A Touch of the Mystic

Members of the Indian Diaspora conceive Kalpavriksha Foundation a Billion Dollar Project for their Motherland. When pressed for details the one line reply is It is an idea that has the potential to change the future of our country!! This project is meant to be a birthday gift for their beloved teacher Shivram Thonse a frail old teacher who is steeped in spiritualism. However it is a birthday gift meant to surprise him which the latter rejects and they are all shocked! Consequently the dream-project falls into the waiting hands of Akshay who converts it into a nightmare!! Employing wrong means Akshay grows big in double quick time to become a celebrity of sorts! Simultaneously in the name of providing insights for a New Way of Living he is learnt to have been unduly interfering in the personal lives of his employees to the extent of actually converting the whole movement into a pernicious cult! Now this high profile businessman is seen engaged in a bizarre experiment with real lives by implementing some of those outlandish ideas of Osho!! Akshay is of the firm belief that the fabric of our society could be ripped apart and he knows how! And in fact to a large extent he has already succeeded in doing that! Narayana Rao Hattiangady a retired banker and a citizen journalist single-handedly attempts to expose Akshay''s misdeeds and finds it an uphill task while over a hundred extended families of the cult-members are subjected to untold misery!! Ironically Shivram Thonse''s own people are also among the unfortunate victims of Akshay''s cult and the old man is therefore able to instantly relate to what Narayan Rao Hattiangady has to say in his detailed article about Akshay and his cult. He directs him to show it to his student Krishna Prasad the Police Chief. Contrary to expectations all that the latter has to say is these are crimes that fall under ''violence of the subtle kind'' and we can do nothing about it. He wants to know why the victims'' own relatives are not complaining. He is also not prepared to buy the argument that the victims in their brain-washed condition are incapable of defending themselves.How the old man reacts when he feels pushed to the wall thus and also how he finally decides to take on the villain in his own inimitable style keeps the reader hanging on tenterhooks and guessing all the time! Things get worse when Akshay gets killed on account of stab wounds and his wife Aparna claims to be an eye witness to the old man stabbing her husband! And it is now up to young Akul who has set up a detective agency to save the old man who has tied himself up in knots to finally solve the murder mystery!Of course there are other tracks too dealing with topics of contemporary interest including one wherein young Akul obsessed with films struggles hard and quickly gains expertise in every department. Even so the dicey nature of the industry leaves him frustrated before he finally decides to turn a detective! Businessman and philanthropist Janardhan Rao is to Shivram Thonse what Hanuman was to Lord Rama! And most importantly after rejecting the birthday gift Shivram Thonse directs his students to donate a hundredth of what they wanted to invest in Kalpavriksha to a more worthy cause according to him namely the Ekal Vidyalaya Movement and get a hundredfold more satisfaction! In the process he explains the laudable activities of the movement and also its founder Dr. Rakesh Popli In fact these tracks provide the much needed backdrop for the main story of my debut novel: A Touch of the Mystic with the sub-title The Good the Bad and the Weird