In 1965, there was a war with Pakistan. In January 1966, Russia presided over a compromise in Tashkent, now the capital of Uzbekistan. On the night of signing the agreement, Indian Prime Minster Lal Bahadur Shastri died. Russian Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin escorted his body to India. That is how as a child I got introduced to Russia.  

I watched my first English film in 1968 in my hometown, Meerut. It was a James Bond movie called ‘From Russia with Love.’ I walked about five kilometres with a few of my friends, all senior to me, to the Palace Cinema in Cantonment where English films were shown. I could not understand much of what was being shown, but I liked the beautiful locations of Istanbul in Turkey. The hero was like a god and even the villain was sophisticated and well-mannered. For many years, I used to identify actor Sean Connery only as James Bond. 

Then came Raj Kapoor’s film, ‘Mera Naam Joker’ in 1970. It was more than four hours-long and had two intervals. There was a Russian circus artist, Marina, in the film, played by actress Kseniya Ryabinkina, whom the hero loved, but she had to return to Russia. I saw it in Nishat Cinema with my father, who was a big fan of Raj Kapoor’s. He did not like the film and I too was confused. Without any fight or a villain, the hero failed in his love three times! 

In 1971, India got involved in the liberation movement in East Pakistan and Russia stonewalled the American Seventh Fleet that was expected to intervene in support of Pakistan. Thus, the nation of Bangladesh was created. India signed a 20-year treaty with Russia, and we all saw Russians as our big friends. Nothing of this sort was ever done before or after this in the history of India. 

I joined the GB Pant University for my engineering studies and there, a big book exhibition arrived, selling Russian books translated into English and Hindi. Not only were the books attractive in look and feel, but they were also attractively priced. For twenty rupees that I had to spare, I could buy two books — the Hindi translation of Maxim Gorky’s novel, ‘Mother’ and S. Venetsky’s ‘Tales About Metals,’ where I first read about Titanium, a great metal given the exalted name — ‘Son of the Earth.’

When I joined DRDO in 1982 and was posted at DRDL, Hyderabad, to work as a Missile scientist, there was Russia all around. My boss, Colonel VJ Sundaram, tasked me to prepare a bill of material of the airframe of the Kavadrat surface-to-air missile that later became ‘TRISHUL’ after redesign. I struggled with Russian drawings, excellently made, and slowly picked up how to read the nomenclature of the components. When I later developed India’s first titanium air bottle, the ‘Tales About Metals’ was still with me. 

In Hyderabad, there was a regular bookshop called ‘Vishal Andhra’, selling Russian books and whenever I used to visit the Koti area, I would go there to spend time and buy a book. ‘War and Peace’ and ‘Anna Karenina’ by Leo Tolstoy, ‘Crime and Punishment’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky and ‘Undertaker’ by Alexander Pushkin were a few of the precious literary gems that I acquired. Later, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, a great Russian enthusiast himself, gave me ‘Dreams of Earth and Sky’ by Konstanti Tsiolkovsky, one of the founding fathers of modern rocketry and astronautics and a great writer, from his personal collection. I read all these books and they become the foundation on which I developed my writing career.

In 1999, I visited Bishkek, the capital city of Kyrgyzstan that became independent after the dissolution of Soviet Russia in 1991. Russia language was everywhere including on the Moscow TV channel, as the sole connection with the outside world. I went there thrice and visited Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan from there. I wanted to go to Tashkent too, but the bilateral relations between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan were estranged. When the President of Kyrgyzstan, Askar Akayev, came to India in 2003, President Kalam ensured my presence in the Rashtrapati Bhavan. 

In December 2004, when President Vladimir Putin visited New Delhi, President Kalam invited me to the State Banquet that he had hosted in his honor. All the eighty members of President Putin’s entourage, including some 20 ladies, were all dressed in black. Dr Kalam introduced me to President Putin as a devotee of Russian literature. President Putin did not say a word to anyone but spoke from his eyes and I will never forget the pure love and kindness his expression conveyed. Later, when I met the President of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, in April 2005, I was astonished to see the well-built Uzbeks. President Karimov handled Islamic terrorism in his country with an iron hand and kept his country safe and progressing. 

