NIRMALANANDA, THE APOSTLE IN WAIT

The leonine disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, the one who was seen in the shrine of the Alamabazar Math guarding the image of the Master from coming to any harm during the great earthquake of 1892 when so many of the others had run to the ground floor to seek safety. This was the messenger of the Master to America and, later, to Southern India where he galvanised the Ramakrishna Movement like none other. Glory unto Tulsi Maharaj, one of the seventeen direct disciples of Sri Ramakrishna, now almost erased from public memory by historical forces. We await his resurrection in the public imagination. Brother Manoj Sivan is doing yeoman's service for the cause. Thank you brother. May Thakur-Ma forever bless you for your selfless service!

WHEN HISTORIANS LIE WITH IMPUNITY AND PEOPLE BLISSFULLY SWALLOW UNTRUTHS

How dare this Prof. Rudrangshu Mukherjee compares Netaji in terms of iconic stature in West Bengal with the likes of Sourav Ganguly, Amartya Sen and Mamata Banerjee in an almost comical, dismissive way while deriding him for shaking hands with fascists like Hitler and Mussolini which he finds despicable, although, it must be said that he does recognise Netaji as a true patriot, as if by way of granting a feel-good tip to a subordinate who he has just vilified? Who are these so-called professors, devoid of character, who dare make a mockery of the life and contributions of our greatest hero while dismissing our reverence for him as so much frothy Bengali sentiment? Followers of Netaji, be scholarly and take up the challenge to rewrite the life and achievements of Netaji with filial adherence to truth and, so, give a befitting reply to these unpatriotic liars masquerading as historians.

IN RESPONSE TO THE ACCURATE ASSESSMENT OF GANDHI BY CHANDRA KUMAR BOSE

At last a solid diatribe, Chandra Babu, exposing the weaknesses of Gandhi which cost India dear. It is time to rewrite Indian history in a dispassionate manner such that the decades-old lies are held before daylight, the falsities and fabrications which have well-nigh emasculated us as a nation are laid bare before the awakening young generations such that Netaji and his INA's seminal role in bringing freedom to our motherland be realised. To top it, the modern-day so-called liberal intelligentsia, for reasons best known to themselves and which reek anyhow of western patronage fulfilling its diabolic designs of neo-colonialism on erstwhile colonies, have taken upon themselves to perpetuate the Nehruvian myth of India's struggle for freedom and achieving independence through the mode of non-violent passive resistance. Eulogising Gandhi for social welfare programmes conducted by him is highly commendable as commendable the programmes themselves were, but to paint the Mahatma as the saviour of dependent India oblivious of the mischief made by him to thwart the rising star of Subhas Chandra Bose is mischief indeed. How India paid for the Mahatma's mistakes, unconscious as well as deliberate, for he was a queer combination of common ignorance and hawkish political cunning, is for all of free India to dwell on. How Nehru betrayed Bose at every step, lying in his ideological loyalties and holding the Mahatma to be his trump-card for future portfolio even as the failed prophet of Indian nationalism held on to him as his protege and buffer against Bose, is for future historians to unravel for the current crop are all sold to the almighty dollar and the sterling pound as they vie with each other to sell the motherland to foreign investors who give currency to their dubious dissertations with a patronising pat of the boss to boot.

Chandra Babu, your great-uncle sacrificed everything for the nation and succeeded in eliciting the same response from 60,000 INA soldiers as well, not counting the countless patriotic expatriate Indians who gave their health, wealth and life to serve the cause of freedom at their Netaji's call. How can we rest in peace and allow this perfidy of distortion of history even after seven decades of independence and the attempt by eminent historians to tone down Netaji's contribution to the cause of freedom? Gandhi and his brigade humiliated the Tripuri Congress President which Subhas Bose was, forced him to resign, then expelled him from Congress and finally, when the hero, indomitable as he was, armed in Vivekananda's undying mantra of self-reliance and uninhibited patriotism devoid of self-interest, essayed his course through the continents of Europe and Asia to knock upon the doors of his motherland with a mighty array of freedom-loving revolutionaries, the British quaked in fear to behold their loyal Indian soldiers turning upon them. Gandhi then derided Subhas as a modern-day Robin Hood who had caught the imagination of a section of the youth and the womenfolk and, thus, downplayed his movement in a clever and calculated way, quite not in keeping with the truth he so espoused, for it was a deliberate and blatant lie that the Mahatma yet resorted to, to gain a political end. Gandhi taught future generations of Indian politicians deceit in defeat and machination to muster support, a lesson which Congressmen learnt from him first-hand to bring about the future degradation of the country while ever clamouring in the name of their illustrious preceptor. And what Nehru did is a blasphemy I cannot recount here in response to your impassioned articulation but which I, for sure, will in future publish to let people know the brutal truth of the perfidies he perpetrated against his comrade-in-arms in the freedom struggle.

