[Quick links] [Pause]       Many people are curious to know what happens when one meditates for a prolonged duration on a regular basis. Will we experience God? Will there be an extreme ecstatic experience? Does one attain special psychic powers? These are some of the questions people often ask.

[Quick links] [Pause]   Sometimes, we have a tendency to associate importance with size. If a Guru has billions of followers then he must be a great Guru; if someone has millions of followers on the social media then whatever that person says should be important; if a religious scripture is voluminous, then what it contains must be the truth, and so on. But that is not necessarily true. I sometimes joke that greater the following a Guru has, more mediocre he is 😉 You find more people at the base of the intellectual pyramid!

[Quick links] [Pause]   Some parents have weird fancies! Here we have a poor man Ajeegartha who had a son named Shuna ShEpa – a name that literally means “tail of a dog”! Did this boy have a dog like tail? We don’t know. But his father found it right to give such a funny name to this boy.

[Quick links] [Pause]     The words ‘white’ and ‘black’ have become taboo words these days. They are reminders of atrocity committed to some races merely based on skin color. I am not talking about those dark ages. I am discussing about Vedas and their possible composers.

[Quick links] [Pause]         These days, we hear of sex drugs, aphrodisiacs and even sex transplants. But have you ever heard of anyone exchanging his youth with someone younger than him? That is what the ancient Indian King Yayaati is supposed to have done. It is an interesting story that appears in the great Indian Epic Mahabharata. Let us do a momentary detour into this story.

[Quick links] [Pause]  Ruins of Indus valley civilization  We were discussing about the authorship of the ancient Vedas of India. One of the theories that were proposed was that of some barbaric nomads called Aryans who invaded India around 3500 years ago. It was they who composed the Vedas.

[Quick links] [Pause]   We were talking about the Vedas which are considered to be the repositories of knowledge.  If there is some repository of knowledge, the obvious inference is that it was composed by someone or by a group of people. But the adherents of the Vedas claim that the Vedas are apaurushEya – which means that they were not composed by anyone.

[Quick links] [Pause]   One of interesting observations of ancient Indian Grammarians was that all the words in any language have a verb as their root. That means any word, no matter it is a noun or adjective or otherwise, has a verb from which it originated. There is no language, if there is no action.

[Quick links] [Pause]         I know, it may sound like a cruel joke to talk about any such thing when thousands of innocent lives are going due to the current Corona pandemic.  No, I am not out to sell any such magic remedy. I am afraid, there is none. I am only reminded of how human beings resort to anything whatsoever, when faced with calamities that seem to threaten their lives and there is no solution in sight.

[Quick links] [Pause]         When you probably are looking forward to the approaching World Yoga day, I have my own small contribution to Yoga.