COMRADES OF GOD Lives of Saints from East and West J. P. Vaswani The great poet saint Thyagaraja sang. "There are so many mahatmas, great souls. To all of them, my salutations!" It is this noble tradition of salutation to the great ones that Rev. Dada J.P Vaswani writes about the heroic souls of East and West. Rev Dada perceives this as the very essence of a mahatma, that he or she transcends all narrow bouds of class and creed, beholding the One in all. They are imbued with the idea of sharing their rich spiritual treasures with the vast multitudes of people whose lives they touch. Their love is universal, unconditional. They seek and find the truth of life through deep and sustained spiritual quest, only to utilise it in the service of all mankind. For them, enlightenment is not an exclusive personal experience to be withheld from lesser mortals, but a God- given special insight that must be translated into words and deeds that can better the lives of the multitudes. In this, the fifth volume in Rev. Dada's series on the lives of the saints, Rev. Dada gives us brief and beautiful pen pictures of twenty saints from many faiths, races and ages. Bahubali and Loyola, Guru Har Rai and Guru Har Gobind, Thiruvalluvar and Madhvacharya, Aandaal and Nagarjuna, Chishti and Chokha Mela, had this in common: they left this world a better place for us to live in; they made better human beings of us. They were, indeed, as Rev. Dada calls them, Comrades of God. Make them your comrades too, on the journey of life!