From ‘Our Moon has Blood Clots. The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits’ by Rahul Pandita

….and an earlier time when the flowers were not stained with blood, the moon with blood clots!

-          Pablo Neruda, ‘Oh, My Lost City’

Arthur Anthony MacDonnell, the great professor of Sanskrit at Oxford University, once remarked, ‘History is the one weak spot in Indian literature. It is, in fact, non-existent.’

……Lal Ded, Kashmir’s revered poetess-saint:

Shiv chhuy thali’e rozaan

Mo zaan Hyon’d tey Musalmaan

God pervades every particle, every being

Don’t distinguish between a Hindu and a Muslim

In 1948, the Kashmiri political leader Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, who had been a strong proponent of Dogra rule in Kashmir, made his pact with India by standing next to Jawaharlal Nehru and reciting a Persian couplet: ‘Mann tu shudi, tu mann shudi. Ta kas na goyed. Man degram tu degri.’ (I became you and you became me, so nobody can think of us as separate.)

But this bonhomie was shortlived. The relationship …..soured…..Sheikh Abdullah would also direct his bitterness towards the Pandits, a community to which his own grandfather belonged, before he converted to Islam. He would tell Pandits: ‘Raliv, Chaliv, ya Galiv’ (Be one among us, flee, or be decimated)

Depicting the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats, Spiegelman asks his father how it felt to be in the Auschwitz concentration camp. His father startles him by producing a loud ‘Boo!’ and says ‘it felt a little like that. But always!’ That is how we felt on the night of January 19.

At the blue gate, Father stopped and turned back. He looked at the house. Looking back, there was a sense of finality in his gaze. There were tears in his eyes. Ma was calm. Satish stood next to me. Nobody uttered a word. Before we moved on, Father recited something that I remember well. The howling of a dog near one’s house was believed to be a bad omen. So if it happened, the occupants uttered: Yetti gach, yeti chhuy ghar divta (Leave from here, O misfortune, this house is guarded by the deity of the house.)

Women had been herded like cattle into the backs of trucks. ….In one of the trucks, a woman lifted the tarpaulin sheet covering the back and peered outside. There was nothing peculiar about her except the blankness in her eyes. They were like a void that sucked you in. Years later, I saw a picture of a Jewish prisnor in Auschwitz. When I saw his eyes, my mind was immediately transported to that day, and I was reminded of the look in that woman’s eyes.

Years later, I saw Father reading a report on the slain Ehsan Jafri, brutally done to death by a Hindu mob in Ahmedabad’s Gulbarg Society, a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood. As I sat next to him, I read how Jafri had nurtured a nest of barn swallows in his room and to protect them, he would not even switch on the ceiling fan. That day I realized that my Father had gifted me something invaluable. Something that enabled me to calmly face an uproariously drunk army general one night in a television news studio. We were there to debate human rights violations in Kashmir and I pointed out that there needs to be zero tolerance towards such crimes. ‘How can you say that?’ he barked. ‘It is they who have forced you out of your homes, turning you into refugees.’

I looked him in the eye and said: ‘General, I’ve lost my home, not my humanity.’

…We also counted the number of times we had shifted house since the day we left home.

It roughly came to around twenty. It may have been even twenty-two times, the same as the number of rooms in our house that Ma talked continually about.

‘You have had no source of income for months now,’ he would continue. ‘This is all I can offer you for your house. I know it is worth much more, but these are difficult times even for us.’

If you relented, he would pull out a wad of cash.

‘Here, take this advance. Oh no, what are you saying? Receipt? You should have hit me with your shoe instead. No receipt is required. I will come later to get the papers signed.’

He would also forcibly leave a hundred-rupee note in your son’s hands and leave. A few days later, a neighbor would come around and ask ‘Oh, Jan Mohammed was here as well?’

‘His son has become the divisional commander of Hizbul Mujahideen,’ the neighbor would inform you.