It is obvious that Russia has taken a different posture in the new Asian realities and that the historical Indo-Russian bonhomie has cooled off if it is not over. A perception was created by Russia that Western powers have adopted an aggressive and devious policy to engage India in anti-China games even while they are ignoring the aggression by China against India. Relations between Moscow and Beijing are at their best-ever level today, even better than they were in the 1950s when newly independent China made Russia its ideological soulmate, and Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong signed a formal treaty of alliance in 1950.

The way the United States has left Afghanistan and the regime has changed overnight; Russia-China appears to be the new superpower of the world. For sure, Russia and China have teamed up for a robotic mission to an asteroid in 2024. They are coordinating a series of lunar missions intended to build a permanent research base on the south pole of the moon by 2030. The powerful tenures of Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Putin are looking as if they will extend much deeper into the 21st century.

India must recalibrate its position and this is not an easy task. Two roads diverge. In the coming few months, the great hope of India joining the expanded G-7 grouping would be validated by how the West decides to take the new regime in Afghanistan. Is it time to restore our alliance with Russia? Is this possible? 

Tolstoy writes in ‘Anna Karenina’, “Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.” It is time to find love and not be drowned in the deluge of hate. Love is a package deal. You can’t pick and choose and expect people to be as you’d like them to be. So, take a pause, and do that which is the best interests of our nation. Let leaders from all political parties sit together and decide where they want to see India in 2050. 

It so happens that my nephew (brother’s son) married a Russian girl studying in the United States, and they have recently been blessed with twin daughters. Yesterday, when I was interacting with the family online, I realized that my buying Gorky’s book, ‘Mother’ in the mid-1970s was not some random event but an omen announcing the very distant future that has finally arrived now! 

No moment ever returns in life. Time flies like an arrow, forever forward. “Impermanence is the hallmark of existence,” said Buddha. And as goes one saying, “You can’t take bath in the same river again,” as the water you have bathed with has gone away downstream and you are bathing the second time in the water that has freshly arrived. But there are certain moments that you can’t even recreate. I am sharing one such moment in my life that I can only relive in my memory.

It was on March 15, 2007. President APJ Abdul Kalam took me with him to Arunanchal Pradesh. We landed at Guwahati Airport and then boarded helicopters to visit Kibithu, the last post in the eastern centre of the Indo-China border in Arunachal Pradesh. Chief of Indian Army General Joginder Jaswant (JJ) Singh was escorting Dr. Kalam. Five helicopters in a formation flew through the Lohit Valley, a few hundred meters above the river, with tall mountains on both sides. It was a breath-taking view that one sees only in films, or in one’s dreams.

Kibithu is one of the easternmost permanently populated towns of India, located on the LAC (Line of Actual Control) west of Diphu Pass near India-China-Myanmar tri-junction. The Lohit River enters India north of Kibithu and merges with the Brahmaputra after reaching the plains in Assam. There was a telescope installed there and I was watching the Chinese flags on the other side, while President Kalam interacted with our soldiers, when three Army officers of Major rank, among them was a lady, approached me and asked if I was the co-author of ‘Wings of Fire.’ I blushed.   

One officer took control of the telescope and guided it to show me a water body below called Parshurama Kund. I was told that when Lord Parshurama, the sixth incarnation of Lord Vishnu, on the orders of his father, Rishi Jamadagni, beheaded his mother Renuka, his axe got stuck to his hand. His father, pleased with his obedience, decided to give Parshurama a boon, to which he asked for his mother to be restored to life. But the axe would still not leave his hand. Finally, Parshurama arrived at the banks of the Lohit River and got cleansed of his sin.

Now, comes the interesting part of the story. The two gentlemen Army officers were from Kerala and Punjab, and the lady was from Uttaranchal. Each of them claimed the ancestry of Parshurama. I found in these three officers and their claim on Parshurama the irrefutable testimony of Indian civilization and the charade of the Aryan-Dravidian rift and the discovery of India through European eyes collapsed in that one moment. Another realization I had was that India is surrounded by enemies and people enjoying their lives in the comforts and pleasures of cities must know that there are vigilant soldiers living in the most hostile conditions, taking care of their secured world.

