The

Guiding Light
 Also by the author
My Journey: Transforming Dreams Into Action
The Righteous Life: The Very Best of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
Governance for Growth in India




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 Contents

Introduction
On Reading

Faith
Belief
Difficulties
Odds and Ends
Tributes
Some Thoughts
Radiance
The Might of Time

Acknowledgements
 Introduction

I don’t remember the first book I ever read. It is almost as if books were always there in my life, a solid,
tactile presence that exuded comfort and assurance. Yet, I know it was not so. When I was growing up, I
lived in a small town in southern India—Rameswaram. It did not have a library, and of course no
bookshops. We studied the holy book, the Koran, diligently and pored over our schoolbooks. For anything
more there were the newspapers. For a while I worked as a newspaper delivery boy, during the days of
World War II, and the feel of crisp, fresh paper on my fingers is a sensation that still gives me pleasure.
My introduction into the world of books and reading happened through my friend, brother-in-law and
first mentor, Jallaluddin. He was, at the time, when I was about ten years old, the only fully literate adult
inhabitant of the town. He had studied up to the Intermediate level and then gave up as he needed to start
working and earning. But he had an expansive, curious mind. His interests lay beyond the concerns of the
island and there were evenings when he read reports from the newspapers and told us of a world beyond
the one we inhabited. It was he who told us about the current political situation, news of the War, prices
of precious metals, and all other such information. I spent a lot of time with him, watching him read or
writing letters for the people of the town which they dictated to him. Somewhere, the power of the written
word imprinted on my mind. I understood that to know and love reading meant the freedom to travel to
any kind of world I wanted to. It could be the world of religion or philosophy—what I learnt in my Koran
class. Or it could be poetry and imagination. Or it could be understanding the words of famous people and
their lives.
Once I was older, I started reading more voraciously. I was still rather penniless since most of the
little money I got was used to pay my bills while I studied at the Madras Institute of Technology.
However, I discovered a tiny bookshop at Moore Market in Madras (now Chennai) whose owner was
happy to lend me books for a small deposit. I started reading in earnest, quickly making my way through
the classics, translations, collections of poetry and essays. I found works explaining concepts from
different religions interesting and I studied the holy books and texts of Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism,
the works of Confucius. The seeds for this were perhaps laid by my father, who was a deeply religious
man and knew the texts of Islam closely. By now my mind was getting ever more thirsty and I needed to
know many answers.
Once I started working and got deeper into the world of science, the questions about connections
between the worldly and the spiritual intrigued me. How are we all connected? Does science negate
spirituality? How can we keep our beliefs while delving into matters that require theorems and proofs to
establish their existence? I read the works of great scientists and philosophers who have studied these
matters. Questions of morality and codes to live one’s life by were also playing on my mind and the
works of thinkers like J. Krishnamurthi, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sri Aurobindo helped me to understand
not only myself but the rapidly unfolding world around me. These essays and books helped me analyse
situations better and understand my fellow workers and their motivations clearly.
One work that has been almost like a code for living for me is the Thirukural. It was written by saint
poet Thiruvalluvar over 2,000 years ago in the great age of Tamil Sangam literature and consists of
couplets or kurals. Each of these contains a profound truth or moral code, expressed in a few words but
enfolding astonishing wisdom within it. There has been hardly any moment of conflict or despair in my
life that the Thirukural has not helped to resolve.
 The other literary form that has intrigued and captivated me from my school days is poetry. I can still
recall a few poems that appeared in our literature textbooks. Later, I read the works of Shakespeare and
Milton and Donne. Milton’s Paradise Lost has been a particular favourite for decades and I have read
and reread those lines over and over again. The works of Indian masters like Tagore and Bharatiar and
Aurobindo too have deeply touched me with their visions for humankind and deep nationalistic strain. The
immediate passion that a poem can capture is perhaps unparalleled in any other form. I myself have
written a number of poems and each time I try to distil the essence of what I want to say into the lines, I
think of the great poems I have loved and admired.
As I grew older, I started thinking more and more about this nation of ours and where we are all
headed. What is the role of each citizen? What does the youth want? What are they entitled to? What are
their responsibilities? What is the vision that we need to keep before us as we traverse the path towards a
better and brighter future for each one of us? At this time in my life, I also became a writer myself. I
published my first book successfully and before I knew it I had authored quite a number of titles. With
each one not only did I get to understand the requirements of a writer better, I started thinking more deeply
on issues of development and vision. My reading became more oriented towards this as I had to
understand large amounts of data, look critically at reports and draw inferences that would help lay out a
vision document, one we called Vision 2020. Along with these, reading the works of Gandhi, Lincoln, and
the histories of nations kept me inspired to keep working on the mission of finding ways to make India a
developed nation in the near future and within our lifetimes.
In this book are included lines from literary, religious and philosophical works that have inspired and
guided me all through my life. There are quotations from religious texts that I have read closely and often
quoted in my writings and lectures. There are the works of classical greats like Milton, Shakespeare,
Donne, Tagore. There are some couplets or kurals from the Thirukural that I hope will inspire readers
who haven’t yet been introduced to this great work, to seek out the text either in original or in a good
translation and read it. There are extracts from essays that I have found thought provoking and which I feel
are essential reading for everybody. The book has been divided into sections and the quotations in each fit
within some broad frameworks like faith, inspirations, duties, tributes etc. But these are great works of
literature and their universal appeal can be understood by reading them in any context one wishes to place
them in.
The following pages are a tribute to the books and texts that have created me as a thinking being. I
hope every reader will not only appreciate these particular quotations, but also make an effort to read as
many of these works in their entireties to understand the thoughts better and in a deeper manner. This book
is a little window to further wonders and many more worlds beyond the ones we go about in. I hope I
have been able to open a few doors and windows and helped bring in some gusts of fresh thought and
ideas into your worlds.

A list of some of my favourite books

Light from Many Lamps, edited Lillian Watson

Man the Unknown, Alexis Carrell

Thirukural, Thiruvalluvar

Code Name God, Mani Bhaumik

Secret the Power, Rhonda Byrne

Works of Kabir
Silappathikaram, Ilango Adigal

Everyday Greatness, Stephen Covey

Gitanjali, Rabindranath Tagore

Paradise Lost, John Milton

The Prophet, Khalil Gibran

The Seat of the Soul, Gary Zukav

Holy Koran
Bhagavad Gita
Holy Bible
 On Reading

I hear all the time that people are reading less and less these days. Perhaps there are more distractions,
more gadgets, our lives are too busy to find a quiet corner and savour a book. Yet, this is a habit that we
need to keep alive in ourselves and inculcate in future generations. Reading is to the mind what a good
meal is to the body. It sustains, it nourishes, it helps us think, it helps us grow. I have for years spoken
about a few simple things we can do in our homes and around us to keep this habit alive. I hope you will
agree with my suggestions and try to implement some of them.
• Build home libraries. Gather books in one and twos and slowly build up a collection. Keep this
library as a gift for future generations, filling it with beautiful meaningful books.
• Read with your children. If you are a parent, keep aside some part of the day when you sit with your
children and read together. It could be the same book that you read together, or each can have his/her
own book that you read in companionable silence.
• If you are a teacher, or part of a school, bring interesting, age-appropriate books into the
classroom and read them together with the children. Begin discussions around them that will make
them think and love the act of reading.
• Visit bookstores and libraries when you go to any new place. Sometimes you may find more
information hidden away there than you expected.
Faith
In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the Mercy Giving.
All praise for Allah, Lord of the Worlds.
The All-Merciful, the Mercy Giving.
Master of the day of judgment.
You alone we worship and you alone we seek help from.
Show (guide) us the straight path.
The path of those upon whom you have bestowed (your) favours
and not of those who incurred your wrath (anger) and not of
those who have gone astray.
—Holy Koran
The mighty Lord on high, our deeds, as if at hand, espies:
The gods know all men do, though men would fain their deeds disguise.
Whoever stands, whoever moves, or steals from place to place,
Or hides him in his secret cell the gods his movements trace.

This earth is his, to him belong those vast and boundless skies;
Both seas within him rest, and yet in that small pool he lies.
Whoever far beyond the sky should think his way to wing,
He could not there elude the grasp of Varuna the king.

The ceaseless winkings all he counts of every mortal’s eyes:

He wields this universal frame, as gamester throws his dice.
Those knotted nooses which thou fling’st, o god, the bad to snare—
All liars let them overtake, but all the truthful spare.
—Atharva Veda, Book 4, Hymn 6
1. Judge not, that ye be not judged.
2. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be
measured unto you.
3. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in
thine own eye?
4. Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me cast out the mote out of thine eye; and lo, the beam is in
thine own eye?
5. Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out
the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
6. Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample
them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.
7. Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:
8. For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be
opened.
…
15. Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves.
16. By their fruits ye shall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
17. Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but the corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
18. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
19. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
20. Therefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
—Matthew 7, Holy Bible
Guard yourself from six things, and I am your security for paradise. When you speak, speak the truth,
perform what you promise, discharge your trust, be chaste in thought and action, and withhold your hand
from striking, from taking that which is unlawful and bad.
—Holy Koran
1. Judge me, O Lord; for I have walked in mine integrity:
I have trusted also in the Lord; therefore I shall not slide.
2. Examine me, O Lord, and prove me;
Try my reigns and my heart.
3. For thy loving kindness is before mine eyes:
And I have walked in thy truth..
…
8. Lord, I have loved the habitation of thy house,
And the place where thine honour dwelleth.
9. Gather not my soul with sinners,
Nor my life with bloody men:
10. In whose hands is mischief,
And their right hand is full of bribes.
11. But as for me, I will walk in mine integrity:
Redeem me, and be merciful unto me.
—Psalm 26, Holy Bible
If there be righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in
character,
If there be beauty in character, there will be harmony in the home.
If there be harmony in the home, there will be order in the nation.
If there be order in the nation, there will be peace in the world.
—Confucius
The Truth says: I consider the heart,
Not the form made from water and clay.
You say: I have a heart within me, whereas
The heart is above God’s throne, not below.
—Rumi
1. For all this I considered in my heart even to declare all this,
that the righteous, and the wise, and their works, are in the
hand of God: no man knoweth either love or hatred by all
that is before them.
10. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for
there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom,
in the grave, wither thou goest.
11. I returned, and saw under the sun, that the rice is not to
the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to
the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet
favour to men of skill: but time and chance happeneth to
them all.
—Ecclesiastes 9, Holy Bible
Moha refers to that which is opposed to knowledge. Actually real knowledge is the understanding that
every living being is eternally a servitor of the Lord, but instead of thinking oneself in that position, the
living entity thinks that he is not a servant, that he is the master of this material world, for he wants to lord
it over the material nature. That is his illusion. This illusion can be overcome by the mercy of the Lord or
by the mercy of a pure devotee. When that illusion is over, one agrees to act in Krishna consciousness.
—Bhagavad Gita As It is, His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
A personal effort is needed to preserve one’s faith, to let it grow within. Later—much later—one day,
looking back, we may see that everything that happened, even what seemed to us the worst, was a Divine
Grace to make us advance on the way; and then we become aware that the personal effort too was a grace.
—Questions and Answers, The Mother
There is One God
He is the Supreme Truth.
He, the Creator,
Is without fear and without hate.
He, the Omnipresent,
Pervades the universe.
He is not born,
Nor does He die to be born again.
By His grace shalt thou worship Him.

Before time itself

There was truth.
When time began to run its course
He was the truth.
Even now, He is the truth
And evermore shall truth prevail.
—The Japji
Belief
O ye who believe! fear God and believe in his apostle: two portions of his mercy will He give you. He
will bestow on you light to walk in, and He will forgive you: for God is Forgiving, Merciful;
That the people of the Book may know that they have no control over aught of the favours of God, and
that these gifts of grace are in the hands of God, and that He vouchsafeth them to whom he will; for God is
of immense bounty.
—Holy Koran
God can do tremendous things through the person who doesn’t care about who gets the credit and is
willing to share the credit, share the power, and share the glory…
It’s better to let somebody else do a worse job than I would do, than not have it done at all. The
surprising thing is that, more often than not, they do a better job of it than I would have done!
—Tough Times Never Last, But Tough People Do! Robert H. Schuller
WHAT GOD HATH PROMISED

God hath not promised skies always blue,

Flower strewn pathways all our lives through,
God hath not promised sun without rain,
Joy without sorrow, peace without pain.

But God hath promised strength for the day,

Rest for the labour, light for the way,
Grace for the trials, help from above,
Unfailing sympathy, undying love.
God hath not promised we shall not know
Toil and temptation, trouble and woe;
He hath not told us we shall not bear
Many a burden, many a care.

God hath not promised smooth roads and wide,

Swift, easy travel, needing no guide;
Never a mountain rocky and steep,
Never a river turbid and deep.
—Annie Johnson Flint
I belong to no nation, no civilization, no society, no race, but to the Divine. I obey no master, no ruler, no
law, no social convention, but the Divine. To Him I have surrendered all, will, life and self; for Him I am
ready to give all my blood, drop by drop, if such is His will, with complete joy; and nothing in his service
can be sacrifice, for all is perfect delight.
—The Mother: The Story of Her Life, Georges Van Vrekhem
THIS IS MY PRAYER TO THEE

This is my prayer to thee, my lord—strike, strike at the root of

penury in my heart.
Give me the strength lightly to bear my joys and sorrows.
Give me the strength to make my love fruitful in service.
Give me the strength never to disown the poor or bend my knees
before insolent might.
Give me the strength to raise my head high above daily trifles.
And give me the strength to surrender my strength to thy will
with love.
—Rabindranath Tagore
PARADISE LOST (an extract)

What if the sun

Be centre to the world; and other stars,
By his attractive virtue and their own
Incited, dance about him various rounds?
Their wandering course, now high, now low, then hid,
Progressive, retrograde, or standing still,
In six thou seest, and what if seventh to these
The planet earth, so steadfast though she seem,
Insensibly three different motions move?
Which else to several spheres thou must ascribe,
Moved contrary with thwart obliquities;
Or save the sun his labour, and that swift
Nocturnal and diurnal rhomb supposed,
Invisible else above all stars, the wheel
Of day and night; which needs not thy belief,
If earth, industrious of herself, fetch day
Travelling east, and with her part averse
From the sun’s beam meet night, her other part
Still luminous by his ray. What if that light,
Sent from her through the wide transpicuous air,
To the terrestrial moon be as a star
Enlightening her by day, as she by night
This earth reciprocal, if land be there,
Fields and inhabitants: Her spots thou seest
As clouds, and clouds my rain, and rain produce
Fruits in her soften’d soil, for some to eat
Allotted there; and other suns perhaps,
With their attendant moons, thou wilt descry,
Communicating male and female light;
Which two great sexes animate the world,
Stored in each orb perhaps with some that live:
For such vast room in nature unpossess’d
By living soul, desert and desolate,
Only to shine, yet scarce to contribute
Each orb a glimpse of light, convey’d so far
Down to this habitable, which returns
Light back to them, is obvious to dispute.
But whether thus these things, or whether not;
Whether the sun, predominant in heaven,
Rise on the earth; or earth rise on the sun;
He from the east his flaming road begin,
Or she from west her silent course advance,
With inoffensive pace that spinning sleeps
On her soft axle; while she paces even,
And bears thee soft with the smooth air along;
Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid;
Leave them to God above; him serve and fear.
Of other creatures, as him pleases best,
Wherever placed, let him dispose; joy thou
In what he gives to thee, this Paradise
And thy fair Eve; heaven is for thee too high
To know what passes there; be lowly wise:
Think only what concerns thee, and thy being;
Dream not of other worlds; what creatures there
Live, in what state, condition, or degree:
Contented that thus far hath been reveal’d,
Not of Earth only, but of highest heaven.
—John Milton
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To
reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must
sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
—The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, Oliver Wendell Holmes
I would like to tell the young men and women before me not to lose hope and courage. Success can only
come to you by courageous devotion to the task lying in front of you. I can assert without fear of
contradiction that the quality of the Indian mind is equal to the quality of any Teutonic, Nordic or Anglo-
Saxon mind. What we lack is perhaps courage … We need a spirit of victory, a spirit that will carry us to
our rightful place under the sun, a spirit, which will recognize that we, as inheritors of a proud
civilization, are entitled to a rightful place on this planet.
—C.V. Raman
PREPAREDNESS

For all your days prepare.

And meet them ever alike:
When you are the anvil, bear—
When you are the hammer, strike.
—Edwin Markham
OPPORTUNITY

They do me wrong who say I come no more

When once I knock and fail to find you in;
For every day I stand outside your door
And bid you wake, and rise to fight and win.

Wail not for precious chances passed away!

Weep not for golden ages on the wane!
Each night I burn the records of the day—
At sunrise every soul is born again!

Dost thou behold thy lost youth all aghast?

Dost reel from righteous Retribution’s blow?
Then turn from blotted archives of the past
And find the future’s pages white as snow.

Art thou a mourner? Rouse thee from thy spell;

Art thou a sinner? Sins may be forgiven;
Each morning gives thee wings to flee from hell,
Each night a star to guide thy feet to heaven.

Laugh like a boy at splendors that have sped,

To vanished joys be blind and deaf and dumb;
My judgments seal the dead past with its dead,
But never bind a moment yet to come.

Though deep in mire, wring not your hands and weep;

I lend my arm to all who say ‘I can!’
No shame-faced outcast ever sank so deep
But yet might rise and be again a man!
—Walter Malone
THE PRAYER OF SAINT FRANCIS

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love,
Where there is injury, pardon,
Where there is doubt, faith,
Where there is despair, hope,
Where there is darkness, light,
Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved, as to love;

For it is in giving that we receive,

It is in forgiving that we are forgiven,
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
—St. Francis of Assisi
Thus a religious man is not really one who puts on a robe or a loincloth, or lives on one meal a day, or
has taken innumerable vows to be this and not to be that, but is he who is inwardly simple, who is not
becoming anything. Such a mind is capable of extraordinary receptivity, because there is no barrier, there
is no fear, there is no going towards something; therefore it is capable of receiving grace, God, truth, or
what you will.
—The First and Last Freedom, Jiddu Krishnamurti
12
The time that my journey takes is long and the way of it long. I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of
light, and pursued my voyage through the wildernesses of worlds leaving my track on many a star and
planet.
It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself, and that training is the most intricate which leads
to the utter simplicity of a tune.
The traveller has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the
outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.
My eyes strayed far and wide before I shut them and said ‘Here art thou!’
The question and the cry ‘Oh, where?’ melt into tears of a thousand streams and deluge the world with the
flood of the assurance ‘I am!’

13
The song that I came to sing remains unsung to this day. I have spent my days in stringing and in
unstringing my instrument. The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set; only there is
the agony of wishing in my heart.
The blossom has not opened; only the wind is sighing by. I have not seen his face, nor have I listened to
his voice; only I have heard his gentle footsteps from the road before my house.
The livelong day has passed in spreading his seat on the floor; but the lamp has not been lit and I cannot
ask him into my house. I live in the hope of meeting with him; but this meeting is not yet.

