Diary 1963 - Murshid Sam's Living Stream

Diaries 1963-2I have before me “Toward Economic Communication in Asia” by one Davie Wightman of theUniversity of Birmingham. It lists over thirty international and UN agencies, the major potion ofwhich receive goodly sums from the United States Treasury. Yet practically every one of these projectsor commissions is overlapped or rivaled by some more recent U.S. agency.I came out strongly for financial aid to India—yes through the World Bank and InternationalMonetary Fund etc. I have seen vast natural resources untouched. My present jibe is that India needsto develop its external Golconda (opening up the mines which were simply abandoned) and its internalGolconda (its heart) to the world. We are wrong, no doubt—and to me there is no doubt aboutit—in even proposing a cultural exchange with Russia which has almost nothing to give us, andrejecting cultural exchanges with Asian nations which have everything to give. But if we are going tooffer financial aid, it should come through venture capital to re-open diamond and gold mines, obtainmineral concessions and explore the Mountains—not only the Himalayas. In Hyderabad I foundthe first office of an internal Geological Survey, but if you mention this everybody goes wild.The time has come either to get back of the UN agencies or to withdraw from it excepting tofinance the tenth in accord with our vote in the upper chamber; in other words, if we are going intothe foreign aid business we should stop financing the UN bodies in the same spheres.If “Newsweek” is correct in this same issue, we are or have helped France financially whichwill ally itself with China to cut our throat. And if an associate power does this, how about someothers? The world has turned, I believe, without humankind and nations receiving external financialhelp to carry on functions.I have seen our Four H boys go abroad, mingle with the people, and nobody accepted theirreports. And the only Peace Corps volunteers I have seen were accompanied by a number of pressrepresentatives. Who was paying those press representatives and why?We are losing in Cambodia. The last thing we can get into our heads is to accept cultural exchangewith Asian nations at any level (we are too concerned with cultural exchange with “Russia”).The whole Buddhist world is dominated by a super-body—I met the leaders in Japan and Thailandand knew them in Ceylon, Malay, etc. Instead of having Buddhism taught by Buddhists, we haveeven accepted the findings of men who are not even scum. A Japanese spoke at a university on Buddhismrecently—everybody knew about “Buddhism” but when he asked where that “Buddhism”was practiced, what were the ceremonies and the organization, not one could answer. Fortunatelythey accepted him and applauded him. But this is not official.