I later had a brief chat with General JJ Singh. A true persona of a warrior, he remembered his father, Lieutenant Colonel Jaswant Singh Marwah, who was posted in the princely state of Bahawalpur, under British India, when he was born. After the partition, he came to India with him as a two-year-old child. His grandfather, Atma Singh Marwah, fought in the Mesopotamian Campaign during the First World War. General Singh said that he was a cadet at the National Defence Academy when China attacked India in 1962. The deputy commandant of the NDA at the time, Brigadier Hoshiar Singh, was given command of a brigade under the 4th Infantry Division and was killed in action.

We returned to Delhi in the evening, and I had a late-night walk in the Mughal Gardens at Rashtrapati Bhawan with President Kalam. It was Ekadashi (the 11^th day of the Lunar calendar) and the bright moonlight created a surreal atmosphere. I narrated Parshurama’s story to Dr Kalam and he surprised me by saying that he knew it all. Then he added that during the twenty years he had spent in Thiruvananthapuram, while working for Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), he had learnt about Parshurama, who indeed is considered the “Father of Kerala.” When Parshurama threw his battle axe into the sea, the land of Kerala was reclaimed from the waters.

Later in 2011, I stayed at the Leela Kovalam Beach Hotel. There was a big painting of a majestic king in the lobby. When I inquired who he was, the receptionist told me with a “who-else-could-it-be” look that it was that of Parshurama. While returning, I made it a point to visit the ancient Parashurama temple about six kilometres from the hotel. It is famous for Balitharpanam, where one can pay tribute to one’s ancestors, I was told.

The legend of Parshurama may be all imagination, but it withstood time – thousands of years! That a water body in remote Arunanchal Pradesh bears his name, three officers from the Indian Army claim him, and that he is considered the “Father of Kerala” cannot be brushed aside. Myths carry their own power as they do not happen all at once. They form slowly, and are told and heard by successive generations, grounded in the mill of time until they turn into very fine powder that is everywhere and cannot really be dusted off.

When we look at our own life and times, how do we know what is real and what is imaginary and yet believed to be real? Right in front of my eyes, I saw nine big tech companies, six American and three Chinese, taking the control of the world. We are sucked into global supply chains by online retail and door delivery systems. Our food, or grocery, a plumber, and even a driver for an hour is available by touching the screens of our smartphones a few times. There is a menu for everything, even our emotions. I wonder for how long we would be able to feel our emotion correctly after conveying it through an emoji on the screen day in and day out!

Who imagined this life where a few powerful corporations, say one lakh people, or a million people put together, construct underlying structures and digital machinery that decides, sorts, and controls eight billion people? When I speak to Alexa and my TV shows me what I want, it is a myth coming true for my mother but fun and a given reality for my grandson. But what about a poor, hungry person, or a sick patient without the means for medical care- whom do they call, and would anyone ever respond? Can we escape a future where big nine, ten, or hundred companies have taken over the control of our planet and made a myth out of our own very life!

It is very natural that we want to be happy. Happiness begins with the fulfilment of our needs – food when hungry, water when thirsty, and sleep when tired. But it does not stop here. Once we get all this, we start seeking further comforts – a good bed to sleep, an air conditioner, and so on. Then to look unique we want a particular dress, shoes, designer bags, etc. Then, we further want to look special – entitled for another’s attention – to receive their respect, love, and obedience. And finally, we start wanting to dominate and control others. The more we try, the more we fail. The more we fail, the angrier we become. Then, we throw tantrums, and brood and sit alone in frustration! Then, a question arises. Who am I? Why am I here? What am I doing?