14
My desires are many and my cry is pitiful, but ever didst thou save me by hard refusals; and this strong
mercy has been wrought into my life through and through.
Day by day thou art making me worthy of the simple, great gifts that thou gavest to me unasked—this sky
and the light, this body and the life and the mind—saving me from perils of overmuch desire. There are
times when I languidly linger and times when I awaken and hurry in search of my goal; but cruelly thou
hidest thyself from before me.
Day by day thou art making me worthy of thy full acceptance by refusing me ever and anon, saving me
from perils of weak, uncertain desire.

16
I have had my invitation to this world’s festival, and thus my life has been blessed. My eyes have seen and
my ears have heard.
It was my part at this feast to play upon my instrument, and I have done all I could.
Now, I ask, has the time come at last when I may go in and see thy face and offer thee my silent salutation?
—Gitanjali, Rabindranath Tagore
Since we consider men in the place that they hold, and value them according to those places, and ask not
how they got thither, when we see man made the love of the Father, the price of the Son, the temple of the
Holy Ghost, the signet upon God’s hand, the apple of God’s eye, absolutely, unconditionally we cannot
annihilate man, not evacuate, not evaporate, not extenuate man to the levity, to the vanity, to the nullity of
this text, Surely men altogether, high and low, are lighter than vanity. For, man is not only a contributary
creature, but a total creature; he does not only make one, but he is all; he is not a piece of the world, but
the world itself; and next to the glory of God, the reason why there is a world.
But we must not determine this consideration here, that man is something, a great thing, a noble
creature, if we refer him to his end, to his interest in God, to his reversion in heaven; but when we
consider man in his way, man amongst men, man is not nothing, not unable to assist man, not unfit to be
relied upon by man; for, even in that respect also, God hath made hominem homini Deum, he hath made
one man able to do the offices of God to another, in procuring his regeneration here, and advancing his
salvation hereafter; as he says, Saviours shall come up on Mount Sion; which is the church.
—John Donne
CROSSING THE BAR

Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,

And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.
—Alfred Lord Tennyson
THE SCHOLAR-GIPSY (an extract)

Thou hast not lived, why should’st thou perish, so?

Thou hadst one aim, one business, one desire;
Else wert thou long since number’d with the dead!
Else hadst thou spent, like other men, thy fire!
The generations of thy peers are fled,
And we ourselves shall go;
But thou possessest an immortal lot,
And we imagine thee exempt from age
And living as thou liv’st on Glanvil’s page,
Because thou hadst—what we, alas! have not.

For early didst thou leave the world, with powers

Fresh, undiverted to the world without,
Firm to their mark, not spent on other things;
Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt,
Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings.
O life unlike to ours!
Who fluctuate idly without term or scope,
Of whom each strives, nor knows for what he strives,
And each half lives a hundred different lives;
Who wait like thee, but not, like thee, in hope.
Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we,
Light half-believers of our casual creeds,
Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will’d,
Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds,
Whose vague resolves never have been fulfill’d;
For whom each year we see
Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new;
Who hesitate and falter life away,
And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day—
Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too?

Yes, we await it!—but it still delays,

And then we suffer! and amongst us one,
Who most has suffer’d, takes dejectedly
His seat upon the intellectual throne;
And all his store of sad experience he
Lays bare of wretched days;
Tells us his misery’s birth and growth and signs,
And how the dying spark of hope was fed,
And how the breast was soothed, and how the head,
And all his hourly varied anodynes.
—Matthew Arnold
THIS, TOO, SHALL PASS AWAY

Art thou in misery, brother? Then I pray

Be comforted. Thy grief shall pass away.
Art thou elated? Ah, be not too gay;
Temper thy joy: this, too, shall pass away.
Art thou in danger? Still let reason sway,
And cling to hope: this, too, shall pass away.
Tempted art thou? In all thine anguish lay
One truth to heart: this, too, shall pass away.
Do rays of loftier glory round thee play?
Kinglike art thou? This, too, shall pass away!
Whate’er thou art, wher’er thy footsteps stray,
Heed these wise words: This, too, shall pass away.
—Paul Hamilton Hayne
Of what use is learning if it fails to lead
To the holy feet of all-knowing God?
—Chapter 1, Verse 2
…
Real joy springs from virtue alone; all other joys
Are painful and devoid of praise.
—Chapter 4, Verse 39
…
The only thing to do is virtuous deeds
The thing to avoid is vicious deeds.
—Chapter 4, Verse 40
—Thirukural
Difficulties
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their soul,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows
may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the Archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
—The Prophet, Khalil Gibran
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the
world to himself. Therefore that all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
—Man and Superman, George Bernard Shaw
One should be very careful in accepting gifts. Even though on account of learning and good qualities, a
person may be worth of accepting presents, he should never get attached to gifts, for by accepting gifts, the
divine light in him gets extinguished.
—Manu Smriti
The angel is free because of his knowledge,
the beast because of his ignorance,
between the two remains the son of man to struggle.
—Rumi
Is it not true that into our education have come a slackness and a softness? Is hard effort prominent? The
world of thought can be entered in no other way.
—The Ever-Present Past, Edith Hamilton
Disease is a personal event. It consists of the individual himself. There are as many different diseases as
patients.
However, it would have been impossible to build up a science of medicine merely by compiling a
great number of individual observations. The facts had to be classified and simplified with the aid of
abstractions. In this way disease was born. And medical treatises could be written. A kind of science was
built up, roughly descriptive, rudimentary, imperfect, but convenient, indefinitely perfectible and easy to
teach. Unfortunately, we have been content with this result. We did not understand that treatises describing
pathological entities contain only a part of the knowledge indispensable to those who attend the sick.
Medical knowledge should go beyond the science of diseases. The physician must clearly distinguish the
sick human being described in his books from the concrete patient whom he has to treat, who must not
only be studied, but, above all, relieved, encouraged, and cured. His role is to discover the
characteristics of the sick man’s individuality, his resistance to pathogenic factors, his sensibility to pain,
the value of his organic activities, his past, and his future. The outcome of an illness in a given individual
has to be predicted, not by a calculation of the probabilities, but by a precise analysis of the organic,
humoral, and psychological personality of this individual. In fact, medicine, when confining itself to the
study of diseases, amputates a part of its own body.
—Man the Unknown, Alexis Carrel
It is rare to be born as a human being
It is still more rare to be born without any deformity
Even if you are born without any deformity
It is rare to acquire knowledge and education
Even if one could acquire knowledge and education
It is still rare to offer service to mankind
And contemplate on higher self.
If one leads such a selfless divine life
The gates of heaven open to greet such an evolved soul.
—Avvaiyar
Who remains true to his conscience
Lives forever in all noble hearts.
—Chapter 30, Verse 294
…
Superior is one who speaks the truth earnestly
To those who do penance and charity.
—Chapter 30, Verse 295
…
Water provides only external purity
Truth reveals internal purity.
—Chapter 30, Verse 298
…
Of all good things that we have found
Nothing surpasses truth profound.
—Chapter 30, Verse 300
—Thirukural
And you, too, youthful reader, will realize the Vision (not the idle wish) of your heart, be it base or
beautiful, or a mixture of both, for you will always gravitate toward that which you, secretly, most love.
Into your hands will be placed the exact results of your own thoughts; you will receive that which you
earn; no more, no less. Whatever your present environment may be, you will fall, remain, or rise with
your thoughts, your Vision, your Ideal. You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as
your dominant aspiration.
—As a Man Thinketh, James Allen
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If
I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the
slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I
shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors and I
shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.
—From Slavery to Freedom, John Hope Franklin
Think ever of rising higher. Let it be your only thought. Even if your object be not attained, the thought
itself will have raised you.
—Chapter 60, Verse 595
…
Forget anger towards anyone
For it begets evil and pain.
—Chapter 31, Verse 303
…
To guard yourself, keep wrath at bay
Unchecked, ire will yourself slay.
—Chapter 31, Verse 305
—Thirukural
Let us learn the meaning of economy. Economy is a high, humane office, a sacrament, when its aim is
grand; when it is the prudence of simple tastes, when it is practised for freedom, or love, or devotion.
Much of the economy which we see in houses is of a base origin, and is best kept out of sight. Parched
corn eaten to-day, that I may have roast fowl to my dinner Sunday, is a baseness; but parched corn and a
house with one apartment, that I may be free of all perturbations, that I may be serene and docile to what
the mind shall speak, and girt and road-ready for the lowest mission of knowledge or goodwill, is
frugality for gods and heroes.
Can we not learn the lesson of self-help? Society is full of infirm people, who incessantly summon
others to serve them. They contrive everywhere to exhaust for their single comfort the entire means and
appliances of that luxury to which our invention has yet attained. Sofas, ottomans, stoves, wine, game-
fowl, spices, perfumes, rides, the theatre, entertainments—all these they want, they need, and whatever
can be suggested more than these they crave also, as if it was the bread which should keep them from
starving; and if they miss any one, they represent themselves as the most wronged and most wretched
persons on earth. One must have been born and bred with them to know how to prepare a meal for their
learned stomach. Meantime they never bestir themselves to serve another person; not they! they have a
great deal more to do for themselves that they can possibly perform, nor do they once perceive the cruel
joke of their lives, but the more odious they grow, the sharper is the tone of their complaining and craving.
Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants and to serve them one’s self, so as to have somewhat left
to give, instead of being always prompt to grab? It is more elegant to answer one’s own needs than to be
richly served; inelegant perhaps it may look to-day, and to a few, but it is an elegance forever and to all.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the amount of information in science doubles every nine months and decays at 30 per cent a year, how
long does one's expertise last? Without constantly updating your knowledge base you could end up with as
little as 15 per cent of your technical knowledge relevant within just five years. However, when you can
google just about anything, knowledge acquisition becomes more important than knowledge retention.
—Rookie Smarts, Liz Wiseman
A DOCTOR’S STORY OF LIFE AND DEATH

Everyone wants to live a life that is free of illness. Any sickness triggers the primal fear of death in us. To
most people, however, death remains a hidden secret. We are irresistibly attracted towards the very
anxieties we find most terrifying. Every attendant by the side of a mortally stricken loved one brushes
with the danger of death in a manner that is more emotional than any other experience one can ever
encounter in life. Very few of us, including those in the medical profession, seem psychologically able to
cope with the thought of our own state of death. The idea of permanent unconsciousness is too scary to
even think of.
I am more concerned with human life than anything else in the whole cosmos; to me how a man lives
is more fascinating than how a star dies. If there is a God, He is present as much in the creation of each of
us as He was at the creation of the earth. The human condition is the mystery that engages my fascination,
not society, country, humanity, and so on. To me, man is God, the centre of everything. Those who
accomplish the most—measured in money, intelligence, skills, happiness, or love—are the ones who
make the most of their genetic inheritance. Even identical twins that share exactly the same genes turn out
differently. Whether we reach our potential depends on many factors, but we are born as unique
individuals with our own distinguished characteristics and capabilities. There is also an inherent flaw
built in each of us that has the potential of growing into a serious malady at any point of our life. Whether
it turns into a disease or how much or how far is all unique.
I have lived with the awareness of death’s imminence for more than half a century and saw several
thousand doors people take for their exits. I am living in my eighth decade. There is no way to foretell
whether this is to be my last decade or whether there will be more. I maintain good health but beyond an
absence of a disease, good health is a guarantee of nothing. The only certainty that I have about my life,
and by implication my death, is another of those wishes we all have in common; I want to exit without
suffering. There are those who wish to die quickly, perhaps with instantaneous suddenness, perhaps in
sleep; there are those who wish to go after a brief, anguish-free illness, just long enough for everyone who
loves them to be by their side. I think I belong to the earlier category. I believe in dying before death
comes. The world in me must die before I in it die so that I can look back quietly and dissolve into
divinity:

There is a flame within me that has stood

Unmoved, untroubled through a mist of years,
Knowing nor love nor laughter hope or fears,
Nor foolish throb of ill, nor wine of good,
I feel no shadow of the winds that brood.
I hear no whisper of a tide that veers,
I weave no thought of passion, nor of tears.

What I hope, unfortunately, is not what I expect. I have seen too many deaths to ignore the overwhelming
odds against it. Like most people, I probably suffer with physical as well as emotional distress that
accompanies many mortal illnesses. Like many of my patients, I too may compound the pained uncertainty
of my last months by the further agony of indecision. It is a very difficult job to decide for a doctor
whether to continue with a treatment or give in. It is even more difficult for a patient to decide whether to
be treated for the possibility of more time or to call it a day and a life. As Ramana Maharishi said,
Mountain of medicine!
Why hesitate to give the
Medicine ending confusion
Arunchala!

I have no fear of the future because I am completely convinced that the situations I have been thrust in are
providential. I am doing God’s work. I am walking in the centre of His will. He is leading me. I am
following Him. He is guiding me. I am making His chosen decisions. He relieves me of responsibility
when it is beyond me, and He knows when and where that is. Faith in God and innate goodness provide
the perfect pathway from here to eternity.
—K. Subbarao with Arun K. Tiwari
Men are divided into those who take notice by themselves and understand, those who do not understand
except through warning and instruction, and who benefit from neither, is like the division of the bosom of
the earth into parts where water collects and increases until it bursts out by itself into springs of living
water, parts where water collects but cannot be reached without digging and arid parts where not even
digging will avail.
—The Book of Knowledge, Gazzali
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that
imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide
universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on
that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and
none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
LEAVE ME ALONE! Leave me alone! I am too pure for thee.
Touch me not! Hath not my world just now become perfect?

My skin is too pure for thy hands. Leave me alone, thou dull, doltish, stupid day! Is not the midnight
brighter?

The purest are to be masters of the world, the least known, the strongest, the midnight-souls, who are
brighter and deeper than any day.

O day, thou gropest for me? Thou feelest for my happiness? For thee am I rich, lonesome, a treasure-pit, a
gold chamber?

O world, thou wantest me? Am I worldly for thee? Am I spiritual for thee? Am I divine for thee? But day
and world, ye are too coarse,

—Have cleverer hands, grasp after deeper happiness, after deeper unhappiness, grasp after some God;
grasp not after me:

—Mine unhappiness, my happiness is deep, thou strange day, but yet am I no God, no God’s-hell: deep is
its woe.
—Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
A PSALM OF LIFE

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream! —
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,

In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!

Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,

Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labour and to wait.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live
without the support of comforting fairy tales. It is not good either to forget the questions that philosophy
asks, or to persuade ourselves that we have found indubitable answers to them. To teach how to live
without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy,
in our age, can still do for those who study it.
—History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell
NO MATTER WHAT YOU KNOW (an extract)

Reality is always soft clay,

ever shifting and changing its shape.
Fire it into form, and
at the very moment
you are hailing it as final truth
it will break in your hands.
—Dorothy Walters
Sincere regard for truth is loyalty and disregard for truth is treachery. The weak amongst you shall be
strong with me until I have secured his rights, if Allah will; and the strong amongst you shall be weak with
me until I have wrested from him the rights of others, if Allah will. Obey me so long as I obey Allah and
His Messenger (Muhammad, pbuh). But if I disobey Allah and His Messenger, ye owe me no obedience.
—Abu Bakr As-Siddiq (R): The First Caliph of Islam,
Abdul Basit Ahmad
DEATH BE NOT PROUD

Death be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and souls deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell’st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more, death thou shalt die!
—John Donne
Odds and Ends
DARIUS GREEN AND HIS FLYING-MACHINE (an extract)

… with thimble and thread

And wax and hammer, and buckles and screws,
And all such things as geniuses use; —
Two bats for patterns, curious fellows!
A charcoal-pot and a pair of bellows;
Some wire, and several old umbrellas;
A carriage-cover, for tail and wings;
A piece of a harness; and straps and strings;
And a big strong box,
In which he locks
These and a hundred other things.
…
So day after day
He stitched and tinkered and hammered away,
Till at last ‘t was done,
The greatest invention under the sun!
—John Townsend Trowbridge
ALICE IN WONDERLAND (an extract)

The Bellman looked uffish, and wrinkled his brow.

‘If only you’d spoken before!
It’s excessively awkward to mention it now,
With the Snark, so to speak, at the door!

‘We should all of us grieve, as you well may believe,

If you never were met with again—
But surely, my man, when the voyage began,
You might have suggested it then?

‘It’s excessively awkward to mention it now—

As I think I’ve already remarked.’
And the man they called ‘Hi!’ replied, with a sigh,
‘I informed you the day we embarked.

‘You may charge me with murder—or want of sense—

(We are all of us weak at times):
But the slightest approach to a false pretence
Was never among my crimes!

‘I said it in Hebrew—I said it in Dutch—

I said it in German and Greek:
But I wholly forgot (and it vexes me much)
That English is what you speak!’
—Lewis Carroll
Let craft, ambition, spite,
Be quenched in Reason’s night,
Till weakness turn to might,
Till what is dark be light,
Till what is wrong be right!
—Sylvie and Bruno, Lewis Carroll
DAFFODILS

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
—William Wordsworth
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward, it is
not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!—
incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are
asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as
are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in
the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who
walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of
Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who ‘didn’t know what fear was,’ we ought always to add the flea—
and put him at the head of the procession.
—Pudd’nhead Wilson, Mark Twain
Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of
human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only
necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer
of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do,
and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why
constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing
Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-
coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them
considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then
they would resign.
—The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
AN ESSAY ON MAN (an extract)

Cease then, nor order imperfection name:

Our proper bliss depends on what we blame.
Know thy own point: This kind, this due degree
Of blindness, weakness, Heav’n bestows on thee.
Submit.—In this, or any other sphere,
Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear:
Safe in the hand of one disposing pow’r,
Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony, not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, ‘Whatever is, is right.’
—Epistle 1, Alexander Pope
‘Estella!’
‘I am greatly changed. I wonder you know me.’
The freshness of her beauty was indeed gone, but its indescribable majesty and its indescribable
charm remained. Those attractions in it, I had seen before; what I had never seen before, was the
saddened softened light of the once proud eyes; what I had never felt before, was the friendly touch of the
once insensible hand.
We sat down on a bench that was near, and I said, ‘After so many years, it is strange that we should
thus meet again, Estella, here where our first meeting was! Do you often come back?’
‘I have never been here since.’
‘Nor I.’
The moon began to rise, and I thought of the placid look at the white ceiling, which had passed away.
The moon began to rise, and I thought of the pressure on my hand when I had spoken the last words he had
heard on earth.
Estella was the next to break the silence that ensued between us.
‘I have very often hoped and intended to come back, but have been prevented by many circumstances.
Poor, poor old place!’
The silvery mist was touched with the first rays of the moonlight, and the same rays touched the tears
that dropped from her eyes. Not knowing that I saw them, and setting herself to get the better of them, she
said quietly:
‘Were you wondering, as you walked along, how it came to be left in this condition?’
‘Yes, Estella.’
‘The ground belongs to me. It is the only possession I have not relinquished. Everything else has gone
from me, little by little, but I have kept this. It was the subject of the only determined resistance I made in
all the wretched years.’
‘Is it to be built on?’
‘At last it is. I came here to take leave of it before its change. And you,’ she said, in a voice of
touching interest to a wanderer, ‘you live abroad still?’
‘Still.’
‘And do well, I am sure?’
‘I work pretty hard for a sufficient living, and therefore—Yes, I do well.’
‘I have often thought of you,’ said Estella.
‘Have you?’
‘Of late, very often. There was a long hard time when I kept far from me, the remembrance of what I
had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth. But, since my duty has not been in-compatible
with the admission of that remembrance, I have given it a place in my heart.’
‘You have always held your place in my heart,’ I answered.
And we were silent again, until she spoke.
‘I little thought,’ said Estella, ‘that I should take leave of you in taking leave of this spot. I am very
glad to do so.’
‘Glad to part again, Estella? To me, parting is a painful thing. To me, the remembrance of our last
parting has been ever mournful and painful.’
‘But you said to me,’ returned Estella, very earnestly, “God bless you, God forgive you!” And if you
could say that to me then, you will not hesitate to say that to me now—now, when suffering has been
stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been
bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape. Be as considerate and good to me as you were, and tell
me we are friends.’
‘We are friends,’ said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the bench.
‘And will continue friends apart,’ said Estella.
I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long
ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of
tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.
—Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
—Macbeth, William Shakespeare
CANAAN (an extract)

Evil is not good’s absence but gravity’s

everlasting bedrock and its fatal chains
inert, violent, the suffrage of our days.
—Geoffrey Hill
SONNET 43

When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,

For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,
How would thy shadow’s form form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay!
All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.
—William Shakespeare
Epistemic absolutism. Knowledge is absolute, in the sense that it is impossible for a person to have
better, or to have worse, knowledge of a fact. (For example, it is not possible to know that one is in
Australia—and, later on, to know better that one is in Australia.)
That kind of absolutism is deeply entrenched in standard epistemological thinking. Regardless, we
will find that there is good reason to regard it as being false.
—Good Knowledge, Bad Knowledge, Stephen Hetherington
Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality
be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.
—Lao Tzu
The appearance of things changes according to the emotions; and thus we see magic and beauty in them,
while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves.
—The Broken Wings, Khalil Gibran
THE TAME BIRD WAS IN A CAGE

THE tame bird was in a cage, the free bird was in the forest.
They met when the time came, it was a decree of fate.
The free bird cries, ‘O my love, let us fly to the wood.’
The cage bird whispers, ‘Come hither, let us both live in the cage.’
Says the free bird, ‘Among bars, where is there room to spread one’s wings?’
‘Alas,’ cries the caged bird, ‘I should not know where to sit perched in the sky.’

The free bird cries, ‘My darling, sing the songs of the woodlands.’
The cage bird sings, ‘Sit by my side, I’ll teach you the speech of the learned.’
The forest bird cries, ‘No, ah no! songs can never be taught.’
The cage bird says, ‘Alas for me, I know not the songs of the woodlands.’

Their love is intense with longing, but they never can fly wing to wing.
Through the bars of the cage they look, and vain is their wish to know each other.
They flutter their wings in yearning, and sing, ‘Come closer, my love!’
The free bird cries, ‘It cannot be, I fear the closed doors of the cage.’
The cage bird whispers, ‘Alas, my wings are powerless and dead.’
—Rabindranath Tagore
About dreams. It is usually taken for granted that you dream of something that has made a particularly
strong impression on you during the day, but it seems to me it’s just the contrary. Often it’s something you
paid no attention to at the time—a vague thought that you didn’t bother to think out to the end, words
spoken without feeling and which passed unnoticed—these are the things that return at night, clothed in
flesh and blood, and they become the subjects of dreams, as if to make up for having been ignored during
waking hours.
—Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
Tributes
WITH YOUR WIND IN MY SAIL

With your wind in my sail

I’ll snap the rope
I’m ready to sink
I’m willing to sink
My morning is wasted
My evening too
Don’t hold me back
Close to the shore
I stay up all night
For the boatman
The waves just
Play with me
I’ll befriend the storm
I shan’t fear its fury
Set me free
The storm will save me
For I’m willing to die
With your wind in my sail.
—Rabindranath Tagore
She walks with raised head, with her eyes straight,
She has her principles, unafraid of anybody!
She has a lofty and knowledge based pride,
Women of excellence, don’t falter from the chosen path,
She drives ignorance away. She welcomes the bliss of life,
With learned mind, this is the Dharma of emerging woman.
—Subramaniya Bharathiar
The truly great are not the men of wealth, of possessions, not men who gain name and fame, but those who
testify to the truth in them and refuse to compromise whatever be the cost. They are determined to do what
they consider to be right. We may punish their bodies, refuse them comforts, but we cannot buy their souls,
we cannot break their spirits. Whoever possesses this invulnerability of spirit even to a little extent
deserves our admiration.
—Living with a Purpose, S. Radhakrishnan
Before he [Al] could talk straight, he ran down to the Milan shipyards and watched the men building boats
for Great Lakes shipping. There, he asked the shipbuilders hundreds of questions. Why could you see a
hammer hit a board before you could hear it, if you were at a distance? Why did you have to fit joints
carefully? What was pitch made of? Some of the questions the men could answer and some they couldn’t.
One of them jokingly said to Samuel Edison, ‘It would save time to hire a man especial to answer your
young one’s questions.’
—Young Edison: The True Story of Edison’s Boyhood, W.E. Wise
Gandhi’s on-the-earth simplicity, devoid of the appearances or reality of power, emphasized his authority.
Gandhi had no power to compel, punish, or reward. His power was nil, his authority enormous. It came of
love. Living with him one could see why he was loved: he loved. Not merely in isolated incidents, but
day in, and day out, morning, noon, and night, for decades, in every act and word, he had manifested his
love of individuals and of mankind.
—Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World, Louis Fischer
I first met him when I joined the Institute as a student in 1953. That is now nearly fifty years ago, but my
recollections of early encounters with him are still vivid. I recall a tall, handsome, young man who would
jump out of his sporty little MG car, wearing a red shirt and a broad smile, racing across the staircase in
the Department and cheerfully saying ‘Good morning’ as he stepped into the class room. Dhawan brought
to the Institute an element of youth, freshness, modernity, earnestness and Californian informality that
captivated the students and many colleagues. In short, he was a star on the campus.
To anyone who walked into the laboratory that he set up at the Institute, one thing that caught
immediate attention was that everything looked different, and worked well. The laboratory managed to
convey an impression of both science and engineering; it had 100 hp compressors running wind tunnels,
as well as lenses and galvanometers measuring what was going on in those tunnels. In a very real sense I
think Dhawan established, at IISc and—by example—elsewhere in the country, a tradition of scientific
research on engineering problems. His laboratory also had a variety of little devices, rigged up by him
with great and obvious pleasure, to make things a bit easier for the experimenter. Among these ‘gizmos’,
as he loved to call them, I remember a pretty little thing for electroplating 5 micron tungsten wires with
copper, so that they could later be soldered for making hot wire probes—I started my life in the
laboratory, like so many students of fluid dynamics everywhere in the world at that time, struggling to
make these fragile probes for wind tunnel measurements of fluctuating velocities in turbulent flows. I still
recall Dhawan teaching me to make these probes, telling me about the ritual one had to follow—‘like
doing pooja’, he would say. The fine wires we needed for these probes were not easily available, and
Dhawan had obtained from his friends in the United States various bits of platinum and tungsten wire
which came stuck on the back of letters written to him: we used to hoard them like misers.
He was the father of experimental fluid dynamics research in India, and indeed was in many ways the
first engineering scientist of the country.
…
The principles that Dhawan formulated and applied (but, characteristically, never stated) in running
the country’s space programme can be easily inferred from the way he operated. First of all he devised a
programme that was societally conscious, with objectives that could be widely understood (weather,
natural resource-mapping, communications, etc.). He had supreme confidence in the ability of Indian
engineers and scientists, even when they did not have degrees from IITs or foreign universities. He kept
the technology development work open and transparent to the national scientific community through an
elaborate system of reviews (some of them held in the big auditorium in the Vikram Sarabhai Space
Centre at Trivandrum, filled to capacity on such occasions; the tradition was quickly established here that
the junior-most engineer could ask awkward questions of the big project leaders)… He managed his
projects through a small group of very able directors, and another small group of bright young whiz-kids
in his office (protecting them from the natural dislike of their colleagues). He took the responsibility when
there were failures, but let others take credit when there were successes (as Kalam has pointed out). He
maintained accountability through peer pressure, but shielded his engineers from blame for honest
failures. He developed a promotion and assessment system that had some unique features, enabling the
more productive engineers to move ahead of their colleagues but not too rapidly, retaining the confidence
of the bulk of the staff in the fairness of the system. And he insisted, successfully, that the national space
programme should be a purely civilian enterprise.
And there were some other unusual things about his management style. He shunned publicity, and
rarely held forth before the media—so much so that people were often surprised how forceful he could be
in private, or within the four walls of Council or Commission.
I think of him as a critical optimist in everything he did.
But what specially distinguished Dhawan from many other eminent scientists and engineers were his
extraordinary qualities as a leader and a human being, his great personal charm, and his keen social
conscience. When the Sriharikota Range was being built, he rejected a proposal to fence the range to keep
cattle from it, noting that the range had belonged to the cattle and the tribals living there, and making
alternative arrangements. He set up a museum housing the artifacts that were found at the site. The
mechanics making his pet gizmos for him in the Institute laboratories—some of them highly skilled but
hardly educated—felt they were his friends, even as the students and his own class-fellows in India and
abroad did. He could be, and was, a tough man many times, but never on personal considerations.
If he sometimes seemed indecisive, that was because he accommodated so many diverse points of
view within himself; after knowing him for some time I felt I could recognize the churning that went on in
his mind on those critical occasions as he balanced, in his own very rational way, all those competing
ideas and forces; and he often shared these thoughts with his close colleagues before he made his
decisions.
He was, most of all, the undeclared but widely accepted moral and social conscience of the scientific
community. He was a great man.
—Roddam Narasimha
Mrs Bixby, Boston, Massachusetts.

