न हन्यते हन्यमाने शरीरे

“The soul is neither born, nor does it ever die; nor having once existed, does it ever cease to be. The soul is without birth, eternal, immortal, and ageless. It is not destroyed when the body is destroyed.”

This is a verse from the Shrimad Bhagavad Gita. Very much continuous with the law of energy conservation in physics. They are two different exponents, no doubt, but I always believe that it is just a different approach to understanding the same truth. Physics says the universe is made of two things, matter and radiation. The Gita says body and soul are different from each other. The body can be taken as matter and the remaining is energy — or in the language of science, radiation. In the above verse it says that the soul cannot be created and can’t be destroyed. How similar it is! It’s not new, I know, but it is amazing.

I read ‘Na Hanyate’, a famous novel by Maitreyi Devi, in college days. The title is taken from this verse — the twentieth verse in the second Adhyay (chapter). The plot of the Bollywood movie ‘Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam’ is taken from it. From the novel, not from the verse.

Reading the Bhagavad Gita. Haven’t read it fully yet — a few stanzas apart from time to time, but not complete at once. It has been a life- and mind-changing experience so far. I want to separate the specific shlokas I like most. People say every verse is a gem in itself. Honestly, for a normal person like me there are so many verses that don’t make sense; that is why I want to separate the most powerful ones. This is one of them. A strong, authoritative statement.