That is the beginning of a ‘human life’ – the life of a unique and the only known creation in Nature, endowed with the power to think, to reflect, and to imagine. This moment has been called ‘dvija,’ the second birth. You have come here to see the working of the mind, a machine inside you that is always telling you something – a voice in your head, constantly chatting with you saying … this is good, this is bad … do this … don’t do this… There are a few fortunate ones who realize that all that this voice says is not right. It leads us to problems, conflicts, and bad and difficult situations, and yet people end up following the ‘commands’ of this voice. And in case of a blessed few, there comes a realization that there is another voice behind this voice… telling us that all that is pleasant is not necessarily good. When you are clearly able to hear this second voice, you have taken your first step into the spiritual world.

Can I hear this ‘observer voice’ more often? Do more of what it wants me to do? 

The answer is ‘Of course! Why not?’

‘What do I have to do for that?’ is the next question.

The answer is to ‘log in’. That’s it!

The idea of the Oneness of the entire creation is indeed universal. Everything exists in God and therefore God is both immanent and transcendent. But, if I live in God, and God is inside me, why am I confused, perturbed, and doing my best, yet not even at peace with myself? This is a doubt that must be put to rest not by some teaching but by experience, by getting connected to the God inside one and feeling firsthand what it means and to what wonderful effect. 

Based on Vedanta insights, the seminal works of Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung (1875-1961), Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), and the monk of the Ramakrishna Order, Swami Prabhavananda (1893-1976), and the writings of Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) and Eknath Easwaran (1910-1999), there is a ‘doable’ method to connect to the God inside us and draw from the eternal source of ‘our being’ – all that is needed to be good and become great.   

There is nothing religious about it. Buddha taught us about transforming the mind. In the Islamic world, silent contemplation – ‘Muraqiba’ – is widely practiced and very well-defined. There has been a great tradition of Christian mystics right from the days of the Roman empire adopting Christianity. 

There are just three simple steps. First, draw your attention ‘inside you’ by withdrawing it from outside. Sit alone, undisturbed, and close your eyes. You will feel terrible resistance. It is so difficult to have our eyes closed… even for a minute! Something inside tells you not to do that … get out … go back to the world! This is the hypnotic power of the world over you – the Maya. You are captivated to live like a puppet – a part of the machinery – serving your family, your company, the economy, the social and political system… and so on! This is indeed proof that you are in real trouble!

As the second step, standing up to this problem, take control of your ‘monkey mind’ that is forever jumping around. Memorize a simple passage of your liking in the language that you understand – your mother tongue, ideally, or even English. (I use St Francis’s prayer: Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace …) Remain focused on that passage with your eyes closed and you will feel less threatened… and with very little practice, you are now able to remain ‘within’ yourself for a few minutes… Now extend this time to 30 minutes. That is enough.

Just this… nothing more and your mind loses its ‘captive power’ and you are now ‘online’. Enjoy this simple feeling of ‘being with yourself’; say nothing, tell no one about it. Don’t even intellectualize it… just experience the connection!

Lastly, select one mantra – a short and simple one – whatever appeals to you. And whenever during the day you notice your mind becoming restless, trying to hijack you ‘away from here and now’ into some past memory, future worry or fantasy… engage it to this mantra. That is all. Your podding stops here. You will see the beneficial results for yourself. 

Know that there are the larger systems that increasingly control the world and the lives of people. The only defence is ‘going inside’ and connecting to the Absolute Consciousness that is the ground upon which this entire creation is built. There are many methods and people have done it, but for an ordinary person, living in this world, my idea is not to abandon the world and merge with the identity-less Oneness but to be aware of what is going on. By doing so, I can have a little peace, a little confidence, that in the end, everything is going to be all right.

Using this, a great many enterprises are operational, ‘selling’ spirituality. Unlike other ‘commodities’ and ‘services’ there is no direct price, but blind following and servitude is charged as price. People have gone for them always and they continue to do so now. Names and forms have changed. Religion has been mutated into cults and sects and off late, a Technology Singularity has become active to capture your attention and control your mind using the Internet provided into your hands ‘at no cost.’

I consider this as the biggest evolutionary challenge that mankind has ever faced. There are thoughtful people talking about it already. A book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari (b. 1976), discusses what might happen to the world when old myths are coupled with new godlike technologies such as artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. So, getting grounded in the Absolute Consciousness, that is present right inside you, is now even more important. 

