotypical “Dragon Lady” and demure “Butterfly” roles that she was often given. Her life and career were re-evaluated in the years around the centennial of her birth, in three major literary works and film retrospectives. Interest in her life story continues and another biography was published in 2009.

Below is a video from Sexy Beijing featuring Anna May Wong. If you can get past the dorky Sex and the City intro, the episode actually contains an interesting and informative interview with Graham Russel Gao Hodges, author of Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend.

Style Icon: Iris Apfel

-
“There’s a sad lack of glamour in the world today,” Apfel mourns. “And there’s absolutely no fantasy.”
-

Via The Observer:

Iris Apfel is 88, a “geriatric starlet” (her own description) who has suddenly become a staple of hip New York life – photographed by Bruce Weber, admired by designers such as Isaac Mizrahi and Duro Olowu, featured in Paper magazine, Vogue and the New York Times, blown up beyond life-size in the window of Barneys department store. In the five years since a show of her clothes at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute was a word-of-mouth sensation, she has taken the world of style by storm. Her looks are now so legendary, so otherworldly, that many who first saw the exhibition assumed she was dead. Her nephew made a habit of taking friends to see it, and she gave him strict instructions: “If you hear anyone say I’m dead, tell them: ‘No, she’s very much alive and just walking around to save funeral expenses’”…

“People say: ‘You have inspired me, you’ve given me courage…’ They’ve gone so far as to say you’ve changed my life! And I would come back and say to my husband: ‘I can’t understand it – what kind of poor little life did she have if I had to come and change it?’” Her husband said she should ask. And sure enough, the next time someone said she’d changed her life, the fan was a 70-year-old lady in Florida. Apfel thanked her, then took her aside and said: “Would you mind very much explaining that to me?” So the woman did. She said that she’d never wanted to look just like everybody else, but she wasn’t sure how to do that without looking silly. Once she saw Apfel’s show, she knew, and what’s more, she said, “now that I’ve learned I don’t have to look like everybody else, I don’t have to think like everybody else”….

I suspect Apfel has become a more intriguing proposition with age and white hair, as if she and her clothes have evolved into an entirely new species – a “rare bird of fashion”, as the title of her book has it. And while she has advice to give if you ask for it, she recognises that not everyone can carry off such wonders as have erupted from her mind. “Doing your own thing is very good,” Apfel concludes, “if you have a thing to do.”

Read the full article here

posted by: Tricia Rock

Watch: My Country, My Country

Studio Synopsis:

Working alone in Iraq over eight months, director/cinematographer Laura Poitras creates an extraordinarily intimate portrait of Iraqis living under U.S. occupation. Her principal focus is Dr. Riyadh, an Iraqi medical doctor, father of six and Sunni political candidate. An outspoken critic of the occupation, he is equally passionate about the need to establish democracy in Iraq, arguing that Sunni participation in the January 2005 elections is essential. Yet all around him, Dr. Riyadh sees only chaos, as his waiting room fills each day with patients suffering the physical and mental effects of ever-increasing violence. Dramatically interwoven into the personal journey of Dr. Riyadh is the landscape of the US military occupation, with Australian private security contractors, American journalists and the UN officials who orchestrate the elections. Unfolding like a narrative drama, My Country, My Country follows the agonizing predicament and gradual descent of one man caught in the tragic contradictions of the U.S. occupation of Iraq and its project to spread democracy in the Middle East.

Director’s Statement:

This film was motivated by a sense of despair about the contradictions of the U.S. occupation of Iraq and its project to implement democracy in the Middle East through the use of military force. I wanted to understand these contradictions from the perspective of the people living them, on the ground.

I spent eight months in Iraq, from June 2004 to February 2005. I worked alone in the field, operating camera and sound. I met Dr. Riyadh in July 2004 at Abu Ghraib Prison while he was conducting an inspection.

Although My Country, My Country focuses on the January 2005 elections, it is a broader story about U.S. foreign policy post-9/11. The use of preemptive military force and the goal of implementing democracy in the Middle East mark a radical shift in U.S. and world politics. The January 2005 elections were the first to be held after the U.S. invasion, and thus are in some ways a testing ground for this new era.

Learn more about the film via PBS or Zeitgeist Films

Watch My Country, My Country free of charge in 11 parts via YouTube

My Country, My Country is also available on Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” system

posted by: Harold Johns III