Most of us did not have a choice. By 1992, the locks of most Pandit houses had been broken. Many houses were burnt down. In Barbarshah in old Srinagar, they say, Nand Lal’s house smouldered for six weeks. It was made entirely of deodar wood.

Sometime ago, in September 2012, I meet an old Pandit scholar in Srinagar who never left Kashmir. He was abducted by militants three times but always returned unscathed…. He tells me about an incident that occurred in 1995…..he was stopped by a Muslim professor he knew. ‘What are you doing here? Go to Bae’bdaem, some very rare books stolen from Pandit houses have been put for sale there,’ he told him……in a shed, a boatman had put thousands of books and rare manuscripts on sale for twenty rupees per kilo. The shed swarmed with foreign scholars from Europe. The boatman spotted him. ‘You look like a Pandit, are you?’ he asked. ‘Then your rate is different; it is thirty rupees.’

….. The scholar picked up whatever he could, including a fifteenth-century Sanskrit commentary on the verses of Lal Ded and Maheshwarnanda’s Maharathamanjari.

I visited Talwindi Salem, where Paash had lived and were he was killed by Sikh extremists some years ago. In his house, I saw the table on which he had scribbled: Know what how why. That round mass of white light inside my chest turned brighter.

….Paash’s immortal lines –

Sabse khatarnaaq hota hai/murda shaanti se bhar jaana

Na hona tadap ka/sab kucch sehan kar jaana

Ghar se nikalna kaam par/aur kaam se lautkar ghar aana

Sabse khatarnaaq hota hai/ humare sapnon ka mar jaana

It’s most dangerous/ to be filled with the silence of a corpse

To not feel anything/ to tolerate everything

To leave home for work/ and to return home from work

It’s most dangerous/ when our dreams die

But I could never get myself to take that final plunge. I isolated a portion of my heart. I kept in it things I would share with no one. Like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s lines in Bandit Queen: Khud se kahi jo kahi, kahi kisi se bhi nahi (What I said to myself, I told no one)

…Ravi left Jammu with two other Pandit colleagues for Gool …..Just before Gool, the bus comes to a halt and armed men enter. They have specific information about three Pandits on board the bus. Ravi knows what this means. He hugs the other two men. They are asked to step out of the bus, which leaves without them. Ravi tries to fight the men. He is hit in the face. All three of them are shot.  ……

….Ravi is dead. My brother is dead, my hero is dead.

After Ravi’s death, things fall apart. The family began to disintegrate. In a few months, Asha [Ravi’s wife] shifted elsewhere with Shubham. Ravi’s mother spent the hours endlessly watching television. She refused to take medicines for her diabetes and high blood pressure. A crazy restlessness crept into Ravi’s father. He would visit us sometimes in Deli, making an overnight journey, and after an hour or two had passed, he would get up and say he wanted to go back. It would take us hours to convince him to stay for at least one day.

[Ravi’s father says]

…Sometimes, when I am alone, I almost hear Arnimal sing her lines to me: Lass’e kami’e hawasay, maazas gaum basbasay. There is no reason for me to live, I am just withering away.

Mohini, my wife, lives with me in a refugee settlement. She deserves a medal for living. One of her kidneys is damaged. She is diabetic. She has lost vision in her right eye.

After Ravi’s death, I cannot stay in one place for long. I go and visit my daughter in Chandigarh. No sooner have I removed my shoes then I have this urge to run away. I go to my sister’s house in Delhi. But from there as well, I feel like running away. It is only here, in the one-room dwelling of this refugee settlement, that I accept my destiny.

….It is said that the heaviest load in this universe is that of a father carrying his son’s body. Ask me, I have carried it myself and my shouders are still bent……

Baramulla, 1947

…… ‘Everything has been reduced to ashes, Damodar,’ he cried.

The fire had spread in our locality after the invaders had entered and killed two sons of one of our neighbours. The boys had been asked to recite the Kalma by the marauders, but they had refused. The tribesmen had then shot them both. Their mother had then asked her husband to carry their bodies to the kitchen to be cremated. The parents chose to burn alive with their dead son. The fire soon engulfed the house and then spread to the entire locality.

My mother could no longer stand on her feet. She sat on the road and sobbed. ….. On both sides of the street, houses were reduced to burnt stubs…… And then we stood in front of what used to be our house. It had been devastated in the fire as well. ….All our belongings had been looted. ….My father walked slowly, as if he were walking in his sleep….he started rummaging through the debris. He was searching for something….. He upturned bricks, stones and burnt wood. Finally he broke down. After a while, he paused and looked at me. He wiped his tears, ‘I was looking for your grandfather’s chillum. That is the last thing he touched before he left us.’

‘…..Maqbool Sherwani is dead.’ ….When he learnt about the tribal invasion, Sherwani rode out on his horse, going from village to village, urging people, particularly the Pandits, not to leave ….when it became clear that the lives of many people were in jeopardy because thousands of tribesmen were approaching, he decided to sabotage their advance. ….Sherwani misguided the tribals, causing them to lose crucial time. But eventually ….they …..captured him. He was dragged to a hillock where nails were hammered into his hands. …… ‘Victory to Hindu-Muslim unity,’ Sherwani had shouted. A squad of invaders pumped bullets into his body……

…..The tribesmen converted Baramulla’s cinema hall into a rape house. Hundreds of women were taken there and raped. Some of them were later abducted and taken to Rawalpindi and Peshawar and sold like cattle. Many women had jumped into the Jhelum to save their honour.

…..The tribal raid of 1947 destroyed many lives…..

There had been mass conversions during the tribal raid. At several places, the invaders had herded Pandits to a ground where, like their ancestors from Afghanistan who ruled Kashmir once, they slaughtered a calf, cooked it and forced the Pandits to eat it, and then read the Kalma while cutting their sacred thread.

Conservative estimates suggest that thousands were converted forcibly to Islam. Most of them were later reconverted to Hinduism through the efforts of Pandit saints …..and social reformers….

A few in Sopore and elsewhere refused to reconvert to Hinduism. They had lost all hope. ‘What if the savages come back?’ they asked.

Dr Razdan looked at my father and said – I have bad news. Ma, he told us, was suffering from a rare neurological disorder called motor neurone disease. She would lose her voice completely, and soon she would be restricted to bed. Her muscles would weaken one by one and then she would even lose her ability to swallow food……

After she developed this condition, I thought it was imperative that we at least have a house of our own. So I booked a flat in a Delhi suburb and I took Father to have a look …..he checked everything thoroughly. The first thing he did, of course, was to turn on the tap. ‘Oh,’ he smiled, ‘running water.’

A few months later, we shifted house. On a wheelchair, I gave Ma a tour of the entire house. When we entered the kitchen, she was overcome with emotion. She cried a lot.

Over the last few years, I have often thought about exile, and about the exiled Pandit families…. I began to worry that the story of our community would be lost in the next few decades….It is people from my father’s generation who know how to consult an almanac and keep track of festivals and the death anniversaries of ancestors. They created mini Kashmirs wherever they settled. But after them, there will be nobody left to remember. We are losing our tradition, our links to the place where we came from. This is evident during weddings, or when someone dies. Tradition is like an embarrassing grandparent who needs to be fed and put back to bed in a back room.

‘The house was in very bad condition,’ the man says. ‘When we shifted the walls were crumbling; we had to spend a lot of money on renovation.’

Sir, quote a price and I will buy it from you right away. Bad condition! Do you, sir, even realize what it means for me to be sitting in this house? This house built with my father’s Provident Fund savings and my mother’s bridal jewellery; this house where my mother sat on her haunches and mopped the long, red-cemented corridor each morning; the house we left forever to become refugees and court suffering and homelessness.

