Title: Life’s Amazing Secrets
Author: Gaur Gopal Das
Publisher: Penguin Ananda
Pages: 208
Price: Rs 250
In the sacred realms of spirituality, ISKCON’s monk, Gaur Gopal Das, is undeniably one of the great names to reckon with. He has already attained a worldwide recognition through his spiritually imbued motivational discourses on various social media platforms.
Now, with his debut book Life’s Amazing Secrets, this highly sought-after monk and life coach has offered an ideal pathway of solutions to the people of the modern age whose vehicle of life has got stuck in the logjam of innumerable problems. Therefore, this book has been purposefully conceived to empower human beings for successfully combating the challenges that life hurls at them.
All that glitters is indeed not always gold. Even an apparently happy and well-settled man, living a life filled with worldly luxuries and creature comforts can be the victim to the emotional turmoil and mundane vicissitudes in reality. Exposing the seamy side of life, the monk-author pertinently remarks that behind the smiles, everyone is going through personal struggles we know nothing about.
Abundantly rich in soul-stirring anecdotes and personal experiences of the glob trotter, Gaur Gopal, the book is based on a conversation that takes place between the hermit and his friend Harry while traversing through Mumbai’s traffic. Soon, the readers begin to identify themselves with Harry and realise that his suffering-stricken life story is, in fact, the story of most of them.
His predicament naturally reminds me of TS Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men wherein the poet ruefully says that we are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men. Quite similarly, with his sharp intelligence and sheer hard work, Harry has, no doubt, materialistically stuffed his life with all the outer comforts but when it comes to inner peace, he is completely hollow inside and is thus doomed to an existence of excruciating professional and domestic drudgery.
Sensing his plight, the monk takes his friend under his tutelage and helps him mitigate his miseries by showering the nuggets of spiritual wisdom from his rich repository. Gaur Gopal Das’ mantras of attaining serenity are not exclusively for his friend Harry. They have the magical powers to bring real and everlasting happiness to all if implemented devoutly.
The secret to a blissful life, as the author puts, it lies in maintaining balance. Drawing the analogy to car, he believes that like a car our life also runs on its four wheels of personal life, relationships, work life and social contributions.
If any of the wheel goes kaput, the vehicle loses its balance and may come to a cropper. Therefore, we must take recourse to divinity and maximize our spiritual strength to deal with discordance in all the spheres. In other words, striking a balance and maintaining the rhyme and rhythm of life should be the cardinal objective of every individual.
To round it off with Professor Lytton’s words, “Life is all about balancing the not-so-harmonious dimensions into a coherent, cohesive and harmonious unit.” Couched in an intelligible language and remarkably lucid style, this self-help book enables the readers to cultivate the perfect art of living.