Dear Madam,

I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of
Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel
how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a
loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the
thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your
bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that
must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.

Yours very sincerely and respectfully,

A. Lincoln
—Abraham Lincoln
The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and
hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely
they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
—Abraham Lincoln
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right,
let us strive to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have
borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and
lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
—Abraham Lincoln
You need to know that you are different, you need to realize that you are much more than what you think
you are, and you need to actualize this through your actions, by achieving more than you think you can.
...
Dangerous—what danger can there be? Fear is the noose of the weak, courage is the ornament of the
strong.
...
Experience gives knowledge, and knowledge is strength. Strength is peace, and I was at peace. While
climbing a peak, you go up and also down. The essential thing is to keep moving—climbing up and down
are irrelevant in the journey of life.
—Tiya: A Parrot’s Journey Home, Samarpan
I remember Mr Pestonji Padshah. I had been on friendly terms with him ever since my stay in England. I
first met him in a vegetarian restaurant in London. I knew of his brother Mr Barjorji Padshah by his
reputation as a ‘crank’. I had never met him, but friends said that he was eccentric. Out of pity for the
horses he would not ride in tramcars, he refused to take degrees in spite of a prodigious memory, he had
developed an independent spirit, and he was a vegetarian, though a Parsi. Pestonji had not quite this
reputation, but he was famous for his erudition even in London. The common factor between us, however,
was vegetarianism, and not scholarship, in which it was beyond my power to approach him.
I found him out again in Bombay. He was Protonotary in the High Court. When I met him he was
engaged on his contribution to a Higher Gujarati Dictionary. There was not a friend I had not approached
for help in my South African work. Pestonji Padshah, however, not only refused to aid me, but even
advised me not to return to South Africa.
‘It is impossible to help you,’ he said, ‘But I tell you I do not like even your going to South Africa. Is
there lack of work in our own country? Look, now, there is not a little to do for our language. I have to
find out scientific words. But this is only one branch of the work. Think of the poverty of the land. Our
people in South Africa are no doubt in difficulty, but I do not want a man like you to be sacrificed for that
work. Let us win self-government here and we shall automatically help our coutrymen there. I know I
cannot prevail upon you, but I will not encourage any one of your type to throw in his lot with you.’
I did not like this advice, but it increased my regard for Mr Pestonji Padshah. I was struck with his
love for the country and for the mother tongue. The incident brought us closer to each other. I could
understand his point of view. But far from giving up my work in South Africa. I became firmer in my
resolve. A patriot cannot afford to ignore any branch of service to the mother land. And for me the text of
the Gita was clear and emphatic:

Finally, this is better, that one do

His own task as he may, even though he fail,
Than take tasks not his own, though they seem good.
To die performing duty is no ill:
But who seeks other roads shall wander still.
—An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, M.K. Gandhi
My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. In my
opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality.
—The World As I See It, Albert Einstein
In Peace and Silence the Eternal manifests; allow nothing to disturb you and the Eternal will manifest;
have perfect equality in face of all and the Eternal will be there....
—Prayer and Meditation, The Mother
LOOK TO THIS DAY

Look to this day:

For it is life, the very life of life.
In its brief course
Lie all the verities and realities of your existence.
The bliss of growth,
The glory of action,
The splendour of achievement
Are but experiences of time.
For yesterday is but a dream
And tomorrow is only a vision;
And today well-lived, makes
Yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well therefore to this day;
Such is the salutation to the ever-new dawn!
—Kalidasa
Einstein’s space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh’s sky. The glory of science is not in a truth more
absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist’s discoveries
impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to
limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer’s frame of reference, which differs from period to
period as a nude by Rembrandt differs from a nude by Edouard Manet.
—The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler
IF

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
—Rudyard Kipling
Some Thoughts
THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER (an excerpt)

‘The Sun now rose upon the right:

Out of the sea came he,
Still hid in mist, and on the eft
Went down into the sea.

‘And the good south wind still blew behind,

But no sweet bird did follow,
Nor any day for food or play
Came to the mariners’ hollo!

‘And I had done a hellish thing,

And it would work ‘em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
‘Ah wretch!’ said they, ‘the bird to slay,
That made the breeze to blow!’

‘Nor dim nor red, like God’s own head,

The glorious Sun uprist:
Then all averred, I had killed the bird
That brought the fog and mist.
‘Twas right,’ said they, ‘such birds to slay,
That bring the fog and mist.’

‘The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,

The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.

‘Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,

‘Twas sad as sad could be;
And we did speak only to break
The silence of the sea!
‘All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.

‘Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

‘Water, water everywhere,

And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

‘The very deep did rot: O Christ!

That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.

‘About, about, in reel and rout

The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch’s oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white.

‘And some in dreams assured were

Of the spirit that plagued us so;
Nine fathom deep he had follow’d us
From the land of mist and snow.

‘And every tongue, through utter drought,

Was withered at the root:
We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot.

‘Ah! Well a-day! what evil looks

Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.’
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Persons who have no faith in human nature are apt to think that such conditions are eternal in man—that
the moral ideals are only for individuals but the race belongs to that primitive nature which is for the
animal. And according to them, in the racial life, it is necessary that the animal should have its full scope
of training in the cult of suspicion, jealousy, fierce destructiveness, cruel rapacity. They contemptuously
brand optimism as sentimental weakness, and yet in spite of that virulent skepticism an enormous change
has worked itself out in course of the growth of civilization from the darkest abyss of savagery. I refuse to
believe that human society has reached its limit of moral possibility. And we must work all our strength
for the seemingly impossible, and must believe that there is a constant urging in the depth of human soul
for the attainment of the perfect, the urging which secretly helps us in all our endeavour for the good. This
faith has been my only asset in the educational mission which I have made my life’s work, and almost
unaided and alone, I struggle along my path. I try to assert in my words and works that education has its
only meaning and object in freedom—freedom from ignorance about the laws of the universe, and
freedom from passion and prejudice in our communication with the human world.
I invited thinkers and scholars from foreign lands to let our boys know how easy it is to realise our
common fellowship, when we deal with those who are great, and that it is the puny who with their petty
vanities set up barriers between man and man.
—The Ideals of Education, Rabindranath Tagore
BRAHMA

‘If the red slayer think he slays,

Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the winding ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

‘Far or forgot to me is near;

Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;

When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
I am the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,

And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
My mother had given me an advice. ‘Son, in your entire lifetime, if you can save or better someone else’s
life, your birth as a human being and your life is a success. You have the blessing of the Almighty God.’
—M.K. Gandhi
The undisciplined man doesn’t wrong himself alone—
he sets fire to the whole world.
Discipline enabled Heaven to be filled with light;
discipline enabled the angels to be immaculate and holy
…

The world’s flattery and hypocrisy is a sweet morsel:

eat less of it, for it is full of fire.
Its fire is hidden while its taste is manifest,
but its smoke becomes visible in the end.
…

You were born with potential.

You were born with goodness and trust.
You were born with ideals and dreams.
You were born with greatness.
You were born with wings.
You are not meant for crawling, so don’t.
You have wings.
Learn to use them and fly.
—Rumi
You have shown through your works, that it is possible to succeed without violence even with those who
have not discarded the method of violence. We may hope that your example will spread beyond the
borders of your country, and will help to establish an international authority, respected by all, that will
take decisions and replace war conflicts.
—Albert Einstein (in a letter to M.K. Gandhi)
1. Do not be ashamed to be helped; the task before you is to accomplish what falls to your lot, like a
soldier in a storming party. Suppose you are lame and cannot scale the wall by yourself, yet it can be
done with another’s help.
2. Let not the future trouble you; for you will come to it, if come you must, bearing with you the same
reason which you are using now to meet the present.
3. It is a property of man to love even those who stumble. This feeling ensues if it occurs to you at the
time that men are your kindred and go wrong because of ignorance and against their will; that in a
little while both of you will be dead; but, above all, that he did you no harm, for he did not make your
governing self worse than it was before.
—Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
COURAGE

Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.

