Cursed at Kedarnath and Other Stories

Deepta has asked me to write the foreword for this her second book. I had written the preface for her bestselling debut Bhangarh to Bedlam: Haunted Encounters and I did tell her that somebody else should write the foreword for the second. But I think Deepta feels that I know best - and in all probability, I do.

When one is writing on the supernatural in India, chances are people will either rub their hands with glee, put their feet up and say, 'Oh! A spooky ghost story'. Or there may be some fearful blighters who will duck under the covers and smother themselves rather than admit that there are other worlds that exist. I'm afraid that in this way we are impractical, superstitious, illogical and no - I won't say that awful word, ignorant.

After all, we are a very old civilization with a lot of knowledge. But in modern India, the word supernatural brings out the rather silly in us. Well, I guess one can't have everything. I am not one of those who supports the west in everything it does. But I must admit that as far as the subject of the supernatural is concerned, the western world is far more advanced than us. They take it seriously - as seriously as the word science is taken in India. Isn't it strange that that one word, 'science' makes us drool without really understanding what science is. The supernatural is a science, my friend. It is a science. And according to the Penguin Dictionary of English, science is 'a systemised branch of knowledge dealing with objects, forces and phenomena of the physical universe.'

What we are dealing with in the supernatural is exactly that. What we are talking about is supernature as so brilliantly written about by Dr. Lyall Watson, author of Supernature from which the word supernatural may very well have emerged. What he talked about was science, saying that matter is never destroyed but goes back into the system to appear again in the same form. To him, that might have been the emergence of ghosts.

Men and women through the ages have believed in the existence of other dimensions and in the survival of the spirit. They have believed in a living consciousness which exists in the so-called inanimate. Scholars of note have researched spirit phenomena and been convinced that life as we understand it does not end with the decay of this body. The essence lives on and definitely has a will of its own. Can we so callously ignore men like Pythagoras, Plato and Conan Doyle? Can we say that the famous inventor Thomas Edison was playing with his ABC blocks when he was building the 'spirit machine' because he thought it was possible to communicate with those who had passed on?

In India, Rabindranah Tagore believed in other worlds. So did the great mystic Shri Aurobindo. Who are we pygmies to say 'No ghosts please. We're scientific'. Utter nonsense.

I congratulate Deepta and her spunk and her erudition which I find plenty of in this book. Go ahead and prove the truth. It is out there. One just has to reach out.