In the 1941 census, Kashmiri Pandits constitute about 15% of the Kashmir Valley’s population. By 1981, they were reduced to a mere 5%.

From ‘mystic's musings. Sadhguru a profound mystic of our times’ by sadhguru jaggi vasudev

There’s a very beautiful Zen saying: ‘When you are ignorant, mountains are mountains, rivers are rivers, clouds are clouds, trees are trees. Once you enter the spiritual path, mountains are no more mountains, rivers are no more just rivers, clouds aren’t just clouds, trees aren’t just trees. But once you arrive, once you are Enlightened, once again mountains are mountains, rivers are rivers, clouds are clouds, trees are trees.’

When his disciple, Sanghamitra insisted that women should be allowed on the path of Dhamma that Gautama was offering to the world – when women were not yet a part of it – Gautama said, “My path will stay vibrantly alive for two thousand five hundred years, but if I allow women into it, it will last only for five hundred years.” …. “If a woman comes and sits with me, for her, more than my Buddha-hood, I will become more attractive because of her emotions and the very duality of man and woman.” It is in this context that he said that women prefer to go after the Buddha rather than the Buddha-hood. ……but it need not always be true.

….Just repetition of a mantra changes the chemisty of the system, because ultimately everything is just vibration and sound; the whole existence is just that. If you use the right sound properly, with the right amount of intensity and perseverance, it will change the chemistry of your system. ….it can cease your mind and give you a glimpse of reality. …..Without the necessary awareness, they can act like any drug, deadening the mind and causing hallucinatory states.

When there s no live Guru, mantras become an essential support. If the right kind of atmosphere, preparation, and awareness is created, a mantra can explode you into a different level of consciousness.

Seeker: Sadhguru, in the cycle of rebirth, does the child select the parents?

Sadhguru: ….your karma makes you settle down in some particular womb, with those kinds of tendencies and with those kinds of attributes…… Its not that this person is named for that person. This is not the way it works.

Dying with your family is not a great way to die. Some amount of love is good, but there are so many attachments. The last moment of your life, if you look at your son, you daughter, your wife or husband, not just love will come. So many other things will come along with it…..

….when the moment of death is approaching, those who are aware of this generally move the dying person out of the house and keep them in a north-south alignment with the head to the north ……if the body is still in the house, inside constructed atmospheres, the being does not leave the body with ease. …..north-south alignment because it further eases the disentanglement of the being from the body.

Even after clinical death has occurred, still the prana is not completely gone from the physical body. The physical body is not totally broken. So the being still tends to hover around the body; but if you place it in a north-south alignment, the being will be pulled away from the body because of the magnetic pull.

Another thing that is known in India is, when a person dies, the first thing is they tie the toes together, because if the toes are not tied together, the remaining aspect of the prana tends to leave from the Muladhara, and it also tends to become a passageway for the being to again enter the body in a partial way, if the Muladhara is open. If the anal outlet is left open, then the being will make an attempt to re-enter from this lower passage, which is not at all good for that being …….If you put your toes together, you will notice that your anal outlet is always tightly shut …..This waiting to possess the body through the Muladhara, or the anal passage, need not necessarily be by the being or the person who left the body. There are other beings who will seek such a passage.

If somebody wants to do certain occult practices where freshly-dead bodies are used, it’s always the Muladhara which is made use of because that’s the easiest passage.

….It is forty days after the conception that the being enters the body. Similarly, up to forty days, the being still takes time to completely leave the body…..even if you have burned the body, it will look for certain elements of the body like the ash or anything else, something that belongs to them, maybe their used clothes. If you do not know this, in the Hindu families, the moment the person dies, all the clothes that the person used, especially those clothes which touched the person’s body, like underclothes, are all burned. This is because the being still looks for elements of the body, maybe the sweat, maybe the smell of the body, maybe something for which it seeks again, because still the realization has not come that its over. ….If you keep the ashes in one place, there is a tendency for the being to look for that. So they are put in a river where they are spread, that way they cannot be found …..Everything possible is being done to make the being understand that its over, and its also for the living to understand that it is all over.