The second wave of COVID-19 in April 2021 created a month-long horror show of people dying due to a shortage of medical oxygen and hospital beds, dead bodies floating in the river Ganga, and rampant black-marketing of lifesaving drugs. Come June 2021, the season had yet to change, and a sea of tourists flocked to Himachal Pradesh. Escaping soaring summer temperatures, scores of affluent people, in their fancy cars, made a run for Manali, Shimla, Kufri and Dalhousie. Within a month’s time, about a million ‘tourists’ made a mockery of corona-appropriate behavior, as if in vengeance.

When I hear experts sweating out every evening on TV, discussing variants and further waves of coronavirus, none of them speak the naked truth, that is, that the virus, by itself, has no ability to mutate and create a wave. An infected person must intermingle with other people to transmit it. If this transmission from one person to another stops, the game of the virus will be over – there will be no mutation and no further wave. So, who is responsible for the waves? Crowding! That was what happened during the recent religious congregation, election rallies and cricket matches. Moreover, if one goes to any vegetable market in any town, one will find a total absence of pandemic-appropriate behavior. There has been a disdain for science among Indian people in general, and it is not fading, but rather ‘mutating’ into haughtiness, to use virus terminology. 

It is a pity that instead of addressing this issue, we either discuss topics such as whether the virus was a bioweapon, which of the two Indian vaccines is better, whether the third wave will affect children more severely, or make statements such as, “I will wait for an ‘imported’ vaccine to arrive.” We see radiating curiosity take in details of everything in the room, except the elephant standing quietly there. Sagacious wisdom watching the meaningless chatter is like a lighthouse in the turbulent sea. Dr Amartya Sen, in his book ‘The Argumentative Indian’, mentions the ability of Indian people to discuss any topic at length, “Prolixity is not alien to us in India. We are able to talk at some length.”

“The elephant in the room” is a metaphorical idiom. So, instead of chatting about never-ending details of our likes and dislikes, political storms in teacups, and games we have never ourselves played, let us look at the elephant. What is one big truth of our times? One can see how the modern world has been hijacked by few large corporations. They have been extracting natural resources – oil, iron ore, and so on – as spoils of the two World Wars in the last century. Now, in the 21^st century, they own whatever is manufactured and grown on earth. Every small business that your eye can see is owned by corporations – directly or through banks – as part of their global supply chains. When a popular brand portrays its logo as an arrow from ‘a’ to ‘z’, it blatantly declares that they indeed own everything that is bought and sold in this world. It is a fact as conspicuous as the elephant that can appear to be overlooked.

Or, the fact that more than twenty-one hundred billionaires globally own more of the world’s wealth than the five billion people at the bottom of the wealth pyramid; that the richest one percent have accumulated twice as much wealth as 90 percent of the global population. The elephant knows that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been working on the coronavirus, receiving funding from the United States. As has been the case of all other major issues in the history of mankind, the powers that control the world at a certain point of time decide ‘the official narrative’ of what is accepted as the ‘truth’ and recorded as a ‘fact’ for posterity.

Or, the fact that governments can only collect taxes and spend them without any real control on the business of the world. COVID-19 would not have become a pandemic had it not spread by the heavy air traffic of millions of people shuttling between continents daily, most of them affluent Chinese tourists celebrating their new year. Online retail has led to global supply chains and industrial production of food. Are not people in India eating fruits from New Zealand and almonds from California? Are not antibiotics and growth hormones injected into animals in poultry and dairy farms?

Finally, urbanization has been forced upon people across the world as their only way out of rural poverty. Who were those people, helpless and scared out of their lives, walking on the roads during the lockdown last year? Why have they all returned quietly even after suffering such an ordeal? Thomas Friedman, in his book on global warming and clean energy, published in 2007, called the modern world ‘hot, flat and crowded.’ It has been made so by large corporations so that they own everything possible on the planet and make a profit out of every activity of mankind.

