Eternal India-Astro-Spiritual Musings of K N Rao

K N Rao, Kotamraju Narayana Rao (Born October 12, 1931) also known as K N rao is a Hindu Astrologer author of many books of Hindu astrology. Born in Machilipatnam village of Andra Pradesh, K .N. Rao Retired from the India Audit and Account Service as Direcgor General in November 1990. He is the Advisor and founder member of the world’s largest school of astrology. Being run in the Bhartiya Vidya Bhawan New Delhi.

K N Rao, fondly and reverently called 'Guruji' by thousands of his students and disciples, is the God sent 'Messiah of Jyotisha' to reclaim Astrology from being the vestigial dogma of pseudo pundits and fake practitioners and giving it a new lease of life as a modern and scientific study with greater emphasis on empiricism. The 'Mission of his Soul' became the 'Ambition of his Life' when his mother, late Smt K. Saraswani Devi initiated him into astrology at a tender age of 12. The fructification of God's will and his soul's mission through his ambitious ventures, clearly prescribed in his horoscope, was predicted well in advance by his divine Guru and Yogi Shri Bhaskarananda ji and his spiritual guru Swami Parmanand Saraswati.

His contribution in establishing Astrology as a science, a discipline akin to Medicine, which could be studied and practiced, by one and all, has been immense and unparalleled. From founding and spearheading the largest astrological (study) institute in the world, to waging and winning a lone battle in Supreme Court to introduce Astrology as a discipline of study in Indian Universities - it has been a revolutionary and path breaking journey of a Change Agent a Messiah. With his phenomenal and historic contribution, Jyotish history will be marked as the Pre - Rao and Post- Rao eras.

Believing that sound research and documentation are the keys to promote a subject as vast as astrology, particularly when there was scarcity of good astrological texts, he not only wrote extensively, but also promoted his students and teachers to conduct research and write, resulting in a huge body of work which is a boon to posterity.

Besides voluminous works in astrology, Guruji has dwelled on the spiritual and supernatural, the play of divine forces, revealed to us as mysterious happenings and magical moments by God's Will. He has brought out a series of articles on intertwining of destinies and divine play.

The present book is a compilation of Guruji's musings on these spiritual and supernatural happenings, which have been published from time to time on the internet. I have only been instrumental in threading the precious pearls. The book has been long overdue, but I believe nothing happens without God's will.

Today, as the Institute of Astrology at Bhartiya Vidhya Bhavan celebrates, 25 years of its existence, there cannot be a better occasion to bring out 'Eternal India'. I have the honour to compile these articles and bring them out in book form, as a tribute to the living legend, on behalf of thousands of his students all over the world.

( Rishis have sung about this Truth in many ways, in various distinctive chants, in Brahma sutras full of conviction and sound reason.

How many religious books I have read, how many religious practices I have watched others follow and how I reacted will be difficult to recount. It all began after a very genuine spiritual experience which repeated many times. I have never told anyone anything about it and have not narrated anywhere or will ever do. My agnosticism died that day.

I pursued my professional career as an officer in the government service of Indian government but deep inside me spiritual quest never died. I observed life differently after that genuine experience. I watched life around me, life of people around me, and of those who came into my life and came to consult me astrologically. Most of them have been and are Hindus. Deep inside them I caught glimpses of eternal India throbbing in their bosoms inspite of their crass and even materialist craze. I decided to write about it. I jotted down these pieces, wrote on the website periodically. That is compiled here and presented in a book form by Neelam Gupta, one of my students.

Except Hindus, there is no such thing as deep distrust of fanaticism in the followers of other religions is what becomes noticeable most prominently in contemporary world. Not a day passes without the news of fundamentalist Muslims doing some damage somewhere or the other in the world. Not a month passes without hearing of Christian fathers enticing people into conversions. Fanatical fools as they are, they have no iota of spirituality in them to accept the wisdom of the Vedic prayer that wise men speak of different paths but that Truth is One.

God is a metaphor for the materialist west. Allah is the source of fanaticism for so many terrorists. But Iswhar is that kind, omnipotent, omnipresent force in the life of the Hindu, baffling but true, invisible yet ever present ... a belief which is not a nebulous thought, but an experience based on some incident of one's own or of someone in the family.

It is because of this tradition that attendance in temples keeps increasing in India, Shirdi Sai Baba temples attracts crowds and donations, Tirupati keep growing in popularity, rush in Hindi pilgrimages is controllable, the gathering in Kumbha mela in 2013 was 12,00,00,000 so brilliantly managed that it becomes a lesson for management experts who do not understand the cultured, gentle Hindu.

Compare it with what has been said about England in a survey, "The 2005 Church Survey, assessing the size of congregations in the country's 37,000 churches, reckoned that only 6.3 per cent of people showed up regularly. A thousand people joined a church each week, but 2,500 left one.

Christianity in the west has moved from cultural position of strength but the dangerous proselytizing church men with their huge funds converting poor Hindus through allurements and money is a menace unchecked in India. Muslims increasing their numbers with uncontrolled population growth, as a policy, are a future menace for a country already partitioned once. Look deeply into all this and you find that spirituality is known only to Hindus and others are only fanatical followers of their religions with no mystical spiritual tradition developed ever in their very brief history. They are young religions and therefore fanatical to make their presence felt and noticed. The eternal message of India is lost on them.

Beneath all these lie the materialism of Hindus also contrasted with the fundamentalism and the misogyny of Muslims who want Sharia to be imposed and stone to death women for alleged sexual transgressions. In the west they roasted women as witches. Compared to that evil of the dowry system appears so innocuous and yet is an evil. Sati, as Mahamahopadhyaya Kane has proved, was practised only by few in royal families of Rajasthan during Moghul times and in some parts of Bengal. There were very few cases of sati as the Mahamahopadhyaya has proved through his research but it has been made to look like a magnificent law because Raja Ramamohan Roy knew that it was practised in Bengal among the rich who wanted to deprive the widowed Bengali women of her share of property which she was entitled to according to the Hindu law (Dayabhaga school existed in Bengal and Assam only.) then prevalent in Bengal.

**Contents and Sample Pages**