Mahatma Gandhi was never equipped with the refined intelligence one needs to be a statesman. He was a mediocre student throughout his academic career right from his school days, never excelling or showing any promise whatsoever that would mark him out as an outstanding public figure, especially one who would be the helmsman of an entire nation gone dry of kshatriya valour as is enjoined upon in our scriptures as the necessary condition for national well-being. The British had disarmed India entirely after the terrible losses of the so-called 1857 Sepoy Mutiny as the British mischievously dubbed it but which, in effect, was the First War of Indian Independence. Thereafter, the Indian National Congress was founded by a retired British civil servant by the name Alan Octavian Hume in 1885 to provide a safety-valve for brewing revolutionary fervour and allowing it a manageable constitutional channel to seek redress. This was a calculated British ploy and the disarmed Indians, having no other means of expressing their grievances, fell for it. The British had put in a lot of research into the Indian psyche and the workings of Indian society before employing this stratagem to contain revolutionary activity in India. The understanding they gained from their study was that Indians were an extremely spiritual people who could be well-relied upon to serve them loyally once they were sworn into the vow of loyalty to the British Crown. In especial, the Sikhs and the Gurkhas were unflinching in their loyalty to the master and these the British sought to enlist in their armed forces to expand and defend their Empire. Added to this was the divided Indian society on the grounds of religion and caste. Hindus and Muslims they sought to separate and to achieve this malicious end the British patronised the All India Muslim League whenever it was expedient to rule the land by instituting divisions in the body politic of India. To top it all came the Dalit Movement of Ambedkar and the creation of separate electorates for the provincial legislatures. In this delicate and dangerous mix of circumstances, Gandhi carried on with his non-violent passive resistance impulsively without plan or detailed programme, starting his movements as abruptly as he did end them, subject to his sudden fits of ideological compulsions and political misgivings, while holding on doggedly to his facile conceptions of humanity and the befriended enemy in the world of realpolitik which deceived him time and again to seal the doom for India that followed him blindly.

But not all. Not all were as gullible or as intransigent in ignorance as Gandhi was and there were wiser souls who widely differed with him but had not the mass-base to counter him effectively, but who, nonetheless, played a seminal role in the eventual emergence of the true liberator of India, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. We are reminded of C.R. Das of hallowed memory who was Bose's political preceptor and whose untimely death cost the fledgling hero the loss of a mentor he banked on in those early days of his political tutelage. The revolutionaries of Anushilan Samity, Jugantar, Hindustan Socialist Republican Association and the Ghadar Party who followed the masculine brand of revolutionary extremism, flood the patriot's vision when he looks back on those heady days of fervent political activity, those fearless soldiers of the soul who laid down their everything at the altar of the motherland to secure her freedom from the hands of the barbarous British but who were vilified as murderers and fringe lunatics by Gandhi in his moments of messianic madness and, otherwise, during saner hours were derided by the Mahatma as misguided idealists sinking into the abyss of corrupting violence. These then sporadically formed the alternative front which advanced the cause of freedom and struck terror into the heart of the British Raj such that in 1911 they shifted capital from calamitous Calcutta to the relatively docile New Delhi. But even here the British became the targets of North Indian revolutionary violence and it remained their only hope to parley with the mild Mahatma and give him prominence as the face of freedom-seeking India to prolong their rule in India even as they did their utmost to foil Gandhi through the likes of Ambedkar and Jinnah in their bid to keep the Indian struggle weak and divided.

