From ‘Abundant living Restless Striving. A memoir’ by Sohrab P Godrej as recounted to B K Karanjia

Never did I know distinctly
What ‘myself’ means for me
- Johann Wolfgang Goethe



She looked after all of us as only a caring woman can from ‘a thousand decencies daily flow.’



There’s a new tribunal now,
Higher than God’s – the educated man’s.
- Robert Browning



Fain would I travel to some foreign shore,
Never to see my country more
So might I to myself myself restore.
- Dryden (tr. Ovid)



What [Max] Mueller had to say….. ‘India – What Can It Teach Us?’

‘If I were to look over the whole world to find out the country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power and beauty that nature can bestow, in some parts a very paradise on earth – I should point to India. If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which will deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant – I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we, here in Europe, we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of one Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw that corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human, a life, not for this life only but a transfigured and eternal life – again I should point to India.’



I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech,
Which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.
- R. W. Emerson



Man is the only animal for whom his own lie is a problem
which he has to solve.
- Erich Fromm



None who have been always free can understand the
terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom
for those who are not free.
- Pearl S. Buck



The individual who has to justify his existence by his
own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself
- Eric Hoffer



It is a wise father who knows his own child.
- William Shakespeare



I am not weary; so long as I live on earth, I intend to
conquer at least my own little foot of territory afresh every
day.
- Johann Wolfgang Goethe



We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have
treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that,
beyond doubt, they would depict the Devil in human form.
- William R. Inge



What is of little value regard as dear;
What is dear regard as of little value.
- Cato



That is at bottom the only courage demanded of us: to
have courage for the most strange, the most singular
and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.
- Rainer Maria Rilke



Keep a green tree in your heart and
perhaps a singing bird will come.
- Chinese proverb



… Sanskrit quotation ….

Ten wells equal to one step-well,
Ten step-wells equal to one lake,
Ten lakes equal to one son,
Ten sons equal to one tree.



Centuries later, Shivaji Maharaj showed considerable enlightenment when he laid down strict rules for the cutting of trees:

The Armada of our kingdom requires durable hardwood for their hulls, decks and masts.

Teak and other appropriate trees of our forests may be felled for this purpose after applying to His Majesty and obtaining the royal permission. If any more be required, they may be purchased from neighbouring kingdoms.

The Mango and Jackfruit trees of our kingdom also provide suitable timber for naval purposes. But they should not be touched, for it is not as if these trees can be grown in a year or two. People plant them and bestow upon them long years of care, as they would on their own children.

If such trees were to be felled, would not the people be inconsolable?

An edifice built upon anyone’s sorrow soon collapses, taking down with it the architect too. In fact, the ruler has to bear the guilt of tyranny. Also, the absence of such trees causes irreparable damage.

Hence, under no circumstances are such depredations to be allowed.

Perchance, if a very old tree has ceased to bear fruit, then it may only be taken with the consent of the owner after persuasion and payment of compensation.

Coercion shall not, under any circumstances, be pardoned.



At independence, 45 per cent of our country was covered by forests and we boasted of the second largest variety of trees and plants, second only to Brazil. Now unbelievably, it is no more than a mere 12 per cent at the most.



Irish proverb …. ‘It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.’

From ‘For a Pagan Song. In the footsteps of the man who would be king: travels in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan’ by Jonny Bealby

…..thats India – anything can happen and usually does

As one fellow traveler put it to me: ‘It’s the only place on the planet where everything that has ever happened in the history of the world is happening every minute of every day, right under your nose.; He’s right. I mean where else could I have watched a cow casually give birth in the middle of a three-lane inner-city ring road or seen vultures swoop to pick the flesh of recently deceased humans? Where else could I have observed a camel wandering the streets under a mountain of straw while being shaved by a blind man on the pavement? And where indeed at three in the morning after a riotious midnight dinner could I have abandoned my dangerously drunk taxi driver in favour of an enormous elephant called Rubkali with ‘STOP – HORN PLEASE’ painted across her arse? Though not always pleasant, travelling here is about ten times more intense than anywhere else I’ve been; a vitality unmatcheable.