……On the third day after death, there is a tradition or a ritual to offer milk and water to the grave. One thing is that there is a psychological need in you to still feed them, still take care of them …..The other aspect of it is that the one who has left the body, the dead – this it not true with everybody who dies, but with certain people – when he dies in a certain unfulfilled way, or if he dies without running the course of his prarabdha karma or the allotted karma for this life, such a person could be quenched by making certain offerings.

We know bala yogis, many of them, who at the age of six or seven become Enlightened. Most of them never reach the age of twently-five or thirty….because they cannot sustain the body at this intensity of existence.

….Rudrakshas ….you can wear them all the time. You can keep them on. They have to be worn around the neck, not on the wrist. Only a certain type of person should wear them on the wrist. If you do, you have to maintain your life in a very rigid way, which is usually not possible. People in family situations should wear them around the neck, not on their wrists…..wearing rings on their thumbs in not a good thing to do. You will attract all kinds of things that are not necessary for you. …don’t wear metal on your thumbs ….Especially metals like gold and copper on the thumb will lead to attracting occult forms

Most saints also do not allow anybody to touch their feet because they’re in a certain state. Sometimes touching feet takes away too much.

…You might have noticed that every bhramhachari and almost every other inmate is wearing a copper ring ….This is so because when people go into intense sadhana, there are possibilities that they may accidentally slip out of their bodies. Just to ensure that people don’t fall out of their bodies accidentally, we fix a metal ring. …. So we always put a copper ring on their ring finger, because it’s a sensitive finger. …..there are certain nadis present in this finger. It can be activated and made to be very sensitive…..

If it is in a certain level of awareness, the disembodied being is in a certain state of pleasantness. It is this state that is referred to as heaven. These beings are in different levels of pleasantness, or you can even say certain ecstasy within themselves, because they have left their physical body in a certain state of awareness: now they have acquired a certain sweetness about them. They enjoy the sweetness for a certain period of time, a holiday, a vacation, before taking on another physical body. The vacation is what you refer to as heaven. Similarly, if people leave or die in certain states of fear, anxiety, anger or ignorance, their karmic shell will have acquired a certain kind of unpleasantness about it. This unpleasantness is what you refer to as hell. Like this, there are many layers of hell and also many layers of heaven.

These beings are drawn here, especially in my presence, which has a certain significance. At the same time, they will never be drawn into the temple because whenever we consecrate a temple, we also create a certain situation where these kinds of beings are not able to enter the temple space …..If we build a major powerful temple, a little away from the temple, another kind of temple will be built which will attract these forces. These are usually used for occult purposes.

A disembodied snake can possess a human being. In this culture it is a common knowledge called naga dosha. This can particularly affect certain layers of your skin and create a very strange sense of stillness and movement. A snake has a more substantial presence of being. That’s one reason why in this culture, people are told not to kill a snake, because it has a more substantial presence about it. In case you happen to kill a snake, it needs to be cremated or buried as we do for a human body. Similarly for the cow and crow, the being of a cow always tends to linger on around certain types of trees. The Pungai tree is one of those which attract the bodiless cows, but their period of transition is very brief. So in India it is understood that if you spend time under this particular tree, you’ll be blessed with nourishment, as cow’s milk has always been the very symbol of nourishment.

Seeker: Sadhguru, how does a disembodied being, which has no will of its own, work off its karma?

Sadhguru: It doesn’t work off karma. Karma wears off just by living…….if you just sit, breathe and live, your karma wears off. The problem is that you’re acquiring more karma than what is wearing off…..A disembodied being cannot acquire more karma. For a disembodied being, karma is wearing out very slowly.This is not the right way to express this, but let us say you have another three years of prarabdha karma left. If you leave your body with these three years of prarabdha and become disembodied, these three years may get multiplied into thirty years, or three hundred years. Karma wears out very slowly when you have not body, because there is no conscious action. Everything happens by tendencies, but you cant accumulate any new karma.

