Workbook 1

Born in a great temple town in a family having dynamic and meaningful proportions of tradition and modernity I was saved from so many hurdles that may face one otherwise. For that I must thank my father and mother. And also the tradition of Sri Ramanuja provides one a climate of knowledge-as-a-value. Of course you must care to make use of that. If you do, then, the webbing atmosphere acts positive to that or at least does nothing to stifle your enthusiasm towards acquiring knowledge. My life should have passed for, set in the regular ways of domestic indulgence, job-finding and getting settled in life. But the fatal moments do happen in some people's life. Only thing is I do not regret that moment in my life. My balance sheet ticks that moment as positive, of course after balancing various aspects. A chance reading of some reader in Tamil printed in 1942 or so, dusting in the family rafts of a Sunday afternoon deposited a saying of Sri Ramakrishna, assuring one of God vision if only that person craves and cries for three days. Whatever that saying meant, it was imprinting on the mind of a school student the idea of God as possible reality. I realised that that saying got stuck in my mind only when an occasion happened, when I had to stress the possibility of God-realisation to another boy in our hot discussions across the streets of a December night. Trying to convince him, I was caught. Or I was set in the path of freedom you may say.

Slowly I started rummaging my father's collection of books, half of them lined on a raft in the hall and the rest in another room or godown of various things. In fact I was thinking at that time that how M K T Bhagavthar had written something in English, seeing a photo in an old edition of The Study of Religion by Swami Vivekananda, Udbodhan Office, one of my father's acquisitions. I corrected myself only after some time. And when that book was brought to common use between myself and another friend of mine, an old lady seeing that photo by chance exclaimed 'Oh! is it M K T Bhagavathar!'. Anger rushed at the first instant only to subside at the next, for, was I not her senior in that impression?

Browsing through my father's collections was followed by purchasing of small booklets and low-priced books of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda. The money was out of savings of chance windfalls that may happen to a school student. May be some happy moments of the mother, or some sudden visits by grandmas and aunts, or some sudden offers of gifts by uncles - something was happening making it possible to acquire books more and more on one's own. The temple shops were a blessing. And I was becoming slowly a reputed customer to be treated with deference. It was a nice feeling to have in that age of trousers. A book-reading boy is not someone to be trifled with. So when the books were growing in number, the old corner of my school bags and things were not enough space for a blossoming scholar. So I had to clean the godown room and make space for my precious library, growing day by day. Local book-shops in the temple premises were not enough. Also having a like-minded friend is great company, if you decide to walk all the way to distant places for big book-shops. From booklets to thin booklings to big books, which we were calling as 'kills', the intellectual life slowly stretched in more extense. Book-reading is a bad habit, bad in the sense it makes you venture tougher and bigger books and sometimes abstract genres. Is it so with every reader, I do not know but it was exactly so with one reader. Reading consumed that reader, one can say. But no regrets at all. When chance comparing with childhood friends show you in bad lights as one who does not know how to live, so what, even if the life is deemed as waste? Taking to the next big book or subject in the line makes you forget all such self-demo reports and you are high in your own world. You can compare it with getting drugged, so what, you get amazing understanding of things and subjects. But what about life? We will leave that and you can write me as a failure on that account. No bother.

And you do not stay content with one sort of books, if you fall into reading. But one thing I must tell you. In reading I had a special talent of going deep into the moods and sentiments of an author, whoever he or she may be. I realised this tangibly only later and also I heard it pointed out by one friend, who took a great liking to hear me reading his pet authors. How I got this and why are things beyond me but such a talent makes one's reading time creative. This is curious. Actually reading is half passive always but for me the experience was different. Not only the authors but also concepts were becoming very transparent in my reading forages. So If I took one book and phased my back in a convenient corner I could escape the reality around and along with that escape the relevant cares and responsibilities too. Such an addiction makes you hate rash changes in life pattern. So naturally you limp back in the race of life or life passes you by inevitably. But the life sounded various warnings at various times through events and persons to a boy who was becoming more and more reckless lost in the world of ideas. I do not want to justify my choices or the effects. I am just awake to my reality and more so I do not feel any persistent sorrow or remorse.