Such was the state of Indian politics over which Gandhi never had any real control, as future events were to testify, and which, despite not having the resourcefulness or power to grapple with any measure of success in terms of real political achievement of winning freedom for an undivided India, the Mahatma experimented with as his means of attaining personal spiritual freedom. Facile though his political postulates were and naive his political programmes thereof, the Mahatma struck a chord with rural India in a measure unprecedented in history and led India to her eventual partitioned doom. En route he was manipulating to the core when it came to political adversaries like Bose and spared no means, fair or foul, to achieve their political demise, albeit in a Machiavellian though non-violent way. He used every trick of the lawyer's trade to conduct his dubious dealings with his perceived threats and he followed no ethical principles when it came to a head-on clash with a political opponent within the Congress. His much-vaunted truthfulness of intent then took to flight and what remained of him was his true self, the scheming politician and not the saint which ever was a facade on a much-compromised man masquerading as a mahatma. Where was the simplicity, the innocence in Gandhi whose every move was calculated to suit his own ideological ends irrespective of whether such a singular stance in a complex national situation would conduce to the eventual well-being of the motherland or not?

Admittedly, Gandhi faced a colossal task in awakening India to revolutionary non-violence, building a mass-base unparalleled in world history and, that too, without the use of violent propaganda or the use of force, and in this he was a phenomenal success. The point is not about his success as a mass leader. The point is as to where it eventually led India. It led to Partition and not to the freedom which was his dream and the lifelong dream of all revolutionaries, violent or non-violent, save of those that fought to fill up portfolios and fill their coffers on India achieving independence, whole-bodied or truncated, it mattered not to them. The chronicling of history has to be factual and its analysis has to be dispassionate and not founded on emotional attachment to personality. Here, Indian historians have failed miserably in being objective on account of their political affiliations and professional tie-ups with interested parties. Gandhi and Nehru have been unduly given the lion's share of space in the history of dependent and independent India while marginalising the seminal contribution of a political stalwart like Subhas Chandra Bose who, in point of fact, was the real liberator of India from British hands at the end of the Second World War. The INA thrust in Imphal and the subsequent INA Trials at the Red Fort set the country ablaze leading to the Royal Indian Navy Revolt in 1946, the Jabalpur British Indian Army uprising and the Royal Indian Air force rebellion. The country was in a fit of revolutionary fervour with the British Indian Armed Forces changing loyalty from the British Crown to the nationalists fighting for freedom. The British realised that the days of the Raj were over and it was time to quit the country. All these developments took place under the shadow of Netaji who had been reported to have been killed in an air-crash the previous year, 18 August, 1945, to be precise. Netaji in absentia wielded power over the masses like Caesar's ghost. His shadow loomed large on the entire landmass which had been ignited by his legendary exploits across East Asia. India became free, not because of Gandhi but in spite of Gandhi and the architect of this liberation was Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.

Then followed the worst perfidy of all time. In the absence of Netaji and with a weakening Gandhi whose political sagacity was now being severely put to the test, Nehru, Jinnah and Mountbatten made common cause to partition India, ostensibly to avoid civil war, but in reality for the fulfilment of far more sinister designs for which millions died during the subsequent riots and during the transfer of populations across the borders of the newly born Pakistan on both sides of India. The holocaust that was sought to be avoided did take place and India stood on independence an amputated land with both arms severed as Pakistan claimed her territory on either side of India. Gandhi had fasted on unnumbered occasions in his life to achieve his political ends but now he was prudent enough not to resort to any such means to prevent Partition for he felt it would prove futile to the cause, and the deed of non-violence he finally signed with the murder of his motherland in which he inadvertently played no mean part. The political situation had precipitated to perdition, exactly as Netaji had forsworn it would in the case of a negotiated settlement of independence with the British. He had in conference with his trusted INA lieutenants articulated his fervent desire to seize independence form the British before the World War was over. Else, he had said, the British would for certain partition and permanently debilitate India.

Netaji was supposedly dead and was purportedly in peace at the Renkoji Temple of Tokyo. Gandhi fell to the assassin's bullet within five months of freedom. Patel died in 1950 after integrating the landmass of India. Now there was none to compete with for the coveted seat of the Prime Minister and Nehru reigned free of fear for the next 14 years till his death in 1964. But before that he suffered brutal humiliation at the hands of the Chinese in the 1962 Sino-Indian War. One more threat, they say, haunted him always. Was it the possible return of his old comrade, Subhas Chandra Bose, whom he had betrayed at every count throughout the latter's political career in India and whose eventual incarceration and possible death in a Siberian labour camp, many suspect, he had the power to prevent by reinstating the hero home but did not care to do in his bid to secure his own position politically as the Prime Minister of India? Was Netaji dead or was he alive and a witness to the high drama of India's independence and subsequent severe toil?

READ THE WORKS OF NETAJI, IF YOU WISH TO SERVE HIS CAUSE

Read 'The Indian Struggle' by Subhas Chandra Bose to understand the workings of the Indian freedom movement. The direct words of Netaji, right from his pen, act like electric current that runs through the system. The given work is a classic study of the period dating 1920-1942 of the freedom struggle, the Gandhian era, so to say, when the freedom movement gained in momentum but suffered from the obvious flaws of over-emphasis on non-violence and passive resistance as the means for attaining freedom. Bose differed in principle with Gandhi, although, he held him in the highest regard personally despite the Himalayan political blunders the Mahatma made which cost India dearly.

Along with this book, also, do read 'An Indian Pilgrim' by Bose which is his unfinished autobiography. Here, you get to know the man as he saw himself. Pilgrim he indeed was, a voyager through the unknown world of men and ideas, a seeker of truth, yet, one who could never rest to lead a quiet life of contemplation, for the call of the nation summoned him to her service every time he settled in his seat of meditation. Profoundly spiritually inclined, the young Subhas yet immersed himself in the service of his motherland relinquishing a prospective flourishing career in the world of British Indian civil service. A lesson for our youth today when selfishness is supplanting these glorious human virtues of service and sacrifice for the common weal that was the wont of the freedom fighters, prince among whom was Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. Jai Hind!  

DARE TO ANSWER, O BETRAYERS OF THE NATION!

The Congress Party has to answer the nation why it destroyed classified files on Netaji. Who stood to gain if Netaji was kept out of the public imagination in independent India?

What people lack is the character and the will to persist in the unravelling of worthwhile information on Netaji, long suppressed by successive Congress governments. Also, more and more genuine researchers need to come forward to do concrete work on Netaji instead of the multitude merely airing fair and foul emotion on the issue.

"You may not believe in the vengeance of God but you will have to believe in the vengeance of history," thundered Swami Vivekananda in America one day as he uncovered before his awe-struck audience the mockery that was British imperialism in the name of civilisation. The prophet went on to say that the Chinaman was the vengeance of history that would alight on the British and that it would serve the British right if they, a mere handful compared to the mighty millions of the Chinese people, were to swept into the North sea by the latter for the perfidies committed by them in history. Today, when we are at the crossroads of a new discovery, albeit a painful but long-awaited one, that of the fate of our leader, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Swamiji's epic pronouncement, as if by way of a verdict passed on the barbarous British, seems pertinent in relation to Nehru and his ilk too, they who plotted the downfall and, possibly, the death of the true liberator of India from the British yoke.

