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No Brain, No Pain.

There was a time when I developed a compulsion of wanting to know everything about Bhagavadgita. I was told that the holy book had all the recipe for a meaningful life. And I heard about a volunteer at a local temple who was conducting a series of lectures on that subject. My acquaintances were all praises about the speaker and the contents of his classes.   I was drawn in. I decided to give it a try. In the first lecture, all that I heard was that I was nothing. I was smaller than the smallest of the speck in the Universe. I did not matter to the greater scheme of things. Hence, the last thing I needed was my ego. I had to crack my hardshell called ego, following which enlightenment would flow in like an eternal fountain of knowledge. Like how Arjuna had to clear his head of all his doubts to receive the unlimited erudition from the Lord himself. I thought to myself, "I do not need these people to tell me that I am nothing; my wife tells me all the time that my ego is bigger ...

Do we really know everything?

Usually, I do not give too much importance to things that are spiritual in nature. I just simply join the bandwagon to keep people, especially my loved ones, happy. Like when I, the first born to my father, was summoned to perform certain rights on the first anniversary of his death, I just obliged. I knew it would make my mother happy to see my father 'sent off' to the ethereal world in a proper manner. It does not matter that my parents towards the tail end of his life, could not stand each other but that is another story for another day. The purpose of the prayers on the day of first death anniversary is to remind the soul of departed that he is not forgotten here on Earth. By invoking the forces of Nature, appeasing the feminine forces and cajoling the spirits of the ancestors, it is hoped that the deceased will keep a cursory eye on the wellbeing of the living. Do these things really happen or is it just another mumbo jumbo set up to put the element of fear of t...