MUMBAI: Padma Bhushan Acharya Shri Ratnasundersuriswarji Maharaj Saheb’s 500th book will be unveiled on January 11 by PM Narendra Modi as a part of Urja Mohatsav from Jan 7-12.For this Jain spiritual teacher, that number is less a tally of titles and more a record of a lifetime spent putting down his inner reflection into public language. The 500th book, titled “World of Love, Love of the World” has been translated into 21 languages.Ratnasundersuriswarji Maharaj Saheb, whose formal schooling ended at Class X, recalled telling his guru that writing a book was an “impossible task”. “I told him I couldn’t even write a postcard,” he said.But his guru, Bhuvanbhanusuriswarji Maharaj Saheb, was unmoved by the protest. He asked him, simply, to begin. “Five minutes later, I was writing,” he said. “And I have not stopped since.”Five hundred books later, the arc of that instruction has stretched across more than 80 themes, genres and preoccupations. Published in multiple languages, his work ranges from personal ethics and mental resilience to social behaviour, spiritual inquiry — and occasionally, the unexpected.He has written on marriage, on cricket, on the social consequences of mobile phones, and even on a public campaign he led years ago opposing the introduction of sex education for six-year-olds in Indian schools. “I have written about things I have never lived,” he said. That body of work has earned him two Guinness World Records, a rare distinction for a Jain monk whose daily life remains defined by austerity: long silences, careful restraint, and radical simplicity.