…..when a person is gentle and moves with full awareness, nothing is disturbed around him….All your agitated movements and actions, you don’t know how much disturbance they cause in the universe…..this disturbance that you cause with those kinds of movements, that is the kind of atmosphere you create around you. You create that and suffer because of it. What you create is what you have to live with. …

Seeker: Sadhguru, I have heard that people use certain devices to attract disembodied beings.

Sadhguru: …..some people misuse the fluids of a woman’s menstrual cycle to attract the really distorted ones. The fluid is applied onto a cloth or some such thing and is hung onto, generally tamarind trees, and for sure you’ll see distorted beings…….

Seeker: But Sadhguru, why a tamarind tree?

Sadhguru: Because the carbon dioxide is very high there, so it has the least disturbance in terms of life forms. None of the birds or animals will rest in a tamarind tree at night because of this. They wont go there because there is too much carbon dioxide. These kinds of beings like to hang there, because there is no physical disturbance and anyway they don’t need oxygen to breathe. …they tend to go where there is less movement. That is also why they tend to hang around in cemeteries, corners and such places, for the same reason. …If there’s a lot of movement of people, they don’t like to go there.

…..The menstrual fluid always means rebirth for them. They’re attracted by tendencies. When they sense these fluids, they think it is an opportunity to look for a new body. So a woman always becomes more susceptible to such forces and such beings when she is close or when she is menstruating. …..it draws them because in some way they sense that it is an opportunity to be reborn.

One of the reasons why in India, when a woman menstruates, she is put in a protected atmosphere, why she’s asked to chant God’s name, why she is not allowed to go out to certain places or do certain things is because she is susceptible to so many forces. As it is, physiologically and psychologically, she becomes a little fragile at this time. This makes her available that way also…..They can easily possess her. The opportunity or the possibility of these beings possessing a woman during this time is so much more. They may not be completely possessed, but many women may just get influenced by their tendencies if they hover around….act a little crazy or aggressive …..just the application of vibhuthi at certain points of the body and showering two or three times a day creates a protection ….the fluids must not remain on the body. That’s the rule. Twice a day, she must have a head bath. She just sits in one place; she doesn’t expose herself to too many situations; she keeps her exposure to a minimum level ……to put water over your head, to cleanse the aura….. After a bath, your aura is not the same as before…. It cleanses; it makes you mor receptive and less available to these forces.

See, it is not that they appear and disappear. Some of them are dense so they become visible. Its just your capability to see or not. At a certain moment, in a certain state of receptivity, you may see them.

A person who is a meditator – when some quality of meditativeness has come – cannot be possessed by anything. Its not possible, but they may create terror in you just by appearing in very distorted form.

Seeker: If celestial or disembodied beings disturb you, whats the best way to handle them? ….

Sadhguru: Its simple. If one is meditative, they need not bother about all that. … Its not a question of ignoring it; it will not even come into your experience.

Suppose that in your family somebody died halfway through their prarabdha. They still have a very strong prarabdha and you happen to be wearing their clothes. Unknowingly, they will come at you. Its not that they are seeking you; it is just that these clothes carry – in some way – a part of their body and energy. They tend to gravitate in that direction. This is a part of our tradition, that if a person dies, you should never wear their rings. ….you wear their rings on your ring finger, it becomes very easy for that being to enter you. You become very accessible. He’s not trying to torment you. He’s not trying to do anything. He has no such intentions. He will just function according to his tendencies, which will be a torture for you in some way. Otherwise, the situation of some disembodied being coming and tormenting you or even becoming visible to you does not arise. Such a possibility is very remote …..Only if in some way it is connected to you, and only if the prarabdha is very strong, that being will gravitate around you and you’ll be able to feel it. Otherwise, it is too subtle for you to feel, unless you have raised yourself to a certain level of awareness ….When you have utter clarity about where you are in the present dimension, the next dimension reveals itself to you.