The root cause of COVID-19, which earlier was SARS-CoV, even earlier was H1N1, and will be something else in future, is the overpopulated and unequal world. The fact is that when billions of people faced the hardships of lockdowns, including loss of their livelihoods, a handful of billionaires made merry. In April 2021, when President Joe Biden informed the U.S. Congress that at a time when twenty million Americans lost their jobs in the pandemic, roughly 650 billionaires in America saw their net worth increase by more than $1 trillion and that they were now worth more than $4 trillion, he was at least acknowledging the elephant in the room.

Know that wherever there are marginalized people, whose lives are entwined with the wild, where animals are slaughtered for their meat, local butcher shops and fish markets, the zoonotic viruses are getting transmitted into human bodies. These slow-motion snippets must be captured and pruned to avoid them later becoming an apocalyptic feature-length film. As Lord Buddha said, “That is because that is, if this stops that stops.” What happened in Wuhan can happen anywhere, anytime, if business as usual goes on. And it is going on. American novelist Ellen Wittlinger (b. 1948) put it plainly when she said, “When there is an elephant in the room, you can’t pretend it isn’t there and just discuss the ants.”

On the eve of my cardiac bypass surgery on 6 February, 2004, at the Care Hospital, Hyderabad, my friend, Madhu Reddy, the Chief of University Press, who published Wings of Fire came to see me. He gifted me, Glass Palace, a book written by, perhaps the best of contemporary authors, Amitav Ghosh (b. 1956). I read the entire 552-page novel while still in hospital, recovering from the surgery. When President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam came to see me, he saw the book and asked me to brief him on it. 

Later, when I visited him at Rashtrapati Bhavan in May 2004, I stayed there for about a week and had the opportunity of telling him the story of King Thibaw Min (1859-1916), the last king of Burma, and the central character in the novel, during our daily walks in the Mughal Gardens. With the story of how Burma lost its freedom to the British as its backdrop, the novel brought out the involvement of Indian-origin people in Burmese society, the complicated business of timber and rubber plantations, the moral dilemmas faced by soldiers in the British Indian Army, when Japan conquered Burma, who eventually formed the Azad Hind Fauj and finally, their exit as victims of rioting when Burma regained independence in January 1948. 

While the entire coastal Burma was under British rule, the kingdom of Ava in Upper Burma was still sovereign, with Thibaw as king, living in the sprawling and magnificent Glass Palace in Mandalay. When it fell to the British in 1885, the king was captured with his family and taken away to India. He briefly stayed in Madras and was later shifted to the rather remote town of Ratnagiri on the Konkan coast practically under house arrest. A 30-room house was built for him, that exists even today. The king died in 1916 and after that, his family was sent back to Burma.  

President Kalam arranged my meeting with General U Kyi Thein, Ambassador of Myanmar (as Burma is now called) in New Delhi. He facilitated my visit to Myanmar along with cardiologist, Dr P Krishnam Raju. This visit helped revitalize “old but cold” India-Myanmar relations. Soon after, Myanmar President Senior General Than Shwe visited India in October 2004 and President Kalam visited Myanmar in March 2006. I was involved in both visits. In Yangon, we visited the mausoleum of Bahadur Shah’s Zafar, who was exiled here in 1857 after the sack of Delhi by the British. When Dr Kalam was signing the visitor’s book, we noticed the signature of General Muhammad Zia-Ul-Haq (1924-1988), President of Pakistan, who had been there in May 1985. 

Mandalay, located on the east bank of the mighty Irrawaddy River, 716 km north of Yangon, was pristine. Atop the 800 feet high Mandalay Hill, is the Sutaungpyei (literally wish-fulfilling) Pagoda. When we were standing there, our host pointed to a jail complex on the western side, where Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1920) was imprisoned from 1908 to 1914 on sedition charges by the British. Lokmanya famously dared the judge who convicted him saying, “There are higher powers that rule the destinies of men and nations; and I think, it may be the will of Providence that the cause I represent may be benefited more by my suffering than by my pen and tongue.” It was during this period that Lokmanya wrote the book, Gita Rahasya.