Reading has not been indiscriminate too with me. That is any book just like that didn't hop up into my reading time. The selection, was it conscious or partly so, I do not know. I have been thinking that I always decided on what books but it is only a part of the story. Some books jumped in by chance. I remember very well the case of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I have heard about her even very early in my eighth standard in High School. But only when I was about to finish my college years I picked that book from my friend's table just as a curiosity, with both the title and the author striking new to me. Only when giving a look-over to the book back and front I vaguely remembered the author mentioned many years ago along with her book The Virtue of Selfishness. But reading Atlas Shrugged straight through for one full week completely changed me from a theist to an atheist and clarified and confirmed my stand on reason.

And also I must say, books have been acting like ghosts on me. When they possessed me it was really radical. That was the case with Ramakrishna Vivekananda literature which started in my fourteenth year. You begin to see, perceive, opine and feel as if you are a character coming in the genre of books that is holding you at that time. Even you begin to feel that you are privy to even some unwritten aspects of the persons you are holding in hero-worship at the time. It is like, 'what if.. it is not written over there?... I know it... I feel it...' it is like that. Then your being assumes a mystic meaning. Some half-legible and half-hidden transcendent purpose activates you from behind.

But reading is only one of the activities of life, that too a mental activity. Why should that take such a place in my life is mysterious to myself. May be astrology can explain such mysteries rather than rational analysis. But astrology appealed to me very late in time. Reason will always be at loggerheads with such unusual methods. But trying to understand the mystery of living is something different; risky but I think it defies any formulas. Really as per my deep interest in Ayn Rand and the thought I had that I had reached the final in her philosophy, I must conclude that I have degraded from being rational. But again this is another bad habit in me, that I take to anything which makes me understand my life, usual or unusual ways. Sometimes I think that I am a confused personality. But I am quite happy with the way I operate even though I do not measure up to fixed standards.

One thing alone I find it difficult, being neither to my liking nor in my element. That is, believing, taking something on faith. My way of worshiping the Divine has always been trying to understand. Of course I believe in cooperating with the methodology but it is always provisional. Any final dictum which precludes my understanding loses me from its subscription. Has no faith any efficacy in transcendental efforts of understanding? When accosted like that I may not be able to counteract but somehow I am not able to feel at home with such a demand as a final writing-off. I am not able to think of the Divine as resenting my efforts to understand it, especially when it is being stressed repeatedly in the transcendent literatures that the Divine is essentially Gnosis. If it is full and full Knowledge in form, how else to approach it relevantly rather than by knowing. Alright, let us say we dispense with any effort of understanding as a way and rather take to faith. After that when we are participating in the Divine level, what will we do if we have discarded understanding, knowing once for all. Even at that level to understand the greatness of the Divine and its inexhaustible goodness, should we not have unhampered function of knowledge? Do not the scriptures various say that our knowledge is hampered in this world but it becomes unlimited in the transcendent levels.? But I am able to understand the place of faith as part of provisional preparations and only as that.

But instead of breaking one's head like this it was so easy and full of relief for me when I became deeply involved in Ayn Rand's Objectivism. All these questions, I was able to shove off as meanderings of the mystics and not meriting any serious concern except as something detrimental to human living. But getting into Ayn Rand's novels and ideas and phasing ourselves with some heroic character consciously or unawares fixed a viewpoint binocular vision on our eyes on others and the outside world and also our own spontaneous actions and thoughts. A detective eye of well proven standards was always wide open in the mind. But slowly I was changing from that, at first imperceptibly and later more definitely. The world which became thin and constricted was again getting colours and curves. What was failing on the basis of reason was entering back by way of culture. To be a strict Ayn Rand enthusiast, who was already a sober person, made me very miserly on my emotions and highly judgmental on others around, especially one's near and dear kins. So as a result I was becoming more and more unpopular in my own domestic fronts. Of course I was more than compensated by being well-armed By AR's clarifications on reason and individuality and the social complexes structured around altruism, which otherwise was not available anywhere down the time or across the globe.