Chief Election Commissioner N Gopalaswami may have superannuated from Nirvachan Sadan amid hectic activity with the 2009 Lok Sabha polls still on. Retirement,however,has come as a welcome break for the man who already has an alternative vocation worked out. Also an astrologer,Gopalaswami plans to pen down his thoughts on Hindu philosophy and to explain the deep-rooted meaning and import of ancient mantras. It will be something spiritual and religious that I will write. I have read the Ramayana in its original form some 10 years ago and also made notes on it. However,I had no time to work on them further. Now I plan to read the Bhagwat Gita in full as well. Whatever I feel could prove useful to the new generation,I will cull out and write pieces on. Then there are the Mahabharata,the Upanishads,the Vedas. if I write enough there could be a small book. It is a subject close to my heart, Gopalaswami said. The Gujarat cadre IAS officers religious and spiritual interests go way back. His first work on these lines was A Brief on Marriage Mantras,a pamphlet that Gopalaswami wrote for his brother on the occasion of his wedding to help him understand the meaning of marriage. My brother was getting married in 1991 and I thought I should help him comprehend its meaning. So I wrote a small flyer on it. Later I refined it further after some people who saw it liked it. I further consulted scriptures and added to it and finally came out with some 1,000 copies that I sent to people who invited me to marriages. Some people wanted to translate it in Tamil and asked me if I had a copyright. I did not! Its wonderful if it helps someone understand the institution of marriage, he added. Gopalaswami explains in his pamphlet how in a Hindu marriage the seven vows start with sakha saptpada bhav which means having taken the seven steps(with me) you have become my friend and that means that spouses share an equal status. But he does not plan to write his memoirs on his 43 years as a bureaucrat and his stint in the CEC. I am averse to memoirs,he says adding he prefers to stick to the spiritual. He does add,however,that his best professional years were as secretary in the Department of Culture,when he managed to get millions of dollars from UNESCO for preservation of the Vedas proclaiming the Vedic traditions as an oral and intangible heritage of humanity and pushed for promoting special schools and courses under the traditional gurukul system of oral recitation.