Many years later, when I visited Tilakji’s house in Pune, I saw a tableau of Lokmanya writing Gita Rahasya in the jail. It inspired me to write A Modern Interpretation of Lokmanya Tilak’s Gita Rahasya. The book was published in December 2017, and I consider it my best work. The book was released by the Chief Ministers of Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra at a glittering centenary ceremony to mark the occasion of Lokmanya Tilak’s call of “Swaraj is my birthright, and I shall have it” at Lucknow in 1916. At the event, I met Lokmanya’s great-grandson, Shailesh Tilak. He hugged me affectionately. A line from Glass Palace surfaced in my memory, “Every life leaves behind an echo that is audible to those who take the trouble to listen.” I felt as if a strange loop got closed with that hug. 

I recently read another excellent book, The King in Exile, by Sudha Shah, published in 2012, narrating the saga of King Thibaw and focusing on the struggle of his family in exile, especially the Queen and the four princesses. It is a deeply moving book, with meticulously collected old photographs, offering a powerful testimony of how fate tosses human lives. Times have changed but not the reality of this world. 

The effect of COVID-19 on migrant workers is a great human tragedy that people are not even willing to talk about. Old and dilapidated buildings are regularly falling in the rains in Mumbai and elsewhere, rendering people homeless overnight. In North India, floods in the Himalayan rivers every year wash away whatever little people living in their basins have, forcing them to live in perennial poverty. 

In what has become a ritual, a cruel pattern indeed, is the announcement of a “relief package” after every flood. In what assumes a comic dimension, the State government demands a very large sum, say in billions, and the Central government provides a moderate sum, say in millions, and no one really knows what the people who lost their everything to the calamity get and to what effect. There is no long-term solution to manage floods, even contemplated. We remain predominantly a rain-fed agricultural nation taking “chances” with the monsoon every year to bring enough water so that we can grow our food. 

Is the era of empires over? Not at all. Let us look at the present world closely. I recently read a 2019 book, The Big Nine, by Amy Webb (b. 1974) about how nine corporations — Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, Microsoft, IBM, and Apple — are the new gods of AI and are controlling billions of people. These “systems” operating the world don’t share the motivations, desires, or hopes of humanity but operate for their own efficiency and wealth. What do we do with our Swaraj? People, even the affluent, are fast losing control of their lives and businesses. Children who are settled abroad for their livelihoods are indeed living in glorified exile. Many elderly people die alone, helpless, and powerless, like King Thibaw.

When the biblical king, Solomon, declared, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9), it was not a world-weary complaint against life’s monotony, but a truth, stated plain and simple. The nature of human life and the world that humanity makes for itself is indeed cyclic. Did we not see the emptiness of living only for being alive during the year-old and still-on-roll COVID-19 pandemic? Living under a hypnotic spell is alright as long as we don’t forget what it is to be human.

One of my fond childhood memories is that of visiting the hydel station cum water pump at Bhola, near Meerut City with my father. We took a public bus, which was divided into two zones – the front and the rear – and there was a differential in ticket. The road was a mix of strips of masonry and asphalt. The sight of gushing water was amazing! There were massive fruit-laden trees. We returned in the evening. 

After my father passed away in 1979, that connection was severed. But my younger brother developed a spiritual bonding with Swami Vivekanand Sarasvatiji, who had an ashram in the vicinity of the hydel station, and I visited him many times. Awareness dawned upon me that the water stream was in fact the Upper Ganges Canal built during 1842 to 1854 by the East India Company, connecting Haridwar to Aligarh for irrigation and as a waterway.

Once, in 1969, while returning from Haridwar, we passed through the Solani Aqueduct in Roorkee. The driver stooped the bus briefly so that everyone could see how the Upper Ganges Canal was flowing over a 300-meter-long bridge crossing over the Solani River. One passenger announced that the song, “Nanha Munna Rahi Hun, Desh Ka Sipahi Hun” — from the 1962 film, “Son of India” was picturized at this location. Of course, I was more interested in looking at the pairs of large stone lions, placed at each end of the aqueduct.