From ‘The thread of God in my life. An Autobiography with a difference’ by R.M.Lala

One of the characters in a play by George Bernard Shaw (Androcles and the Lion) is the obstinate Christian named Lavinia, who refuses to burn incense to the Roman gods; she says she would rather be thrown to the lions. ‘I think I am going to die for God,’ she says. ‘Nothing else is real enough to die for.’ And the captain of the gladiators querulously asked her, ‘What is God?’ To which Lavinia replies: ‘When we know that, Captain, we shall be gods ourselves.’



Einstein’s famous response ….. ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.’



W.Stanley Jones …. ‘When you find a faith,’ he says, ‘all your sums add up.’



Zoroastrian morality is expressed in just three words, Humat, Hukht, and Huvarsht – good thoughts, good words, and good deeds



G.K. Chesterton …. ‘Angels can fly…… because they take themselves lightly’



Shakespeare …. ‘This above all to your own self be true.’



JRD Tata …. ‘To lead people you have got to lead them with affection.’



The possessions Sir Dorab Tata left for the creation of the trust included his shares, landed estates and jewellery, valued in all at one crore rupees in 1932, equivalent to about a hundred crore rupees today. They included the 245-carat Jubilee Diamond, twice as large as the Kohinoor.



Andrew Carnegie …. started two thousand public libraries across the USA and Scotland.



Jamsetji N. Tata …offered in his lifetime almost half his wealth to the creation of a postgraduate Institute of Science



A Japanese proverb says, ‘Time spent in laughing is time spent with the gods.’



JRD, when he was sixty-one, was asked by a teacher in Calcutta what his guidelines were, and he highlighted the following five priciples:

• Nothing worthwhile is ever achieved without deep thought and hard work.

• One must think for oneself and never accept at their face value slogans and catch phrases to which, unfortunately, our people are too easily susceptible.

• Forever strive for excellence, or even perfection, in any task, however small, and never be satisfied with the second best.

• No success or achievement in material terms is worthwhile unless it serves the needs or interests of the country and its people and is achieved by fair and honest means.

• Good human relations not only bring great personal rewards but are essential to the success of any enterprise



‘Somewhere in the heart of a man, there’s a door, and what’s more
He can fling it wide and throw the key away.
Suddenly it’s like a sunrise on a summer day!’



Augustine …. ‘Lord make me pure – but not yet!’



The Chinese proverb …. ‘The strongest of memories is weaker than the palest of ink.’



William Blake ….
‘To see a world in a grain of sand,
And heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.’



To the end of his life JRD would often tell me, ‘We don’t smile enough. Sometimes when people recognize me when I am travelling by car, I smile at them. It makes them happy and it costs me nothing.’

When he was awarded the Bharat Ratna in 1992 there was an open-air felicitation by Tata employees at the NCPA grounds. On that occasion JRD said, ‘And American economist says that in the next century India will be an economic super power. I don’t want India to be an economic super power. I want India to be a happy country.’



‘Don’t hate ‘evil men’, hate the evil in men.’
- The Dalai Lama



‘Why do we wait, and coldly stint our praises,
And leave our reverent homage unexpressed
Till brave hearts lie beneath a roof of daisies
Then heap with flowers each hallowed place of rest? …
Ah! Why not give to living hearts some token
Of half the love and pride that throb through ours?’
- J. R. Miller



‘The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand,
nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship;
it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when
you discover that someone else believes in you
and is willing to trust you with a friendship.’
- Ralph Waldo Emerson



As Chairman of Air-India International and pioneer of flying, JRD’s views on aviation were respected by Nehru. However, Nehru totally kept him out of anything having to do with the economic policy of India…… JRD …..told me with sadness, ‘You know, Russi, in no other country would the government not have consulted a person like me on economic policy.’



Shakespeare ……
‘This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.’

‘Age is opportunity no less,
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening fades away,
The sky is filled with stars,
Invisible by day’
- Henry Longfellow



‘We give him back to Thee, dear God, who gavest him to us.
Yet as Thou did not lose him by giving,
So we have not lost him by his return.’



‘Death is nothing at all,
I have only slipped away into the next room.
I am I, and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other,
We are still.
Call me by my old familiar name,
Speak to me in the easy way you always used.
Put no difference in your tone,
Wear no air of solemnity or sorrow.
Laugh as we always laughed
At the little jokes we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.
Let my name be ever
The household word that it always was,
Let it be spoken without effort,
Without the ghost of a shadow on it.
Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same as it ever was
There is absolutely unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind
Because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you, for an interval,
Somewhere very near,
Just round the corner.
All is well.’
- Canon Henry Scott-Holland

From ‘Goodbye to Gandhi. Travels in the New India’ by Bernard Imhasly

….statement voiced by the German nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg: ‘In the West we have built a big and beautiful ship. It has all the possible comforts, yet something is missing: it has no compass and doesn’t know where it is heading. Men like Tagore and Gandhi have found it. Why cant we install this compass in our ship, so that both may find their ultimate purpose?’



