An✂️editorial🎬note📝of❤️‍🩹confession during today’s Easter🐣Sunday

Abs & appetite, humour & pranks inclusive, we’ve a 4️⃣-packed Thursday with Corpus Christi (Thursday, June 19th 2025), viṭl̥a piṇḍi utsava (mosaru kuḍiké, Aug 15, 2025), malhari dīkṣitara punya dinā & haripūra viśvābhigṅyara āradhané! I’ve no idea about the last 2️⃣. If you do, please share like some of the readers did the last time I went blank too! Nonetheless, let me sportily expose my ignorance with the first 2️⃣!!!

A tale of the 2️⃣ southern states of karṇāṭakā & Texas: Transports from forts to ports & courts; mél̥kōṭē to uḍupi & Corpus Christi city in TX; rāmānujācārya to madhvācārya & Jesus Rabbi; viśiṣṭadvaitā to dvaitā & Christianity; Cheluva to Krsna & Christ, Tipu Sultan to Delhi Nawab & Judus Iscariot!

Rewind to my childhood. Self-diagnosed & hailed as an amnesiac, there are a few exceptional things that even I do remember. Amongst those exceptions, hospital visits have remained sharp in my lifetime memories probably for 2️⃣ reasons: one, because I only visit them once in a blue moon, thanks perhaps to much more than an apple 🍏 a day & a couple of Apple 💻 products 📱 a year diet! Secondly, during almost every one of those rare visits, I’ve been in the company of co-visitors [co-u-sins], who’re sure-fire 🔥 ingredients for a 🤣 laughter riot 😂. Almost every time, after several unsuccessful warnings ⚠️, we’ve ended up being angrily shooed away by the old school nursing 👩‍⚕️ staff, who perhaps had no idea that laughter is the best medicine… being pre-Patch Adams, munnābhāi, vasūl̥rājā era! 

On one such rare occasion, as a naughty 😈 little 👦🏻 schoolboy, I had gone to St. Philomina’s Hospital 🏥 enroute to unknowingly experience my first & perhaps last ever encounter with Corpus Christi. No, it was neither the Texan city infamous for its illiteracy & crime rate nor the movie by that name, which released much later in 2019, but the orthodox celebrations by a few of the humongous number of Christian ✝️ denominations: a feast honouring the holy blood 🩸 & body (corpus) of Christ (Christi). Not much different from today, the educational system then too rewarded the theoreticians more than the practitioners, tilting the luck towards yours truly! 

Despite studying Bible as a regular theoretical subject throughout my schooling, thoroughly enjoying its stories & scoring nearly full marks in every exam, fortunately not to the chagrin of my practicing Christian classmates who were scoring much lesser, my first ever real physical tryst with the Eucharist happened in a much more sober setting. My paternal grandpa 👴🏻, a retired police 👮‍♂️ officer, was at St. Philomina’s for a near death 💀 experience, though the adults around me imagined he was recovering from one! 

Too sober for my liking then, I wondered & wandered away from his bed 🛏 & ward, unnoticed by my serious guardians, to the in-house chapel 💒 & sat through the slightly more cheerful mass. At the end of the long-winding sermon was the much-anticipated time for the Holy Communion & I wasn’t going to miss this new adventure, despite the lurking awareness 💭 that my parents might be searching for their little boy throughout the hospital 🏥 & maybe beyond, as the time ticked away unchecked as it always does uncaring for however high we value the circumstances! 

Standing in the long queue, & trying to take a peep 👀 at the process of how those ahead of me were receiving the sacrament bread 🍞 & fermented grape 🍇 juice 🥤, I guess I wasn’t such a great copycat learner after all. All theory & no practice! The result was that the way I opened my extrawide mouth 👄 & thrust out my extralong tongue 👅, the alert pastor unhesitatingly signaled for my honorable departure, prior to my much-awaited adventure. Pardoning the spoilsport & respecting his spot-free robes, having already angered gentle nurses, I wasn’t ready to anger a gentler pastor to add to my overflowing baggage of funny ‘sins’ that day & moved out of the chapel without a fuss, only to face an angrier family! 

The next time I visited St. Philomina’s led to an even more hilarious situation. I wasn’t yet a professor, but had already mastered one of its most important eligibility criteria of absentmindedness.  I had actually gone to see a close relative who was admitted there but, mixing up the names of my aunt & much younger cousin, I ended up enquiring with my concerned uncle about the health of my ‘respectful’ cousin & referring to my elderly aunt in a condescending lingo, usually reserved for youngsters! Ironically, my goof apparently cheered up my uncle for multiple reasons, which I could decipher only after my own grihasta āśrama praveśā!!! 

The last time I visited St. Philomina’s with these fond memories was decades later to check out my best friend at school who had by then become the leading neo-natologist at the hospital, Dr. Ahmed Khan, who had just then moved in from Saudi Arabia 🇸🇦 & quickly left for Australia 🇦🇺. Proof that even docs don’t stay in a hospital forever!!!

Enough of relevant & reverent chitchat. With this personal background, let’s explore the spirit of Corpus Christi & viṭl̥a piṇḍi. As we encountered in a previous post, as individuals, we’re at least 4D creatures, with the evolution of physical, mental, intellectual & spiritual dimensions being crucial for any meaningful accomplishment in or with life. Now, as we enlarge our canvas & recognise that we’re far more than an individual & begin an all-inclusive process, teamwork becomes as critical as the 4D individual sādhanā. 

This is evident in the current era as much as in the sober ‘Last Supper’ of an about-to-die Christ, 2 millennia ago with his 12 disciples, & even the playful ‘Butter Snacking’ of a just-born kr̥ṣṇa, 5 millennia ago with his innumerable playmates! The former is reenacted, albeit without Judus, in Corpus Christi while the latter is reenacted as viṭl̥a piṇḍi utsavi in uḍupi, wherein youth & kids devoted to kr̥ṣṇa use their bodies to construct pyramids to reach out to the high-hanging earthen pots filled with dairy produce. Butter 🧈 as the hidden essence of milk 🥛 is symbolic of the jīvātmā as the essence of ourselves, eager to be stolen by the paramatma. It’s one thievery that’s most welcomed by all devotees with the repeated call “haré (steal) kr̥ṣṇa!” Some seem to ponder if wine 🍷 is similarly the essence of grapes 🍇, sour or not!!! Ask the fox 🦊!

Back to the human pyramid, strength, focus, skill & care while self-deconstructing/descending are as significant as those while self-constructing/ascending it. This is also reflected in raising & lowering the 🐍 kuṇḍal̥ini ⚕️energy ⚡️ through the suśumna nāḍīi by the yōgis. Relish the multimodal symbolism, irrespective of your ongoing spiritual diet.

ĀŪM̐ namō bhagavaté VĀSUdēvāya!

AMEN namō bhagavaté YĒSUdēvāya!

One of the comments received in 2020: @Prof. Dinesh Harursampath (continuing your thoughts from above) and hence another way to reason that there are infinite realities and the parallel universes possible, which can all manifest based on the multitude of decisions each of us take every moment of the day. There are infinite trajectories for each of us (assume Aleph) leading to the highest-order infinity (The Absolute Infinite). Applying Set Theory, we are presented with Choice Functions even as infinite decisions are possible, and the Axiom of Choice or Axiom of Infinity is always beyond our grasp!