By Dada Vedaprajinananda

The surprise candidate of the presidential primary race is Donald Trump. He is now the front runner in public opinion polls among Republicans and as I travel around I hear ordinary people saying good things about him. Despite his public appeal he is widely denounced by commentators on the left and on the right. One political pundit, though not in favor of Trump, said that the reason for his success is that his campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” speaks to what common people are feeling.

Let’s look at the slogan and see whether Trump can actually deliver on his promise. Trump’s general idea is that America was once a great superpower but is now in a state of decline due to “stupid” politicians. Before we ask whether America is truly in decline and what is the cause of that decline, it is important to decide whether America was once “Great.” Continue reading

In my memoir From Brooklyn to Benares and Back, I wrote about a bus ride that I took in 1981. I was on a crowded bus making its way from Katmandu to Janakpur, a town in south Nepal near the Indian border. The bus was packed and the route was a treacherous, slow descent on narrow roads carved on the edge of mountains overlooking ravines and gorges. We made it safely but I still called it the bus ride from hell.

18 years later I took my first bus journey from Athens, Greece to Tirana, the capital of Albania. The bus departed from a chaotic station in Athens where hundreds of people pushed and shoved their way onto the white buses which took scores of emigres back to their home country. I was the only non-Albanian on the bus and the overnight journey, punctuated by a long and also chaotic wait at the Greek-Albanian border, was not fun. It was the bus ride from hell, part 2. Continue reading