Gandhi …..The Jain concept of anekantavad was equally important to him. ‘I very much like this doctrine of many-ness of reality. It is this doctrine that has taught me to judge a Muslim from his own standpoint and a Christian from his….’



….Shiva temple of Somnath ….. the list of prohibited items put up near the entrance …… it said in Gujarati, Hindi and English,‘No mobile phones,’ and, more bizarrely: ‘No coconuts and revolvers.’



The struggle against the British had not been Gandhi’s only concern. His strategy of non-violence went hand in hand with his personal quest for truth, wherein he constantly questioned his own motives. Satyagraha, ‘holding on to truth’, was not only intended to banish the evil in the other – be it political and racist repression of religious and social discrimination – but, in the process, to cleanse the self too.



…..in his obsession with cleanliness and hygiene, as well as in his insistence on punctuality, he was a constant critic of his people.



Ela Bhatt …. SEWA ….. I kept hearing comments like “when men see money, something happens in their heads”. Women are certainly less corrupt. They can look into the future, I don’t know why. Perhaps it has to do with biological factors. What is certain is that they are better at planning, at saving. And since they look ahead, they have developed survival strategies, which are not based on exclusion and violence, but on non-violence and integration.’



Rajasthan … a local saying: ‘When the rains fail, only three living beings survive: the Brahmin, the goat and the camel.’ …. Udayvilas Resort ….. a 100,000 litres of water are used every day for tending to the extravagant Mughal gardens and swimming pools for each of the resort’s bungalows. This massive daily consumption puts the ecological benefits of tourism in perspective: the average Rajasthani family consumes as much water in three-and-a-half years.



Rajiv Gandhi ….. Of hundred rupees, just about fifteen reached the beneficiaries; the rest was lost in the gigantic net of corruption that had grown around the anti-poverty schemes.



Aruna Roy told me ….that India today has ‘the most liberal law in the world to disclose official information’.



Indians are talkative people, and they cant wait until they have extracted each and every personal detail from strangers



‘Kidnapping in Bihar is a sophisticated business,’ the documentary filmmaker Prakash Jha would tell me later, ‘You can hire kidnapping specialists, and the victim’s families can hire people who specialize in their release. If you are willing to pay, you can get better treatment for a victim, better food as well. And when it comes to paying the ransom, the “client” can choose from several alternatives, even credit cards!’



Gandhi had walked the sixteen kilometres from Narkatiaganj to Bhitiwarwa. In contrast to the modern ‘parachute Gandhians’, he could thus actually witness the poverty from close quarters …… We drove alongside a canal in which children, shouting happily, were splashing about. Buffaloes were standing in the water and did not seem to mind being used as diving boards or as gleaming black slides over which the children glided into the water, arms and legs up in the air. Nearby, women had begun transplanting the paddy; their bright red saris were visible from a distance. On coming closer, we heard their rhythmic singing as they pressed the plants into the water. The Arcadian beauty of the scene made me momentarily forget that this was backbreaking work and that the saris the women wore were probably the only ones they possessed.



….. Primary Health Centre (PHC) in the nearby village of Amalwa. ….the administrator ….When I inquired about the poor attendance, he said that nobody came for treatment, and he listed the reasons: the medical worker had died in 2001 and had not been replaced; the doctor had been transferred in 2003. He had not been replaced either. Only a midwife and he were still in service.

I could see with my own eyes why nobody wanted to come here. In a corner of the operating theatre was a jumble of metal rods, the leftovers of a taping table and a stretcher. And as I tried to open the medicine closet, the official rushed in to stop me, but too late – a swarm of bees came flying out. How did she manage deliveries under these conditions, I asked the nurse. She shrugged. The women just had to give birth on the floor, she said



Manipur, a state half the size of Switzerland with a third of its population, has twenty-six underground organizations to its thirty-five ethnic groups. …. In Manipur alone, with a military strength of 44,320 soldiers, there is one serviceman to every fifty-six inhabitants – almost seven times the figure of Germany.



