It is difficult to pigeonhole this book as a ‘philosophical tract’, a ‘prophetic discourse’, a ‘journey into the human mind’, a ‘guide for human survival’, a ‘spiritual treatise’. It is an amalgam of all these and more. Embellished with profuse quotations from various sources, modern and traditional, spiritual and scientific, the volume reaches out to those who are already uneasy about the way we on this earth are progressing. C.B. Rao as he is fondly called, an Indian Administrative Service Officer, has not allowed the iron of long years in the bureaucracy to enter his soul or stifle creative thinking. If this sounds like high praise from a fellow bureaucrat, let the discerning reader decide if he is correct in the use of such adjectives!
The author has extensively covered the evils besetting human beings like hatred, malice, jealousy, cruelty and violence. Murder, suicides, wars are common. We vacillate between pleasure and pain, individual and collective identity, the real and unreal like the rope and the snake, spirituality and social responsibility, power, passion and love, science and religion.