Mitr LILA

At LILA, we call every friend a Mitr. Mitr is a very an­cient word, be­long­ing to the Proto-Indo Iran­ian root, which pre­ceded the sep­a­ra­tion of Indo-Aryan and Iran­ian lan­guage fam­i­lies.Slowly, the word en­tered many dif­fer­ent tra­di­tions: Mitra, the Rgvedic deity in San­skrit, Mehr in today’s Per­sian, de­rivated from the an­cient Zo­ras­trian, Maitreya, the Bod­hisattva show­ing the path to en­light­en­ment in Bud­dhism, and also the Mithraic mys­ter­ies of Greco-Ro­man re­li­gion…

The word Mitr comes from the Aves­tan roots mei, “to bind” and tr, “that which causes”. A Mitr is that which causes a bind­ing. As the lin­guis­tic his­tory shows, this con­cept cuts across bound­aries and cul­tures. It is a covenant, a promise that is kept across dis­tances.

A con­tem­po­rary as­sump­tion, ac­cord­ing to which Mitr is uniquely a San­skrit word, is to­tally wrong. Such di­vi­sive at­tempts to mo­nop­o­lise the term have to be re­sisted, through the multi-di­men­sion­al­ity of Mitr. At LILA, we use it across parts of speech, gen­ders, lan­guages and cul­tures. For us, ‘Mitr’ means ‘Friend’ as much as it is ‘to Be­friend’ – the ini­tia­tive to get closer to each other. The knowl­edge of any par­tic­u­lar lan­guage is not re­quired to un­der­stand and use the word ‘Mitr’, and it ap­plies to and finds its in­spi­ra­tion from all cul­tures. ‘Mitr’, fi­nally is gen­der-free – not just open to two, or three gen­ders, but to the pos­si­bil­i­ties and po­ten­tials of in­nu­mer­able gen­ders.

 

 

‘Mitr LILA’: Being our Mitr

LILA is con­ceived as a rich and com­plex un­der­tak­ing, meant to evolve in un­ex­pected ways in un­trod­den di­rec­tions. Our own team is keenly aware that we may not, at any point in our his­tory, know all the forms that LILA would take. Im­plicit here is our sur­ren­der to the di­men­sion of time — LILA is an idea that would con­tin­u­ously man­i­fest through time. Hence, against the anx­i­eties of our epoch, we re­claim time as our ally. To do this, we must be sur­rounded by peo­ple who share the faith we have in time.

At­ten­tion is the hard­est thing to come by these days. Our times are marked by a mul­ti­plic­ity of in­ter­ests and ac­tiv­i­ties. While this may seem an im­prove­ment in terms of human well-be­ing and im­me­di­ate sat­is­fac­tion, it also bears the in­her­ent risk of play­ers los­ing rigour in the long term, thus jeop­ar­dis­ing the rel­e­vance, scope and sus­tain­abil­ity of en­ter­prises and in­vest­ments. That is why we need life-long friends whose at­ten­tion and in­ten­sity never flag.

As a Mitr, we will count on you for the larger process of LILA’s evo­lu­tion. LILA is a peo­ple’s move­ment, but it can re­main so only on the con­di­tion of gen­uine and pro­found com­mit­ment of the peo­ple in­volved. We con­sider each of you a real friend, whom any of us at LILA would feel free to go to, to ask for help or ad­vice. We rely upon our Mitron . We hope to see these friend­ships be­com­ing long-stand­ing re­la­tion­ships with LILA.

We wish to fea­ture here a few of our Mitron, peo­ple as well as or­gan­i­sa­tions. They have shown their com­mit­ment to be­come our fel­low trav­ellers, by of­fer­ing us their com­pan­ion­ship, ideas, and sup­port (in fi­nances and kind).

[Under con­struc­tion]

 

‘Mitr LILA’: Be­come a Friend!

As a Mitr, you be­come a stake­holder in what LILA en­vi­sions and ac­tu­alises. Through your in­ter­ven­tions, your points of views, your com­ments and crit­i­cisms, you too will make LILA.

We make Mitron through dif­fer­ent modes and events, but we also open our in­vi­ta­tion to re­ceive friend­ship through your ini­tia­tive. If you think you share the com­mit­ment that con­nects us, please leave your in­for­ma­tion below and… mitr LILA!

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