Kedar's Page

I was always a seeker. As a young journalist I visited many workshops and avantgarde groups in various cultural fields, made my own experiences and wrote about them in newspapers and magazines. I was also active as a photographer and published my work. I then met my wife Nirmala who invited me one day to a lecture by one of Sri Chinmoy's students at the University of Zurich. This was on November 27, 1978. At that time I was very sceptical and didn't believe that following the teachings of a spiritual master was as important as it became later in my life. I was fascinated by the path of Sri Chinmoy because it does not implicate an escape from today's world but in the contrary we all follow our daily activities but try to do them in a cheerful and affirmative approach.

Photography was always a passion in my life. When I was a little child, my father gave me a little camera called "Agfa Clack" and I made my first steps. Although my father was not a photographer he implanted in me the love for photography and trained my eyes to look for the important and compose each frame best possible. From amateur pictures arose more advanced works and as mentioned I could do a lot of assignments for daily papers and magazines. I was editor of a youth paper for seven years, picture editor in an agency and responsable for the lay-out of a Swiss economical bi-weekly paper. Finally I created my own magazine, a newsletter for fine art photography, called "print letter" which fulfilled my life for another seven years. It was mainly a one-man job from writing articles in English and German, compiling news from the art photography market, doing interviews with skilled photographers and reporting from festivals like the famous one in Arles in Southern France that still exists. Most of the published work was in black & white, because most of the famous fine art photograhers like Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Ansel Adams and Paul Caponigro worked in black & white.

Phography for me was also a means of personal expression, although I never worked as a full-time photographer. The SX-70 and Polaroids in general fascinated me specially because first you immediately see what you created and secondly the fixed format is a challenge. Also color for the first time was gaining importance. I created many Polaroids over the years until I recently switched to digital cameras for my personal work.

As a logic consequence I jumped into the filmmaking world some 25 years. I bought a Super-8 film camera and started to capture my teacher Sri Chinmoy during regular meetings in New York. Although I loved producing films much more than doing videos, I realized that the new medium Video was more appropriate for the documentation work I did, because I didn' depend on a 2 1/2 min film roll that goes to a lab and can be watched only a week later. With videos I had longer running times and no noise (the movie camera was quite loud). So I rented a video camera for Sri Chinmoy's visit to Switzerland in 1987 where he played on a pipe organ in Zurich and played on 100 instruments in the Swiss mountain village Davos. A little later I bought my first S-VHS video camera and since then I became more and more active in the video world. Over the years I produced over 100 documentary films on Sri Chinmoy, most of them now available as DVD's. If you want to see some of my works, you will find short clips on www.srichinmoy.tv where you can browse through the archive and features, and download the clips.

After my journalistic adventures I opened a wood-oven bakery inspired by Sri Chinmoy. Its name was Ecstasy-Sky. For more than 13 years we produced various healthy organic breads and sweets every day and delivered to health food and other specialized shops in and around Zurich. Then I could take over a health food shop myself and for a short time I also managed a juice bar. After a long time of being my own boss I tried to be a humble worker in one of the enterprises owned by students of Sri Chinnmoy and first chose Madal Bal, a wholesale company. There I worked for 12 years and was responsible a the new department called Feng Shui that I established when I joined the company. One of my main activities was selling the famous Himalayan Rock Salt for eating, bathing and decoration purposes. Other items I deltg with were crystals, lamps out of natural stones, 100 % pure palm wax candles and hand-hammered singing bowls from Nepal. In general I like to sell things I like myself.

In spring of 2012 I had problems with the retina of my left eye and therefore had to calm my many activities. By autumn of 2012 my health become better again and I am now doing as much as possible to manifest my master's light through blogs, videos, slideshows, interviews and the production of DVD's. On a daily base I am moderating two blogs with photographs (srichinmoyphoto.com) and artwork (daily.srichinmoyart.com) of Sri Chinmoy and monitor many other blogs such as INSPIRING THINGS FROM AROUND THE WORLD and Photos HD with oversize pictures on various subject matter to enjoy for everybody. As we are entering a new age of sharing, most of my videos and photographs are available for free on the video sites vimeo and YouTube as well as on the mentioned blogs. In November of 2013 I joined the team of a new vegan, vegetarian and organic restaurant in the heart of Zurich, called THE SACRED/VEGELATERIA on a part-time base. Good nutrition always has been a key concern of mine and therefore this work make sense for me. To include my journalistic skills I also started a blog called BIO & VEGAN (vegelateria.wordpress.com) for the enterprise.

- Kedar Misani, January 2016