Thread by @HindooHistory

Imperial Valley Press, 1936

"Hindu Fakirs Baffle Science"

"More than 5,000,000 Fakirs Roam Over India-- Is Their Mystic Power A Religion or A Racket?"

#HindooHistory

"India is the strangest, most colorful, and weirdly mysterious land under the sun. It at once fascinates and repulses; thrills and appalls; delights and saddens."

"Bound up in a bundle of complexes so legion that even the thought of understanding is futile, India the eternal, the immutable, remains a challenge to a modern world of realities-- the iconoclast of nations-- ruthlessly disproving the accepted beliefs of a scientific world..."

"laughing at man-made conventions, and transforming the impossible into the commonplace. There is no spot on the terrestrial plane where the supernatural seems more real, the strange powers of the occult so baffling and yet so real."

"That this land of unique incongruities is integrally linked in some perverted way with a higher, more enlightened plane seems to me undeniable after witnessing the amazing feats it was my privilege to experience in my last trip through India."

"Science is 'kismet,' so what chance have I? I'm baffled, bewildered, uncertain! But here's my story and after you've read it you may decide for yourselves"

"I had tramped through India before, from the southernmost tip to the Khyber Pass. I was not a stranger by any means to this great kaleidoscopic land. One thing I had never seemed to have time for in my travels, however..."

"was to thoroughly investigate the ascetics, yogis, mendicant magicians, snake charmers, and in general-- all fakirs. When I learned there were more than 5,000,000 Hindu fakirs who roam the length and breadth of India..."

"having renounced all worldly possessions, and who live, work and care free, on the generosity and holy instincts of the religion-conscious people, I decided that here was a subject worth delving into"