The soul that knows it not, knows no release
From little things;
Knows not the livid loneliness of fear
Nor mountain heights, where bitter joy can hear
The sound of wings.
How can life grant us boon of living, compensate
For dull gray ugliness and pregnant hate
Unless we dare
The soul’s dominion? Each time we make a choice, we pay
With courage to behold resistless day
And count it fair.
—Amelia Earhart
…our aim in founding the State was not the disproportionate happiness of any one class, but the greatest
happiness of the whole; we thought that in a State which is ordered with a view to the good of the whole
we should be most likely to find justice, and in the ill-ordered State injustice: and, having found them, we
might then decide which of the two is the happier. At present, I take it, we are fashioning the happy State,
not piecemeal, or with a view of making a few happy citizens, but as a whole; and by-and-by we will
proceed to view the opposite kind of State. Suppose that we were painting a statue, and someone came up
to us and said, Why do you not put the most beautiful colours on the most beautiful parts of the body—the
eyes ought to be purple, but you have made them black—to him we might fairly answer, Sir, you would
not surely have us beautify the eyes to such a degree that they are no longer eyes; consider rather whether,
by giving this and the other features their due proportion, we make the whole beautiful.
—Dialogues of Plato
THIS, TOO, WILL PASS (an extract)

This, too, will pass. O heart, say it over and over,

Out of your deepest sorrow, out of your deepest grief,
No hurt can last forever
Will bring relief.
perhaps tomorrow
This, too, will pass.
—Grace Noll Crowell
When good things come, men see them as gain
When evils come, why complain?
—Chapter 38, Verse 379
…
What is stronger than destiny? It is a power
That prevails over human endeavour.
—Chapter 38, Verse 380
—Thirukural
WHERE THE MIND IS WITHOUT FEAR
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
—Rabindranath Tagore
HUMAN LIFE’S MYSTERY
We sow the glebe, we reap the corn,
We build the house where we may rest,
And then, at moments, suddenly,
We look up to the great wide sky,
Inquiring wherefore we were born…
For earnest or for jest?

The senses folding thick and dark

About the stifled soul within,
We guess diviner things beyond,
And yearn to them with yearning fond;
We strike out blindly to a mark
Believed in, but not seen.

We vibrate to the pant and thrill

Wherewith Eternity has curled
In serpent-twine about God’s seat;
While, freshening upward to His feet,
In gradual growth His full-leaved will
Expands from world to world.

And, in the tumult and excess

Of act and passion under sun,
We sometimes hear—oh, soft and far,
As silver star did touch with star,
The kiss of Peace and Righteousness
Through all things that are done.

God keeps His holy mysteries

Just on the outside of man’s dream;
In diapason slow, we think
To hear their pinions rise and sink,
While they float pure beneath His eyes,
Like swans adown a stream.

Abstractions, are they, from the forms

Of His great beauty?—exaltations
From His great glory?—strong previsions
Of what we shall be?—intuitions
Of what we are—in calms and storms,
Beyond our peace and passions?

Things nameless! which, in passing so,

Do stroke us with a subtle grace.
We say, ‘Who passes?’—they are dumb.
We cannot see them go or come:
Their touches fall soft, cold, as snow
Upon a blind man’s face.

Yet, touching so, they draw above

Our common thoughts to Heaven’s unknown,
Our daily joy and pain advance
To a divine significance,
Our human love—O mortal love,
That light is not its own!

And sometimes horror chills our blood

To be so near such mystic Things,
And we wrap round us for defence
Our purple manners, moods of sense—
As angels from the face of God
Stand hidden in their wings.
And sometimes through life’s heavy swound
We grope for them!—with strangled breath
We stretch our hands abroad and try
To reach them in our agony,—
And widen, so, the broad life-wound
Which soon is large enough for death.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
‘…although liberal education isn’t perfect, it is the best preparation there is for life and its exigencies.…
Liberal education has helped me in that most human of desires—the yearning to make order and sense of
out of my experience.’
—Seeing Life Whole, Dana Cook Grossman
The Dhamma should be taught to others only when five qualities are established within the person
teaching. Which five?

1. The Dhamma should be taught with the thought, ‘I will speak step-by-step.’
2. The Dhamma should be taught with the thought, ‘I will speak explaining the sequence [of cause &
effect].’
3. The Dhamma should be taught with the thought, ‘I will speak out of compassion.’
4. The Dhamma should be taught with the thought, ‘I will speak not for the purpose of material reward.’
5. The Dhamma should be taught with the thought, ‘I will speak without hurting myself or others.’
—Udayi Sutta: About Udayin, Anguttara Nikaya
Most people in the world struggle to correct problems they see in their outer life. However, what most of
these people do not realize is their problems in the outer world are a result of their beliefs, inner conflict,
and fears and that all of this originates from a false sense of self. This means that there will be no end to
their problems in the outer world until they solve the original problem, their belief in the false self.
—Understand The True Self: The Treasure Within, Floyd Jerred
Radiance
Then a ploughman said, Speak to us of Work.
And he answered, saying:
You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth.
For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life’s procession that marches in
majesty and proud submission towards the infinite.

When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music.
Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison?

Always you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune.
But I say to you that when you work you fulfil a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that
dream was born,
And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life, And to love life through labour is to be
intimate with life’s inmost secret.
…
And what is it to work with love?
It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that
cloth.
It is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.
It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the
fruit.
It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit, And to know that all the blessed
dead are standing about you and watching.
…
Work is love made visible.
And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and
sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.
And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.
And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day
and the voices of the night.
—The Prophet, Khalil Gibran
Then all the tax collectors and the sinners drew near to Him to hear Him. And the Pharisees and the
scribes complained, saying, ‘This Man receives sinners and eats with them.’ So He spoke this parable to
them, saying:
‘What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in
the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on
his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to
them, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!” I say to you that likewise there will
be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine just persons who need no
repentance.’
—The Parable of the Lost Sheep, Holy Bible
Ramanujan’s belief in the Hindu gods, it stands repeating, did not explain his mathematical genius. But his
openness to supernatural influences hinted at a mind endowed with slippery, flexible, and elastic notions
of cause and effect that left him receptive to what those equipped with more purely logical gifts could not
see; that found union in what others saw as unrelated; that embraced before prematurely dismissing.
—The Man Who Knew Infinity, Robert Kanigel
At the age of ten I saw my first airplane. It was sitting in a slightly enclosed area at the Iowa State Fair in
Des Moines. It was a thing of rusty wire and wood and looked not at all interesting. One of the grown-ups
who happened to be around pointed it out to me and said: ‘Look, dear, it flies.’ I looked as directed but
confess I was much more interested in an absurd hat made of an inverted peach-basket which I had just
purchased for fifteen cents.
What psychoanalysts would make of this incident, in the light of subsequent behavior, I do not know.
Today I loathe hats for more than a few minutes on the head and am sure I should pass by the niftiest
creation if an airplane were anywhere around.
—Last Flight, Amelia Earhart
Only the individual can think, and thereby create new values for society—nay, even set up new moral
standards to which the life of the community conforms. Without creative, independently thinking and
judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the
individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.
The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of the individuals composing it
as on their close social cohesion.
—The World As I See It, Albert Einstein
THE AENEID (an extract)

Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc’d by fate,

And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate,
Expell’d and exil’d, left the Trojan shore.
Long labors, both by sea and land, he bore,
And in the doubtful war, before he won
The Latian realm, and built the destin’d town;
His banish’d gods restor’d to rites divine,
And settled sure succession in his line,
From whence the race of Alban fathers come
And the long glories of majestic Rome.
O Muse! the causes and the crimes relate;
What goddess was provok’d, and whence her hate;
For what offense the Queen of Heav’n began
To persecute so brave, so just a man;
Involv’d his anxious life in endless cares,
Expos’d to wants, and hurried into wars!
Can heav’nly minds such high resentment show,
Or exercise their spite in human woe?
Against the Tiber’s mouth, but far away,
An ancient town was seated on the sea;
A Tyrian colony; the people made
Stout for the war, and studious of their trade:
Carthage the name; belov’d by Juno more
Than her own Argos, or the Samian shore.
Here stood her chariot; here, if Heav’n were kind,
The seat of awful empire she design’d.
Yet she had heard an ancient rumor fly,
(Long cited by the people of the sky,)
That times to come should see the Trojan race
Her Carthage ruin, and her tow’rs deface;
Nor thus confin’d, the yoke of sov’reign sway
Should on the necks of all the nations lay.
She ponder’d this, and fear’d it was in fate;
Nor could forget the war she wag’d of late
For conqu’ring Greece against the Trojan state.
Besides, long causes working in her mind,
And secret seeds of envy, lay behind;
Deep graven in her heart the doom remain’d
Of partial Paris, and her form disdain’d;
The grace bestow’d on ravish’d Ganymed,
Electra’s glories, and her injur’d bed.
Each was a cause alone; and all combin’d
To kindle vengeance in her haughty mind.
For this, far distant from the Latian coast
She drove the remnants of the Trojan host;
And sev’n long years th’ unhappy wand’ring train
Were toss’d by storms, and scatter’d thro’ the main.
Such time, such toil, requir’d the Roman name,
Such length of labor for so vast a frame.
—Book 1, Virgil
In order that a man may enter into Cosmic Consciousness he must belong (so to speak) to the top layer of
the world of Self Consciousness. Not that he need have an extraordinary intellect (this faculty is rated,
usually far above its real value and does not seem nearly so important, from this point of view, as do
some others) though he must not be deficient in this respect, either. He must have a good physique, good
health, but above all he must have an exalted moral nature, strong sympathies, a warm heart, courage,
strong and earnest religious feeling. All these being granted, and the man having reached the age
necessary to bring him to the top of the self conscious mental stratum, some day he enters Cosmic
Consciousness. What is his experience? Details must be given with diffidence, as they are only known to
the writer in a few cases, and doubtless the phenomena are varied and diverse. What is said here,
however, may be depended on as far as it goes. It is true of certain cases, and certainly touches upon the
full truth in certain other cases, so that it may be looked upon as being provisionally correct.