IN DEFENCE OF NETAJI'S FAMILY AGAINST CARPING CRITICISM FROM OVER-ZEALOUS CRUSADERS FOR THE CAUSE

This is the spirit --- a spirited rejoinder to all that is being aired by 'perfected patriots', 'self-acclaimed researchers' and 'heirs apparent to the leonine leader' with a practised persistence, vehement and vitriolic, which by incessant repetition is, however, failing to produce the desired effect of inducing conviction in facile theories running contrary to the tenor of the hero's being and, therefore, is being rejected, in the absence of tangible evidence, by many an ardent devotee of Netaji. There are followers galore of sensationalists propounding preposterous propositions centring Netaji, for credulity abounds in the average mass of humanity who lap up conspiracy theories wherever there is an element of mystery and in our hero's case there is no dearth of such shrouded stretch where imagination runs wild in pious pursuit of preferred propositions irrespective of scientific rigour in approach casting deliberated doubts on the plausibility of such presumptions. All things said and done, however, truth cannot be discerned amidst the murkiness of misapprehension where the essential element of scientific enquiry, objective and dispassionate, without a tinge of malice, self-aggrandisement or verbal aspersion cast on a seeming adversary to one's proposition, is lost. The prime requirement of the hour is, thus, an intensive search for truth uncluttered by histrionics, hyperboles and heresies founded on fabrications and falsities. The solidarity of a movement demands that all participants must exhibit adequate civility towards one another in their individual pursuit of truth and that access to information on the basis of research or reading on Netaji ought not to arrogate for oneself the divine right to insinuate and insult whosoever one chooses in one's 'superior wisdom' to vent one's venom upon.

Netaji was a supremely human person, compassionate to the core, with a heart 'as broad as the sky' and a soul 'as deep as the ocean'. He was such a catholic personality that his staunchest adversaries, antagonists in ideology and execution of his Presidential programmes at Tripuri, received his warmest regards nonetheless and he sacrificed self-interest to prevent partitioning of the movement that had been geared to win freedom for the motherland. Knowing this to be our heritage, we ought to, out of mutual respect, guard against the vice of over-zealousness for the cause to the point of being insensitive to others' feelings of honour and dignity. Moreover, if we are patriots worth the salt, we shall avoid casting aspersions on his immediate family out of a natural sense of love and sympathy and a kindred feeling for them, for such is the law of love that it refrains from slandering those who are dear to the one we adore as our nation's cherished leader. Let us in real intent be worthy of Netaji and his cause even unto the resurrection of the truth of his disappearance. Let us debate the issues in a healthful manner, agreeing to disagree if necessary on every count but forever casting aside divisive tendencies that tend to weaken the movement. Netaji is our leader in this search for truth and may his spirit animate us into becoming loving adherents of his cause and not enemies spitting venom ceaselessly resolving to nought our aspirations and efforts! May Netaji bless us all with a tinge of the virtues that had raised him to the pinnacle of glory and humanity above all! Jai Hind!

THIS LIFE AND THE LIFE BEYOND (UNFINISHED)

Death inexorably moves in on all. Dictators and devils die, gods and ghosts die, men and mortals die, all die inevitably with the passage of time that consumes it all. Even time eventually dies when its play is done as the universe winds up its network that had so long trapped us all. Phenomena, perishable and pernicious, holds us all in its thraldom as death dances over its domain. The cyclical pattern of things deludes us with the vision of a seeming permanence in this ephemeral dream of life, persistence of vision lends continuity to this diabolic design where disparateness assumes dissolving shapes and particulate motion masquerades as solidity of being. But despite this bewitching sensory drama that fascinates the mind of man and keeps him from tracing his roots, there remains ever an underlying current of consciousness whose feeble call man hearkens to at times and a whole vista opens up of limpid spaces, luminous, free, unbounded by death or decay, an unbroken mass of pure consciousness, the Self brooding on the Self. This, of course, is the Himalayan height of realisation, subtle and sublime, not accessible to all who dwell on commoner plains of mundane existence. But the principle is there. It lives on in the genius of extraordinary souls whose preoccupation is the pursuit of truth transcendental but which is a pointer to the fact, thereby, of the organic capacity of the human species at its evolved best to comprehend reality as it is and not merely as it seems to be. Uniformity is the rigorous law of Nature and from it follows the possibility, nay, the certainty that all will in due course apprehend this absolute truth of man and Nature and the Reality beyond. The panoramic world with its myriad enchantments then fails to hold the blossoming soul of man seeking perfection as it peers higher and higher into the heavens and the realm beyond, breaking free of the bonds that had held it so long. The Universal Enchantress then makes way for the chosen child that has rebelled against her dictates and releases him in the infinitude of freedom but not until he has had his cupful of cosmic experience in all its delights and despairs. He becomes now a living soul as he witnesses phenomena as the cover of consciousness and history as the surface scratching of toddlers on the page of experience. While the leonine soul emerges out of the meshes of Maya, the rest of humanity, faltering and failing, fumble about in the darkness of cosmic nescience, subject to death and decay, in the terrible transmigratory cycle that spares neither prince nor pauper but renders all equal in the sameness of death.

