ups and downs...

You might have been aware that I had an article published late last year on the Satyananda Yoga organisation in Australia and their involvement as Case Study 21 in the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The paper was accepted by a journal and published without my knowledge. They never let me, even after several requests prior to and after publication actually make the necessary changes to the draft document I sent them. As a result, it included many errors. The worst one was the defamatory mistake of confusing a victim of abuse as a perpetrator. This could not go unchecked. I sent emails weekly trying to get them to either unpublish the article or allow the necessary changes. Finally, I decided to make up a story that the aggrieved individual was pursing defamation suit. This got the journal to respond almost immediately. Still, the copy editor was so unbelievably bad at their job they did not include the one most important change...this lead to two more attempts and still not all the errors were addressed by the copy editor. At one point, curious about the progress, I went to their website and realised that the file was not available. The next day, all mention of the article was erased. I wrote to the journal and received a reply that said the editors had noticed a 'few discrepancies against Indians'. They did not bother to explain these discrepancies or how they might be addressed. So, the article is now 'unpublished' for what can only be described, I suppose, as 'hate speech'. What a joke. If you want to read the article, then, it is available here, with the errors the copy editor could not accomplish solving.

On another, more successful note, one paper that we co-wrote a couple of years ago has just been accepted for publication. It is about the revival of Sanskrit as a spoken language. It looks at the historical sociological complexities and current sociolinguistic as well as political issues. It is scheduled for publication later this year in the Mentalities Journal. You can read the abstract, here. 

We are off to Canada and America very soon for 3 weeks.  Attending and presenting at a bunch of conferences.