In 1998, when Dr APJ Abdul Kalam went to the convocation of Roorkee Engineering College, now the Indian Institute of Technology, I assisted him in writing his speech. The speech recalled how this engineering college was started in 1847 to teach engineering to “the natives” to meet the need of constructing the Upper Ganges Canal and was later named The Thomason College of Civil Engineering. Dr Kalam thundered, “Those ‘natives’ have put a satellite into orbit and have now a Nuclear Weapon!” 

A nation moves ahead through big projects. The Manhattan Project that produced the first nuclear weapons decided the ending of World War II. Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904 -1967) inspired Dr Homi J. Bhabha and Prof Vikram Sarabhai, whose leadership would later create BARC and ISRO. U.S. President, John F. Kennedy, on May 25, 1961, announced the goal of landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade and it eventually happened. The construction of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River was a major project that put China on the road to become a World Power. 

So, where are our big projects? After the Light Combat Aircraft that made its maiden flight in 2001 could not be productionized till 2016 for political reasons, India is yet to see something big happening. Where are the new Nuclear Power Stations? The plan of Thorium-based reactors? Our passenger aircraft? Our Bullet Train? Why have we become a society continuously arguing on every little thing and unable to see the big picture and afraid to take strides? A big nation ought to think big, do big, and deliver big. 

What are the big dreams India can have? Becoming a 5-trillion economy is a neat, right, and doable dream. It is unfortunate that rather than a discussion on “how,” there is a chorus of naysayers, ridiculing the idea itself as if this nation must forever remain a nation of daily-wage farm labourers. Why not have ten of India’s higher education institutes in world ranking? A medical college with a 1000-bed hospital in every district? A house for every family? Tap water in every home? No open drainage in any city of more than a million people? If these things happen, the rest will happen automatically.

India must get rid of its perennial flood problem. This one “project” will transform our villages. Floods in India are turning more severe, unpredictable, and rather intractable every year. It is a no-brainer that hundreds of water courses originate from the Himalayas flooding Kosi, Gandak, Damodar, Brahmaputra and Mahanadi in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Assam and wash away properties and livelihoods of millions of people who as a result, live in perennial poverty. The Western Ghats have become the new flood zones and cloudburst-like situations are playing havoc every year. 

Why is the country of legendary engineer, Dr M. Visvesvaraya, shying away from discussing a River-linking project? We need to wake up to the fact that India accounts for 18% of the world population, which will become 20% and eventually 25% by 2050, and has about 4% of the world’s water resources, which will turn less than 2% in the same period. Which other solutions would solve the country’s water woes but to link our rivers? People getting killed by water in some areas and dying from dehydration in some other parts can’t be our destiny.  

Beyond water security, the canals as waterways would ease the stress on transport infrastructure, hydro power would feed grid, and fish farming would broaden income sources in rural areas. The cost of power generation by solar power is steadily declining and soon, say by 2025, renewable power would be available for water lifting/pumping, giving an advantage that was never there. But such an enterprise must be immune from electoral politics and declared by the Parliament as a National Mission.

The cost of not doing this is going to be existential. No national economy operates in isolation. People with vehicles at the petrol pumps swallow this bitter truth every day. The bumper crops in irrigated areas and dismal situation of rain-fed farming is a fact well laid out. I personally saw the chorus of “disaster” when the Sardar Sarovar Dam was created to better utilize the water of the Narmada in Gujarat. But now that it has happened, the transformation that has come is apparent and undeniable. We can’t condemn people living in river-basins to suffer every year and flourish as a nation. 

The Katha Upanishad declares, उत्तिष्ठत जाग्रत प्राप्य वरान्निबोधत – Arise, awake, find those who know and learn from them (1.3.14). The nation has seen enough of electoral bickering and petty politics during the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, there is nothing for which any one can claim any credit. The system has exposed its inadequacies and the society, its organic defects. Why can we not come out of the hypnotic spell of words like “world leader”, “superpower” and the “largest democracy” and show something real for the good of the people, especially the poor and the powerless, who are fast losing hope.