Such is the human predicament. Ignorance, primeval and uncaused, has sprung up whence to direct this dual drama of life and death, this cosmic spectacle of minor proportions, this wakeful dream of self-oblivion, man knows not. Prophets arise and sound their clarion call to break the dream but few ever respond in true intent to their earnest sentiments including their close associates and heirs for most, consciously or otherwise, fashion truth after their heart, truth which is comfortable or convenient and not which carries the purest imprint of the divine. Thus, the message is lost in the man as personality ruins principle and the movement, which had sprung in the Mother-heart of all that is serene and sublime, meanders off-course into the shallow waters of murky materialism whence there is no return to its pristine source despite pious protestations of followers to the contrary. Thus, all spiritual movements, after an inspired beginning, peter out gradually to more mundane organisational existence and the life of the Spirit which animated the Prophet and his Apostles is supplanted by a routine culture where daily discipline settles the soul into passive acquiescence of hierarchical authority that stifles so often individual genius and threatens thereby the very life of the Order. For all things must perish when they fail to refresh themselves from the eternal fountain of joy that abides in the depths of the soul and nourishes the creative faculty in man which is the sustenance of his being.

Thus, on the individual and the collective plane, in the routinised or the rambling way, difficulties galore spring up to oppress the soul of man which must yet triumph over material contamination to affirm the freedom of the Self, the supremacy of the Spirit over matter and lend light to the dark corridors of this terrestrial terrain, this theatre of fratricidal feud, this stage of sensory unreality. And through it all runs the torch of life, ever kindling, ever dimming, but never quite extinguished for good as the fire of fresh life keeps up the image of the Reality which underlies it all, nameless, formless, waveless, free. Life is transcended and so is death as the shadow of this cosmic spectacle pales into insignificance before the splendour of the Self. Thus is the victory sealed as the very face of Reality surfaces as the cosmic dance of death and every whirl reveals, in flash of light and love, the life within that is, pristine pure, pure delight. This very Earth is then heaven as bliss reveals all, this very Earth is hell itself as darkness shrouds the Self and this very Earth is Existence Absolute as separation vanishes before the integrated vision.

This admixture of good and evil is then an in-built structural element in the fabric of the man-universe that denies alteration, a perception problem for man seeking a rectification of vision as much as it is an evolutionary proposition that demands wholesale realignment of mental forces with the passage of time leading to higher insights into the core of Reality. The objective universe will remain the same but the subjective vision of man will, with evolution, slowly change and the balance of good and evil spiral upwards along a tapering mountainous detour till the road narrows to nothingness and the pilgrims reach the summit of realization where they are not nor anything is, the mount, the road, the men, the mode, all dissolving, coalescing into an integrated mass of consciousness, a void seeking itself in its nothingness, an infinitude brooding on itself in self-oblivion, in Self-awareness, a hollow wholeness in eternal solitude without a stir or motion, the ocean, waveless, tranquil, free of splash or bubble, spherical, unbounded, nor large nor small, dimensionless, limitless, nameless, formless, free.

This, then, is the other world, this, the life beyond in its absolute sense, the very world of everyday occurrence transforming from its manifoldness to its unitary status and the transcendence thereof, the panorama painting poetic dreams passing from partitioned phrases to its pristine wholeness, a ponderous point perishing into the prevision of phenomena, the Presence, pure and perfect, parallel, free. Yet, we have to contend with the dual syndrome of material life and struggle to combat the devil of delusion and death that stalks all of life. Shall we ever succeed in eliminating death and evil? No, for ignorance hallucinates hells and heavens which knowledge dispels and the flip side of good is forever evil, both assuming relative merit from our graded perception mode. Adjustments, advances, amendments are all subjective even though they seem external to our human apparatus. Through all these brushes of the paint, the artist reforms the substance of his dreams, reshapes the canvas of his mind till the fruit of his fancy is ready for deliverance. And then alone does he envisage at last that this life, after all, was a phenomenal dream, full of the dual throng of good and evil in the fabric of life and death, but that there is a higher reality too, a sublimity soaring past the highest heavens into the very kernel of existence lodged in the secret chambers of the human heart where a lamp shines ever leading to the sun of the Self, inward, deeper, gravitating to the essence of things. The Ancient Poem is there, come ye all and read into its meaning. The rest, who knows what destiny has in store for them? Death, decay and destruction await all but few apprehend the truth to escape the clutches of this ancient foe and emerge triumphant free, masters of life and death. For them is life a play and the world a vast stage where respective parts are being enacted by humans as per the divine director's bidding. But so few have access to the inner recesses of this reality about us that one cannot but wonder at the Divine Enchantress’ mesmeric spell that keeps us so befuddled as to so induce in us utter Self-oblivion.

