Baba
Baba
Namaskar,
As everyone knows, the AM book, “Idea and Ideology”, is a collection of discourses given by Baba between 27 May - 05 Jun 1959, and stands as one of our philosophical foundations.
Here below is the cover of the latest Hindi edition of the book, “Idea and Ideology”. Unfortunately, it has two major flaws, at minimum.
#1: The English title is "Idea & Ideology" but they wrongly translated this into Hindi where it means, "Idea & Transcendental". This is of consequence as the Hindi translation fails to accurately and philosophically represent the original title of the book which Baba has given. In the below image, see the third Hindi term in yellow font with the red box around it. That is the Hindi word that means transcendental when it should have been the Hindi term for ideology.
#2: In the cover diagram they have equated "aham" with "ahamkara". But these two terms are not the same. Aham is the doer-I, whereas ahamkara is a negative tendency of mind (vanity) where one is egotistical and feels that they are better than others. So ahamkara has nothing to do with brahmacakra or the cycle of creation. Unfortunately, when this term - ahamkara (in red box below) - is on the cover of the book then it gives a very poor show. It is akin to writing a book about elephants and putting a photo of a giraffe on the cover. When interested readers see that, they will think that the author has no idea what he is talking about.
When they got the book title wrong and the cover image wrong, then we can only guess how many errors there are with the text. We should all check this to see.
Again, this is one of the foundational books of AM philosophy etc, so we should ensure that all such translations are up to the mark.
In Him,
Ananda Sagar