I recalled the notorious quote by M.S. Golwalkar, Hedgewar’s successor as RSS chief, who in 1939 had written in We, or Our Nationhood Defined: ‘…. the foreign races in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect Hindu religion’, or they will have to live ‘in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges ….not even citizen’s rights.’



….just as Gandhi did not want to be in the city, Ambedkar did not want to be in the village. His blue suit and red tie, a copy of the Constitution in the left hand, sends out a message not only as clear as that of Gandhi’s symbols, but also clearly the opposite. The outstretched right hand points to the distance and tells Dalits: ‘Your future lies not in the village and in tradition, but in the modernity of the city, the universities and factories.’

These differences in body language and mode of dress, as depicted by their iconic statues, tell us that Ambedkar and Gandhi looked for different ways not only out of the caste system, but also out of poverty. Contact with the West and ‘industrialism’ had convinced Gandhi that the economic well-being of India’s 650,000 villages did not lie in industrialization and urbanization but in the rural subsistence economy, in which everyone had enough for his own needs, and no more, In his view, industry would in the long run not create jobs, but destroy them. Ambedkar, in contrast, also with a western education behind him, saw the village as nothing more than the ‘cesspool’ hindering all economic progress, precisely because it stifled the free development of all social groups.



Gandhi ….. ‘The test of orderliness in a country is not the number of millionaires it owns, but the absence of starvation among its masses.’



There are 1.2 million NGOs here, engaging and employing seven million people. The entire sector has a turnover of 190 billion rupees…. Yet, 75 per cent of all NGOs are one-man outfits. Hundreds of thousands of them work in isolation, without synergies or networks.



…..Tamil saying: ‘He who is born in fire, is not burnt by the sun’.



Gandhi …. ‘… he played a vital role in giving the people of this country the feeling of belonging to a national community’. …..John Stratchey….acting Viceroy had said in 1888: ‘There is not and never was an Indian or even any country of India, possessing any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious.’ And Churchill had famously – and with a snigge – compared India to the Equator. It was precisely the opposite which Gandhi had achieved …. Millions of people have identified with him, rich and poor, Hindus and Muslims. From him they acquired a feeling of being part of a community’.



The poet Nirmal Verma had ….in a diary entry from 1986: ‘If I think of Gandhi, what is the first image that appears? Something akin to a flame: a light in the darkness, hardly occupying any space; weak, but without trembling, it rests in itself, wide awake; yet it burns, so quietly, one doesn’t even notice that it burns’.

Gandhi represents for me something of the immense diversity of India, in this potpourri of paradoxes which are compressed into this one person and this single biography: earthiness and spirituality, simplicity and elegance, steadfastness and pragmatism, tolerance and fierceness, rusticality and universality….

From ‘Midnights with the Mystic. A little guide to freedom and bliss. Sadhguru. Yogi, Mystic and Visionary’ by Cheryl Simone

There is a

Force within

That gives you life

Seek that.

- Rumi

“Every opinion you have about anything can be a limiting identity.”



A yogi is one who is unwilling to settle either for deductions or for belief systems. He wants to experience and know it. In that sense, yoga is a technology of taking a person from his individuality to his universality, to knowing and experiencing existence as himself.



….yoga works….it definitely works for everyone. Factors such as age, attitude, or karmic situations, to name a few, decide how quickly yoga works



….mystical Kedarnath…..I knew that Sadhguru was particularly fond of Kedar. …..It is a place where many saints and sages have lived, and still do.



….I asked Sadhguru why there were not more enlightened beings on the planet, he said that for most beings, the moment of enlightenment happens at the time of leaving the body.

From ‘Letters to a young poet’ by Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

….most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.



Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write?



A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.



…..for ultimately, and precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone; and many things must happen, many things must go right, a whole constellation of events must be fulfilled, for one human being to successfully advise or help another.



Read as little as possible of literary criticism – such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them. Always trust yourself and your own feeling, as opposed to argumentations, discussions, or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your judgements their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing.



Bodily delight is a sensory experience …..what is bad is that most people misuse this learning and squander it and apply it as a stimulant on the tired places of their lives and as a distraction rather than as a way of gathering themselves for their highest moments.



…..be happy about your growth, in which of course you cant take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust. Avoid providing material for the drama that is always stretched tight between parents and children; it uses up much of the children’s strength and wastes the love of the elders …



….believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.



……if there is nothing you can share with other people, try to be close to Things; they will not abandon you; and the nights are still there, and the winds that move through the trees and across many lands; everything in the world of Things and animals is still filled with happening, which you can take part in; and children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way – and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no value.



Someday (and even now, especially in the countries of northern Europe, trustworthy signs are already speaking and shining), someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only of life and reality: the female human being.



The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise….



Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

From ‘Vedic Ecology. Practical Wisdom for surviving the 21st Century’ by Ranchor Prime

……the poet T. S. Eliot, “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”



Indian consciousness is full of trees and forests. If you look, for example, in Greek literature, you will find only a few descriptions of trees and forests, whereas Indian literature such as Ramayana and Mahabharata is full of such description, as if people were always under the trees.



At the outset of the nineteenth century India was well-endowed with thick forest land. To meet the British Empire’s needs during the nineteenth century, the forests were gradually nationalized and the Indian Forestry Department set up to exploit them. From the beginning of the century large areas of virgin forest were felled, mainly to supply the expanding British shipbuilding industry. After the arrival of the railway in India in 1853, further vast amounts of timber were required for sleepers and for fueling locomotives. Later, when coal replaced timber as a fuel, the coalmines themselves needed large quantities of timber for their underground galleries. Exploitation continued, and even as late as the second World War, the war effort required the felling of 6,326 square miles of previously untouched Indian forest.

…..In essence, these laws took India’s forests out of the hands of local people. Villagers were denied rights to what had always been theirs. Because the basic connection between village and forest was brokem, the tradition of caring for trees, of respecting and even worshipping them, faded away.



The air is his breath, the trees are the hairs of his body,
The oceans his waist, the hills and mountains are his bones.
The rivers are the veins of the Cosmic person, his movements
are the passing of ages.

- Srimad Bhagavatam



The incessant search for material comforts and their multiplication is an evil. I make bold to say that the Europeans will have to remodel their outlook, if they are not to perish under the weight of the comforts to which they are becoming slaves.

- M. K. Gandhi, from Young India



Gandhi said that he was not against the idea of a machine as such; after all, the human body itself is the most delicate machine. ….. “What I object to,” he said,

…is the craze for what they call labor-saving machinery. Men go on “saving labor” till thousands are without work and thrown on the open streets to die of starvation. ……Today machinery merely helps a few to ride on the backs of all.



Excerpts from Thomas Macauley’s “Education Minute”

“[No Orientalist] could deny that a single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia….all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England. The question now before us is simply whether, when it is in our power to teach the [English] language, we shall teach languages in which….there are no books on any subject which deserve to be compared to our own ….whether, when we can patronize sound philosophy and true history, we shall countenance at the public expense medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand years long, and geography made up of seas of treacle and rivers of butter. The great object of the British government ought to be the promotion of English literature and science among the natives of India.”



Balbir Mathur …..he devised a list of basic conditions: the trees must give nutricious fruit; they must grow quickly and give fruit within one year; they must be easy to look after and grow in poor soil; and they must be able to fit in a confined space. To meet these conditions he came up with a shortlist of five trees: lemon, papaya, banana, drumstick and falsa.



The whole stretch of the Yamuna from Delhi to Agra, which includes Vrindavan, has now been declared unfit for drinking and bathing. This strikes at the heart of Vrindavan’s culture. Water from the Yamuna is used to bathe the deities of Krishna in the temples and is taken as a purifying drink



One should not cause urine, stool or mucus to enter water. Anything mixed with thes unholy substances, or with blood or poison, should never be thrown into water

- Manu-Smriti



The fact that Vrindavan is bounded on all sides by contaminated water – the Yamuna on one side and sewage on all others – is a deep injury to its well-being and its function as a place of purification and revitalization. ….How could this situation have come about? …..Satish Kumar points out …..that for nearly two hundred years Indians have been estranged from their own culture by English education. They have been encouraged to think in Western ways and to value the things that the West values. Their own traditional values have been marginalized. In many cases they no longer know what those values were or why they were held because those things are no longer taught.



One who is undisturbed by the flow of desires, as the ocean is unmoved by the incessant flow of rivers, finds peace.

- Bhagavad Gita