If the Elephant Flies: India Confronts the Twenty First Century

This is a collection of essays dedicated to India’s past and present, its role and mission in the world and the contribution it has made and continues to make to the spiritual and material capital of humanity.

After looking at some of the many factors, internal and foreign, that have contributed to the formation of the nation as it is today, the book explores various aspects of the harmonic convergence between contemporary scientific discoveries and philosophical insights and the esoteric Indian teachings and symbolic representations.

India’s intellectual civilization has been since its remote Vedic origins centered on the notion of infinity in time and space, though it was also constantly and simultaneously aware of the impermanence and elusive character of all creation. This book proposes a reflection on the paradoxical but essential connection between seemingly “hard” realities found in history, geopolitics and the economy and the “soft” contemplative truth of metaphysics, mythology and mysticism. That perspective emanates from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra and Buddhist scriptures which account for the world as a process of dynamic interaction between consciousness and matter.