Self-memory and Self-oblivion---these are the dual aspects then of this phenomenal universe and the transcendence thereof. The children of light remember their roots and are blissfully free but the children of the world forget their selves and suffer. Theirs is an eternal drudgery, the tyranny of the routine rigmarole, the tedious tending of the material self in the desert-sand of life. Effulgence illumining all on one side and darkness enveloping all on the other and in between is a glimmer of hope hinging on cross-linkages of the twain. It is a continuum all through, phases merely separated in time along an upward slide which nothing can thwart. Or, perhaps, one may prefer to term it the downward drift to the core of Reality, the gravitational focus, the essence of Being. Whatever the name, the destiny is divine for it is subtle and transcending the domain of physical phenomena, each movement along the ascending scale a quantum shift towards the finer, phenomenon tapering from grosser to subtler realms as it out-reaches itself to finally dissolve in an all-absorbing void, the vast unknown whence there is no return. The universe merges and so does the self in this abyss of nothingness and everything is blotted out in an all-encompassing cipher, beyond bounds, beyond cognition, the indecipherable end-point of things. As the universe zeroes in on itself, the material cover of things is rent apart and the spiritual shines in abiding effulgence from the source of stellar glow, the luminous core of transcendence. All that was dark and desolate is then lit up in a blaze of supernal light with bliss flowing in unceasing cascades and a self-existence that has been perennially there, undivided, whole, conscious and integrally so, without part or partition, self-brooding since eternity and incapable of replication or self-mirroring save in delusion which touches it not.

The 'this side' and the 'that side' of reality, the obverse and the reverse of the same coin tossed in play reveals but a single face of it, hiding the other. But it is all a threaded network across the face of reality that part reveals, part conceals that which is ever beyond the web, it is all a percolation that defies territorial bindings as it makes its way across defined domains, ever revealing slices of the truth beyond in the evolving process of phenomena, a reminder to the lost horizons of their ancestral roots in the centre whence they have sprung forth to ramble along expanding periphery. But the call is on and the flock must return to base camp before the vespers are done with and the nightfall beckons a fresh reckoning of things for a future foray into the unknown.

This then is the saga of existence, the this and that side of life ephemeral and life eternal. This is the cosmic dream, the clash of forces and the resolution thereof, this the sheer significance and the insignificance of terrestrial play. What a vast Cosmos and what a vaster Reality beyond! But how magical it is that the key to its centre lies in the deepest recesses of the human heart, that the core of consciousness is in the human soul, that the secret chambers of knowledge and bliss lie locked in the innermost cellars of this temporal temple where since antiquity is being matured the fermented fruit of realisation, the wine of love in the distillery of the Cosmic Mother-heart enthroned therein. The Self witnesses it all as the dance of the Divine holds the universe in its death throes and the life beyond. Shadows, they loom and shadows, they disappear when the hour cometh. Why, none call tell. They say it is a wrong question to ask. But the question remains and the questioner remains too and none knows why. Perhaps, they all get resolved in realisation when duality dissolves in the paradox of the infinite nothingness and the triune of the observed, the observer and observation all get unified in the unity that is the Void where causality and its queries are all absorbed in a comprehensive consciousness which knoweth it all but may not express. On this side, however, let us dwell on our dualistic deliberations of life and death and the entire spectrum betwixt the two.