The uniqueness of the Dhyanalinga is that all the seven chakras are established. Lingadhanda, a copper tube with solidified mercury in it, has all the seven chakras established in their full flow ….

In my previous life as Sadhguru Shri Bhramha, I was known as Chakreshwara ….He was known as Chakreshwara because he exhibited certain qualities of his total mastery over the chakras.

….in South India, there are five Lingas for the five elements in nature. These five Lingas are created for sadhana, not for worship ….And the most fundamental sadhana in yoga is bhootha shuddhi. ….If you want to do sadhana for the element of water, you go to Thiruvanaikaval. For space, you go to Chidambaram. To do different sadhana, different types of temples were built. …The tradition always told you that if you go to the temple, you must sit there for a while, because these temples are energy centers.

Sadhguru Shri Bhramha …..Coimbatore…the place where he attained samdhi and shed his body still exists; it is very vibrant, it pulsates with energy ….this place, at the top of the seventh hill, just at the edge of the mountain where wild winds blow constantly, says everything about this man…….

If you have a stone idol in your house, every day pooja must happen. If an idol gets damaged, or if you don’t take care of it, the energy will start receding. If you keep idols with receding energies in your house, it will start sucking people in and it will cause harm to you ….In the tradition, they have always told you that even if a little bit of damage occurs to the idol, you should throw it into a river or a well, because receding energies are not good for people.

From ‘The art of Effective Giving’ by R.M.Lala

‘The wealth of a person becomes meaningless if it is not distributed and utilized’

-          Rig Veda

……..i was surprised to hear from a Japanese lady that they had no notion of philanthropy, and it was only after the World War II that they got the concept from the Americans.

Jamsetji Tata …..said: ‘What advances a nation or a community is not so much to prop up the weakest and the most helpless people but to lift up the best and gifted so as to make them of the greatest service to the country.’

‘The longer I live the more I am convinced that the one thing worth living for and dying for is the privilege of making someone more happy and more useful. No man who ever does anything to life his fellow men ever makes a sacrifice.’

-          Booker T. Washington

….Leo Tolstoy: ‘Men think that there are circumstances when they can treat their fellow being without love, but no such circumstances exist. Inanimate objects can be dealt with without love but human beings cannot be treated without love … If you feel no love for men – leave them alone. Occupy yourself with things, with your own self, with anything you please, but not with men.’

Before the wedding of Bill and Melinda Gates, Bill’s mother Mary, who was suffering from cancer, wrote a letter to her daughter-in-law to be. She ended with the words: ‘From those to whom much is given much is expected.’

…..Warren Buffet….. ‘I believe in the philosophy that a very rich peson should leave his kids enough to do everything but not enough to do nothing.’

Andrew ….Carnegie gave away $350,675,653. What was left was a $30 million which he wrote away in his will. This was less than one-tenth of his fortune – which means he had managed, before his death, to dispose of most of his fortune.

‘The power of money is to give it away.’

-          N.R. Narayana Murthy

…Jamsetji Tata …..At his memorial meeting Sir Lawrence Jenkins, chief justice of Bombay, said: ‘Wealth came to him in full measure, but he remained to the last what he was by nature, a simple, modest gentleman, seeking neither title nor place, and loving with a love that knew no bounds the country that gave him birth.’

‘No person was ever honoured for what he received. Honour has been the reward for what he gave.’

-          Calvin Coolidge

‘Think of giving not as a duty but as a privilege’

-          John D. Rockefeller Jr

‘No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.’

-          Aesop

‘We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.’

