Author: Ramchandra Gandhi
Publisher: IndiaInk
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 248
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8186939180
Description
Two Indians, a man and a woman, decide to take the same flight home from America, on the first anniversary of 9/11. He is a peripatetic philosopher and spiritual seeker of an older generation. She, daughter of an old college friend, is a young graduate student of art and religion at an American university.
He had last seen her when she was a child who spoke very little. Now she plies him with questions about the role of Indian philosophy and spirituality in the world traumatised by violence and vengefulness.
He shares with her his understanding and experiences of a cross-section of people he has met and his conversations with them, art that he has seen and the wisdom of modern India.
We can love the world as ourselves, because all things are but images, lucid or distorted, of Atman, our own deepest self. This timeless teaching of Advaita, he suggests, is the light in the midst of the darkness of our times.
Muniya’s Light is a work of fiction in the Indian tradition of storytelling and simultaneous philosophical and spiritual inquiry.
When two brothers draw a line on the ground and one of them says, The land on this side of the line is mine, and the other says, The land on this side of the line is mine. God laughs.
Kabaddi is a game invented by Sri Krishna to transform the tragedy of separation into partnership, but who listens to him? India must not forget its meaning. When somebody crosses a line of division, of caste or class or gender or creed, breathing out their foul air and refusing to breathe in the pure air of the all-encompassing sky which unites all in the most intimate bond of identity, the identity of self-realisation, the sky under which alone this land of Bharata has most insistently sought to live, we must hold them, not in imprisonment, but in our embrace and ask them to breathe in the air of our love.
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
REUNION
Storytelling In San Francisco
Airborne
REMEMBRANCE
Beginnings
Thanksgiving
Miracle In Pune
Birthday
Jnaneshvari
Iconography
Indian Indivisibility
Kabaddi
Temptation
Wanderings
REALITY
Muniya’s Anguish
Lullaby
Terror
In London with Haren Dasi
Francis Bacon’s Intervention
Hinduism And Violence: A Lecture At The Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan
The Wisdom Of Hissing
Was Gandhi A Fraud?
Violence And The Girl-Child
Post-Pacifist Non-Violence
The Third Atom Bomb
Untouchability and The Mandukya Upanishad
Sankeertana In Oxford
Confession
Last meal With The Desais
Conception
I Want To Be Free!
Grounded In Mumbai
Muniya’s Light
Jnaneshvari’s Consolation
Roles Reversed!
Could Ramakrishana Have Been Gay?
A Falling Figure
The Ocean’s Invitation
Hindutva Or Sindhutva?
Samadhi
GLOSSARY