Whether or not this piece ever gets published in the Hindustan Times, I probably won’t know for a while. Nonetheless, I thought the essay suitable to read as a “Thought for the Day.” Here it is: Invisible controllers are at work. They can be reduced to three obvious forces: governments, economics and the intelligentsia. Our lives are not our own. The nation, economics of the day, and the prevailing `intellectual’ climate limit our freedom at every juncture. But there’s a fourth, more insidious influence at work: Hollywood. Entertainment is yet another, more subtle phenomenon that has a way of invading our consciousness; it determines our actions. It tells us what we should be; where to go. It sets our goals; makes us do what our instincts demand, usually that which is daring and cool. James Bond, we loved you! Above and beyond these four, lies the realm of God, millions of light years away, in astronomical language. Billions of miles travelled at the speed of mind, a Vedic philosopher might say. To the behaviourist, the moon is a satellite and heaven is outer space. God is imagined, irrelevant, irrational. Maybe God equals destiny, but in some metaphysical sense, God is inscrutable, and the concept is pigeon-holed as MYSTICAL. Some self-styled people (we may call them behaviourists) considered that they moved earth and sky — like the Man Who Would Be King in the famous Kipling story; they thought they caused the movements of heavenly bodies. They were the centres of their universes. Illusions like this that have kept most of us on the wheel of samsara for aeons and forced us to skate and slither on the rock we call earth. Some, however, feel the presence of this fifth unseen controller, who, as Brahma says, burns up all the karma of those who are imbued with devotion (BRAHMA SAMHITA, 5.54). Such is the awareness of the theist and the seeker.