a. The person, suddenly, without warning, has a sense of being immersed in a flame, or rose-colored
cloud, or perhaps rather a sense that the mind is itself filled with such a cloud of haze.
b. At the same instant he is, as it were, bathed in an emotion of joy, assurance, triumph, ‘salvation.’ The
last word is not strictly correct if taken in its ordinary sense, for the feeling, when fully developed, is
not that a particular act of salvation is effected, but that no special ‘salvation’ is needed, the scheme
upon which the world is built being itself sufficient.
c. Simultaneously or instantly following the above sense and emotional experiences there comes to the
person an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Like a flash there is presented to his
consciousness a clear conception (a vision) in outline of the meaning and drift of the universe. He
does not come to believe merely; but he sees and knows that the cosmos, which to the self conscious
mind seems made up of dead matter, is in fact far otherwise—is in very truth a living presence. He
sees that instead of men being, as it were, patches of life scattered through an infinite sea of non-
living substance, they are in reality specks of relative death in an infinite ocean of life. He sees that
the life which is in man is eternal, as all life is eternal; that the soul of man is as immortal as God is;
that the universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the
good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love, and that the
happiness of every individual is in the long run absolutely certain. The person who passes through
this experience will learn in the few minutes, or even moments, of its continuance more than in months
or years of study, and he will learn much that no study ever taught or can teach. Especially does he
obtain such a conception of THE WHOLE, or at least of an immense WHOLE, as dwarfs all
conception, imagination or speculation, springing from and belonging to ordinary self consciousness,
such a conception as makes the old attempts to mentally grasp the universe and its meaning petty and
even ridiculous.
d. Along with moral elevation and intellectual illumination comes what must be called, for want of a
better term, a sense of immortality. This is not an intellectual conviction, such as comes with the
solution of a problem, nor is it an experience such as learning something unknown before. It is far
more simple and elementary, and could better be compared to that certainty of distinct individuality,
possessed by each one, which comes with and belongs to self consciousness.
e. With illumination the fear of death which haunts so many men and women at times all their lives falls
off like an old cloak—not, however, as a result of reasoning—it simply vanishes.
f. The same may be said of the sense of sin. It is not that the person escapes from sin; but he no longer
sees that there is any sin in the world from which to escape.
g. The instantaneousness of the illumination is one of its most striking features. It can be compared with
nothing so well as with a dazzling flash of lightning in a dark night, bringing the landscape which had
 been hidden into clear view.
h. The previous character of the man who enters the new life is an important element in the case.
i. So is the age at which illumination occurs. Should we hear of a case of cosmic consciousness
occurring at twenty, for instance, we should at first doubt the truth of the account, and if forced to
believe it we should expect the man (if he lived) to prove himself, in some way, a veritable spiritual
giant.
j. The added charm to the personality of the person who attains to cosmic consciousness is always, it is
believed, a feature in the case.
k. There seems to the writer to be sufficient evidence that, with cosmic consciousness, while it is
actually present, and lasting (gradually passing away) a short time thereafter, a change takes place in
the appearance of the subject of illumination. This change is similar to that caused in a person’s
appearance by great joy, but at times (that is, in pronounced cases) it seems to be much more marked
than that. In these great cases in which illumination is intense the change in question is also intense
and may amount to a veritable ‘transfiguration.’ Dante says that he was ‘transhumanized into a God.’
There seems to be a strong probability that could he have been seen at that moment he would have
exhibited what could only have been called ‘transfiguration.’
—Cosmic Consciousness, Richard Maurice Bucke
The Might of Time
To view the fleeting as everlasting
Is foolish and degrading.
—Chapter 34, Verse 331
…
Men cannot claim even a moment as theirs
Yet give themselves to countless plans.
—Chapter 34, Verse 337
…
The bond between the body and the soul
Is like a bird leaving an egg-shell.
—Chapter 34, Verse 338
—Thirukural
Unfortunately, there is a trap that lies in waiting for even the most brilliant strategist. In fact, sometimes it
is the most brilliant strategist that is most susceptible. The trap is delay, usually caused by the desire to
overanalyze the situation and make it perfect before proceeding. Too many strategists want the perfect
situation, all the information, everything ‘just so’ before proceeding.
—Act Now!, William A. Cohen
It is, in fact, normal and necessary for us to ‘forget’ in this fashion, in order to make room in our
conscious minds for new impressions and ideas. If this did not happen, everything we experienced would
remain above the threshold of consciousness and our minds would become impossibly cluttered. This
phenomenon is so widely recognized today that most people who know anything about psychology take it
for granted.
But just as conscious contents can vanish into the unconscious, new contents, which have never yet
been conscious, can arise from it. One may have an inkling, for instance, that something is on the point of
breaking into consciousness—that ‘something is in the air,’ or that one ‘smells a rat.’ The discovery that
the unconscious is no mere depository of the past, but is also full of germs of future psychic situations and
ideas, led me to my own new approach to psychology.
—Man and His Symbols, Carl G. Jung
Gandhi was so detached from his physical environment that going to jail did not disrupt his work at all,
and he drove some of his hardest bargains from behind jail walls. Usually the walls were those of
Yeravda Prison, where he felt so much at home that once, when a British interrogator asked for his
address, he answered, ‘Yeravda.’ When a man does everything in the spirit of worship, everywhere he
goes is sacred, and Gandhi used to mark his jail letters Yeravda Mandir, which means ‘Yeravda temple.’
—Gandhi, The Man: The Story of His Transformation,
Eknath Easwaran
As a leader, one must sometimes take actions that are unpopular, or whose results will not be known for
years to come. There are victories whose glory lies only in the fact that they are known to those who win
them. This is particularly true of prison, where you must find consolation in being true to your ideals,
even if no one else knows of it.
—Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela
The contact with poets, forest saints and the best wits of the land, the glimpse into the first awakening of
Ancient India’s mind as it searched, at times childishly and naively, at times with a deep intuition, but at
all times earnestly and passionately, for the spiritual truths and the meaning of existence—this experience
must be highly stimulating to anyone, particularly because the Hindu culture is so different and therefore
has so much to offer.
—The Wisdom of India, Yutang Lin
THE SERPENT. Eve.
EVE (startled) Who is that?
THE SERPENT. It is I. I have come to shew you my beautiful new hood. See (she spreads a magnificent
amethystine hood)!
EVE (admiring it) Oh! But who taught you to speak?
THE SERPENT. You and Adam. I have crept through the grass, and hidden, and listened to you.
EVE. That was wonderfully clever of you.
THE SERPENT. I am the most subtle of all the creatures of the field.
EVE. Your hood is most lovely. (She strokes it and pets the serpent).
Pretty thing! Do you love your godmother Eve?
THE SERPENT. I adore her. (She licks Eve’s neck with her double tongue).
EVE (petting her) Eve’s wonderful darling snake. Eve will never be lonely now that her snake can talk to
her.
THE SERPENT. I can talk of many things. I am very wise. It was I who whispered the word to you that
you did not know. Dead. Death. Die.
EVE (shuddering) Why do you remind me of it? I forgot it when I saw your beautiful hood. You must not
remind me of unhappy things.
THE SERPENT. Death is not an unhappy thing when you have learnt how to conquer it.
EVE. How can I conquer it?
THE SERPENT. By another thing, called birth.
EVE. What? (Trying to pronounce it) B-birth?
THE SERPENT. Yes, birth.
EVE. What is birth?
THE SERPENT. The serpent never dies. Some day you shall see me come out of this beautiful skin, a new
snake with a new and lovelier skin. That is birth.
EVE. I have seen that. It is wonderful.
THE SERPENT. If I can do that, what can I not do? I tell you I am very subtle. When you and Adam talk, I
hear you say ‘Why?’ Always ‘Why?’ You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never
were; and I say ‘Why not?’ I made the word dead to describe my old skin that I cast when I am renewed. I
call that renewal being born.
EVE. Born is a beautiful word.
THE SERPENT. Why not be born again and again as I am, new and beautiful every time?
EVE. I! It does not happen: that is why.
THE SERPENT. That is how; but it is not why. Why not?
—Back to Methuselah, George Bernard Shaw
Time is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible; without it, nothing. The
supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it.
You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the
unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. No
one can take it away from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.
In the realm of time there is no aristocracy of wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect. Genius is never
rewarded by even an extra hour a day. And there is no punishment. Waste your infinitely precious
commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. No mysterious power
will say, ‘This man is a fool, if not a knave. He does not deserve time; he shall be cut off at the meter.’ It
is more certain than government bonds, and payment of income is not affected on Sundays. Moreover, you
cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get onto debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You
cannot waste tomorrow; it is kept for you. You can not waste the next hour. It is kept for you.
You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure,
money, content, respect and the evolution of your mortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is a
matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that. Your happiness—the
elusive prize that you are all clutching for, my friends!—depends on that.
If one cannot arrange that an income of twenty-four hours a day shall exactly cover all proper items of
expenditure, one does muddle one’s whole life indefinitely.
We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is.
—How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day, Arnold Bennett
See the flower, how generously it distributes perfume and honey. It gives to all, gives freely of its love.
When its work is done, it falls away quietly. Try to be like the flower, unassuming despite all its qualities.
—Bhagavad Gita
 Acknowledgements

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint:

‘Satish Dhawan’, Current Science Vol. 82, No. 2 (25 January 2005), Roddam Narasimha
A Doctor’s Story of Life and Death, K. Subbarao with Arun Tiwari, Ocean Books
The Japji and the Rehras: The Morning and Evening Prayer of the Sikhs, translated by Khushwant
Singh, Rupa Publications India
Tagore for the 21st Century Reader, translated by Arunava Sinha, Aleph Book Company
Thirukkural: Pearls of Inspiration, translated by M. Rajaram, Rupa Publications India
The publishers would like to acknowledge Shrutikeerti Khurana for her work in compiling the
quotations.