-          Winston Churchill

From ‘Living with the Himalayan Masters’ by Swami Rama

Dr. Jagdish Chandra Bose, a prominent Indian scientist, analysed the Ganges water and concluded: “There seems to be no other river water like this anywhere in the world. Its mineral qualities have powers to cure many diseases.”



He muttered the Sanskrit verse “During that which is night to others, the enlightened one keeps awake.” Then he explained: “The finest hours are the hours of night, but very few know how to utilize their worth and silence. Three categories of people remain awake at night: the yogi, the bhogi [sensualist], and the rogi [sick person].”

From ‘Quest beyond Religion’ by Dr I. M. Singh

“As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods,
They kill us for their sport”
- The Earl of Gloucerster in Shakepeare’s King Lear



Every man thinks God is on his side.
The rich and powerful know that he is.
- Jean Anouilh (1910-87), French dramatist



If God did not exist,
it would be necessary to invent Him.
- Voltaire (1694-1778) French writer



In the real dark night of the soul
It is always three o-clock in the morning.
-Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) American novelist



When being asked by Napoleon why he had made no mention
of God in his book about the universe, Mecanique celeste,
French mathematician and astronomer,
Marquis de Laplace (1749-1827),
replied: “I have no need for that hypothesis.”



Hell is other people.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, (1005-80), French philosopher



Mark Twain once said:
Man is the religious animal; he is the only religious animal.
He is the only animal that has true religion – several of them,
He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself, and
cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight.



The Chinese philosopher Confucius (551-479 CE) once said:
If a lie is repeated ten times it becomes a truth.
And time will embroider the truth.



Once the great philosopher and atheist Bertrand Russell was asked what he would say if after dying he was brought to God and asked why he had not been a believer. Russell replied, “I would say, not enough evidence God, not enough.”



….Mahatma Gandhi…once said to a young Christian priest who was preaching to him:
A rose does not preach
It simply spreads its fragrance.
The fragrance is the sermon.



The first commandment in the Hebrew Book of Old Testament says:
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Because I am a jealous God.



To become a popular religion, it is only
necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.
- Dean Ing (1860-1954), British Churchman.



Christianity has made of death a terror which
was unknown to the gay calmness of the Pagan.
- The Failure of Christianity,
By Marie Louise de la Ramme (1839-1908), British novelist



Had I been present at the creation
I would have given some useful hints
for the better ordering of the universe
- Alfonso Wise (c. 1221 - 84), King of Castile and Leon



Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939) …..
Religion is the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity, and
it is destined to disappear when human beings learn to face
reality as it is resisting the tendency to edit to suit our fantasies.



The most savage controversies are those
about matters as to which there is no
good evidence either way.
- Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970), British philosopher



Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grace.- Longfellow.

From ‘To the Frontier’ by Geoffrey Moorhouse

When the doors of the plane were opened, warmth wafted in; and with it came the familiar first intoxicant of the East, the penetrating odour of aviation fuel and hot earth, with a trace of decay which tantalizes because it can be either animal or vegetable, or a compound of both.



To the Pathans, who have sometimes come here from their mountain fastnesses to the north, Baluchistan is ‘the dump where Allah pitched all the rubbish left over from creation’. The Baluch themselves have regarded it without such contempt, but more wryly. In their homelands, they say, “If you see a cow you have found water, if you see a donkey you have found a camp, if you see a camel you are lost.”



In Pukhtu, the language of the Pathans, the word for the son of your father’s brother is tarboor; which is also the word for your enemy.



……..shops selling nothing but brass and copper utensils …..where a shopkeeper discouraged business by his piety. He was absorbed in the Koran every time I passed him, holding the book in both hands and bobbing his head rhythmically forward in the same religious oblivion that seizes Orthodox Jews at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.



She had bronze hair cascading from a wide-brimmed straw hat which was laden with artificial cherries and other fruits, and she wore the kind of diaphanous dress that needs foundation garments if it is to be respectable.