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Book Name: The Sword and the LotusPrevious     Next
 

hearts. But it is not impossible.

If I can reach to millions of people's hearts you all can make the effort. And this is the only way to change this miserable state of affairs. You just have to have enough courage, because it is going against the crowd.

In my childhood it happened I had a Sanskrit teacher in my school who was a very old-fashioned man. He was very fat, and he had a very big turban. He was the teacher of Sanskrit, a dead language, and he also lived according to his subject matter -- in a very antique kind of way. But he was a very simple man too, and because he was very simple, we used to call him Bholenath. It simply means a simpleton.

He was very furious whenever he heard it. And we used to write in big letters on the blackboard before he came into the class: bholenath -- lord of the simpletons; that is the exact meaning. The first thing he would do was that he would rub it off, and he would start shouting and making a scene -- and we all enjoyed it.

He died, so I went to his house with my father before his body was taken to the funeral pyre. I was standing there with all his relatives and friends and neighbors, and then his wife came before his body was to be taken away. She came running out of the house, fell on him, and said, "Oh, my Bholenath!"

I could not contain my laughter -- I had never thought that this would happen! When a man is dead... Even we were not thinking about his nickname, but his wife comes there and calls him Bholenath! So I laughed loudly. Everybody was shocked, and my father was very angry, but now there was nothing he could do -- I had laughed.

On the way home he told me, "I will never take you anywhere. Can't you see a simple thing? The man is dead. His wife is crying, his whole family is mourning, all his relatives are sad, everybody is sad. And are you mad or something? -- you started laughing!"

I said, "You don't know the whole thing; otherwise you would have laughed too." And I told him the whole thing.

He said, "This is great! It is good that you had not told me before."

And I told him, "As far as I know, all those relatives are simply pretending to be

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