The world today is facing a bewildering array of problems stemming from human behavior, which is now both brazen and bizarre, narcissistic and nihilistic. Those who are searching for a way out are daring to ask fundamental questions:

What is man’s rightful  place in the cosmos? Are we a doomed species? Is God becoming weary of mankind? How should we synthesize human effort and divine grace?

In Man’s Fate and God’s Choice , Bhimeswara Challa shares his comprehensive study of the human way of life and suggests that the very paradigm of our awareness, comprehension and thinking does not address the root of all problems. Indeed that is the principal problem. The choice before mankind, he says, is either to stagnate and die as a ‘human’ caterpillar, or be transformed and soar as an ‘angelic’ butterfy.

….Stagnate as a ‘creepy caterpillar’ or transform into a ‘beauteous butterfly– is the seminal choice before mankind, and every one of us. In this setting, the book raises some fundamental questions: What is man’s rightful place in the cosmos and his manifest destiny on earth? Why are we so self-righteously self-destructive? Are we a doomed species? Or ‘divine’ beings struggling to overcome the hubris of the human intellect? Is God getting weary of mankind? How should we synergize human effort and Divine Grace? The book posits that any betterment in human behavior needs a cathartic change at the deepest levels. That requires diluting the dominance of the mind and reawakening the long-dormant intelligence of the human heart.

To meet that challenge, we need minimum numbers, a ‘critical mass’ to create self-sustained momentum for transformation through consciousness change. And every single human of this generation should behave in such a way that he or she is that single person whose transformation could make the decisive species-scale difference. The book offers a menu of ideas and an agenda of action. This book could be itself become an input to mobilize that very ‘critical mass’ it advocates for human transformation. Well-planned and cohesively written, the book is noteworthy for its delightful blend of information and arguments, and reveals the depth of the author’s understanding of the human predicament…

Man’s Fate and God’s Choice , a book of a rare genre, incisively covers an array of issues and proposes an agenda of action, blending scripture and science, that could reverse our drift towards premature extinction.Bhimeswara Challa is a ‘double-retiree’: he retired from the Indian Administrative Service in 1983 and from the United Nations in 1996. Over a career spanning nearly forty years of professional work, Bhimeswara Challa has served in multiple capacities, from the grassroots to the global level, and has travelled extensivly. Alongside, he has also been a part-time but passionate writer, having published to two novels in his mother tongue (Telugu), as well as numerous articles on a broad range of subjects in newspapers and journals, in India, UK, and USA. Read here

The War Within – Between Good and Evil (Reconstructing Money, Morality and Mortality)

The human has always prided himself as an exceptional ‘moral species’ but has always been haunted by two questions: ‘Why am I not good when I want to be; ‘why do I do bad when I don’t want to’. This is at the heart of what scriptures and sages have long alluded to as the eternal internal struggle-between good and evil – that wages in the human consciousness. The book posits that much of our confusion and angst stems from our inability to recognize the ramifications of this ‘war’ between two sides of our own ‘self’. It is because we are ignoring this ‘war’ between two sides of our own ‘self’. It is because we are ignoring this war that we are losing all other wars of the world. That ignorance is the primary source of all the horrors, malevolence, and violence that fill us with so much dread. But a ‘favorable’ outcome is possible only if the forces of goodness are aided to get an upper hand consistently – and that calls for two cathartic changes: consciousness-change by inducing a turn from the mind to the heart; and contextual-change, by radically reconstructing the roles of morality, money, and mortality in our everyday lives. The book offers a menu of insights and options we all can use to tilt the scales in the war waging inside each of us. Read here