Some 25 years ago, I had been struggling to receive spiritual initiation from a would-be diksha-guru for over three years, but he kept repeating that I was not ready yet. Just about that time (April 1994), I suffered what turned out to be a near-fatal heart attack during a lunch break at my FDA office. They rushed me into the emergency where I underwent triple heart bypass surgery. Three major arteries in my heart had ~98-100% blockages. One of these is the one commonly referred to by cardiologists as a “widow-maker!” Suffices to say that I could have suffered a massive heart attack, but for some divine intervention, I probably received another life. That incident alarmed me to seek spiritual initiation from my spiritual master, but I did not have much hope for that possibility. Based on my meagre scriptural knowledge at the time (Ante Narayana Smiti), I took refuge in whatever intelligence the Lord had endowed me. How do I attract Guru Maharaja’s attention to my cause? My intense greediness/eagerness [referred to as laulyam in sanskrit] initiated prompted me to study his mood using my intelligence. Through Krsna, we get introduced to our prospective guru, and thru Guru only, we attain Krsna. Thereby I figured out how he served his guru. His pranama-mantra happens to be “prabhup?dasya s?hitya? yat prak???ya vitirya?ca” Prabhupada ordered him to renounce this lucrative job of being a general manager of the Pepsi cola company, get married to a devotee woman even though he did not want to marry, return to India, and translate his books into several regional languages, and then distribute in India and abroad. All these he did in the prime of his youth when he was in Canada. That is when the idea flashed in my mind to write this essay on Absolute Knowledge despite my limited knowledge of Bhagavad-Gita at the time. I gathered enough courage to submit that essay with a degree of apprehension at his lotus feet. My would-be spiritual master was so pleased with it that not only did he invest the time out of his preaching schedule to read this synopsis written by an absolute novice like me, but he also initiated me within a month in our Potomac Temple in the suburb of Maryland, USA, on Lord Nrsimhadeva’s Appearance Day (May 25, 1997). Moreover, he gave me an order at my initiation, which was even more significant. I paraphrase it here: “Carucandra, I want you to learn the Gaudiya scriptures and then teach others.” This year, I would celebrate a silver jubilee to that fateful occasion in my spiritual life. And to this day, the divine couple has mercifully allowed me to keep my word to my Guru. Carrying out his order remains the very mission of my life balance.

This book is a historical exploration of the social and cultural processes that led to the rise of the ideology of labor as a touchstone of Bengali Muslim politics in late colonial India. The book argues that the tremendous popularity of the Pakistan movement in Bengal is to be understood not just in terms of "communalization" of class politics, or even "separatist" demands of a religious minority living out anxieties of Hindu political majoritarianism, but in terms of a distinctively modern idea of Muslim self and culture which gave primacy to production/labor as the site where religious, moral, ethical, as well as economic value would be anchored. In telling the story of the formation of a modern Muslim identity, the book presents the conceptual congruence between Islam and egalitarianism as a distinctively early twentieth-century phenomenon, and the approach can be viewed as key to explaining the mass appeal of the desire for Pakistan. A novel contribution to the study of Bengal and Pakistan’s origins, the book will be of interest to researchers studying South Asian history, the history of colonialism and end of empire, South Asian studies, including labor studies, Islamic Studies, and Muslim social and cultural history.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the International Workshop on Software Measurement, IWSM-Mensura 2007, held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, in November 2007. The 16 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers deal with aspects of software measurement like function-points measurement, effort and cost estimates, prediction, industrial experiences in software measurement, planning and implementing measurement, measurement-based software process improvement, best practices in software measurement, usability and user interaction measurement, measurement of open source projects, teaching and learning software measurement as well as new trends and ontologies for software measurement.

Citizenship studies is at a crucial moment of globalizing as a field. What used to be mainly a European, North American, and Australian field has now expanded to major contributions featuring scholarship from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies takes into account this globalizing moment. At the same time, it considers how the global perspective exposes the strains and discords in the concept of ‘citizenship’ as it is understood today. With over fifty contributions from international, interdisciplinary experts, the Handbook features state-of-the-art analyses of the practices and enactments of citizenship across broad continental regions (Africas, Americas, Asias and Europes) as well as deterritorialized forms of citizenship (Diasporicity and Indigeneity). Through these analyses, the Handbook provides a deeper understanding of citizenship in both empirical and theoretical terms. This volume sets a new agenda for scholarly investigations of citizenship. Its wide-ranging contributions and clear, accessible style make it essential reading for students and scholars working on citizenship issues across the humanities and social sciences.

Explores the ways linguistic nationalism has enabled and deepened the reach of All-India nationalism. This title is also available as Open Access.

In The Concealed Art of the Soul, Jonardon Ganeri presents a variety of perspectives on the nature of the self as seen by major schools of classical Indian philosophy. For Indian thinkers, a philosophical treatise about the self should not only reveal the truth about the nature of the soul, but should also engage the reader in a process of study and contemplation that will eventually lead to self-transformation. By combining careful attention to philosophical content and sensitivity to literary form, Ganeri deepens our understanding of some of the greatest works in Indian literary history. His magisterial survey includes the Upanisads, the Buddha's discourses, the epic Mahabharata, and the writings of Candrakirti, whose work was later to provide the foundation for Tibetan Buddhism. Ganeri argues that many Western theories of selfhood are not only present in, but are developed to high degree of sophistication in these writings, and that there are other ideas about the self found in the work of classical Indian thinkers which present-day analytic philosophers have not yet begun to explore. Scholars and students of philosophy and religious studies, particularly those with an interest in Indian and Western conceptions of the self, will find this book fascinating reading.

Gaudapada was one of the world’s greatest philosophers in seventh-century India. He invokes the mystical symbol ‘AUM’ (pronounced as ‘ohm’) pointing to the three states of consciousness (waking, dreaming and deep sleep) and the nature of reality itself. In the text on which this book is based, he writes that the waker, dreamer and deep-sleeper are like the roles that an actor plays at various times. All three states are the result of ignorance and error. Who we really are is the fourth aspect – the actor himself. If you see or feel a ‘thing’, then that ‘thing’ is not ‘real.’ So the waking world is no more real than the dream. ‘You’ have never been born. Nothing has ever been created. Causality is a myth. Discover your true nature to be Existence-Consciousness, without limitations, undivided and infinite, prior to time and space. Incredible? Read...and be convinced by the irrefutable logic of Gaudapada.