For The Time Being- Essays in Living Today (An Old and Rare Book)

About The Author SISIRKUMAR GHOSE: Teacher at Santiniketan. Also taught abroad. President, All India English Teachers' Conference (1973). National Fellow (1974-76). National Lecturer (1982-83). Publications include: Aldous Huxley, The Later Poems of Tagore, The Poetry of Sri Aurobindo, Mystics and Society, Metaesthetics and Other Essays, Rishis: Modern and Otherwise, Man and Society, Lost Dimensions. Also contributed the article on Mysticism to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The present book For The Time Being is a collection of the author's articles and essays, quite a few of which appeared in print from time to time, and the rest specially written by him for this book.

The articles cover a wide variety of subjects and they sparkle with wit and humor and sorrow too at man-kind's follies and foibles. The author has not spared any one, and least us. In his incisive style, he dissects each issue and problem facing our country and the world with a surgeon's knife and skill.

It is a feast and repast, as the reader will find for himself.

Also under publication by the Bhavan author's another book entitled "Faith of a Poet", being selections from Gurudev Tagore's writings.

Preface In spite of loud lamentations over the decline in the quality of life, all is, perhaps, not lost. In the heart of man, battered, baffled, is a dream, to live abundantly rather than reconcile him-self to being condemned. The crisis of civilization, now on al-most everybody's lips, may turn out to be something else. The pain may be a growing pain. Anyway we are all caught up in the crisis and have to make the most of it. Can I see another's woe and not be in sorrow too? Today's world-without-end misery calls for a desperate remedy. The predicament spells responsibility. New proofs and witnesses are called for to support a viable faith for living.

Here is one man's effort at encountering the human situation, or parts of it. Who will claim to know the all, to speak for everybody? If these mini-meditations, on some problems of contemporary living, ranging from pollution, the cursed city, the taming of the Titan, to the way of meditation and a celebration of consciousness raise echoes in the minds of the like-minded, the sahrdaya, that is what they are far. To care and to share is part of being human. Togetherness is the language of to-morrow, if not transcendence.

I am more than grateful to the Statesman, especially its editor, Mr. S. Nihal Singh, for unfailing courtesy to a tyro. Also to readers and critics who both understood - and misunderstood.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages