Sootre MaNigaNaa Iva - (Like Beads on a Thread)

सूत्रे मणिगणा इव
(Like beads on a thread)

In the Geetaa, the Lord says, "You all are strung together by Me, as indeed like beads on a thread." The Lord is is our Aadhaara, our Support.

We are not independent. Our movements are restricted. A little this way or a lttle that way.
We fall off without the string.

Again God is the Sootradhaari, the Divine Puppeteer, pulling strings and making us dance. Using modern terms, we are all robots controlled remotely by God. No strings but still dependent slaves.

Chaturanga is our name for chess (The Persian name Shatranj matches). There is a king and a queen. Four wings of army. Soldiers on feet, on horses, on camels and on elephants (named diffetently in modern chess). Each piece, other than the queen, has its own restricted movement. The king moves one square in any direction. Soldier moves one square forward or one diagonally for attack, horse jumps two squares forward or sideways and one square sideways or forward. Camel moves diagonally. Elephant moves vertical or horizontal. The queen is free to follow any movement, any direction except horse's jump.

Chess pieces have flat bottoms. Now imagine the chess board has grooves - vertical, horizontal and both diagonals. And chesss pieces have a stub at the bottom so that they slide along the grooves. God is like the queen which moves freely across chess board (This is a reverse conception of ourselves as pieces and God moving us across the chess board). Like friendly and smiling ghost Casper (from the comic book), God moves freely and nothing can restrict His movements. This is what we call Otaprota. Pervading and permeating. Warp and weft.

Wonder what binds the small cubes of the Rubik Cube. Each and every layer is free of other layers, horizontally or vertically. I saw a wrist band made of magnetic needles. It could be twisted , broken and rejoined. Then again, in our childhood, our pants and shirts had buttons made of thread. We could make strings of them piercing them with a separate string - they were perfect sootre maNigaNaas.