This book is a compilation of the names of the ancestors and descendants of only these two protagonists viz. Gopalakrishna and his wife Radha Bai, and not every other family belonging to the Gowda Saaraswath Braahman (GSB) community. There are over seven hundred thousand GSB families living in the world (requires authentication). The descendants identified by the preliminary survey conducted by the author number about 2,500 as on October 15, 2012. However, the author does not vouch to the completeness of the register of this extended family of Gopalakrishna and Radha Bai. I hope to expand this to include more details such as the dates of births and deaths of the members, etc., for which I invite information from those who have such records.

The story is an attempt to place before the readers the probable steps our ancestors climbed in order to reach this high of the present through the ages. By our ancestors I mean the people who lived on the West coast of India from their first human forms up to the present. The story is completely my imagination and not based on any hard and fast evidence. But it is based on the present knowledge of people like me about the stages of civilization. We do not have much evidence to either believe or not believe whether man developed from apes; first into homonids and then into Homo sapiens. I believe that most of the information available in literature now about the various ages of civilization is based on interpretations of the fossils and archaeological findings by the learned scientists. There are still questions regarding when and how this world came into being. Man wants to know the conditions in which his ancestors lived. He wants to know how they came to live in the land. Was there a beginning to this world? How many years have passed since the first human appeared? Every sand particle on the West coast of India has a history but we can not see it with naked eyes. There are no fossils of animals or plants, which could recount their stories to us directly. This story is based on whatever is known to an educated person like me and provides a possible outline of the lives of people who lived here since the earliest times.

This book contains quite a bit of history of the region now known as Karnaataka in this book. I have made honest efforts not to state anything that is not factual, but history being so difficult to be uniform, I can not say that everything in this book is just as it happened in the past. Language is only one of the tools that can be used in unifying people. But if the mother tongue of the people is not the same as that which is recognized as the OL, then there could be clashes. Imposition of Kannada by the Kannada enthusiasts upon the linguistic minorities in the state could be resented and might lead to adverse developments for the language. Like they say, "language is not everything." Language is certainly required for communication but taking love for it to extremes is counter-productive. According to the 1971 census, there were 66% Kannada speaking people in Karnaataka. Among the rest, 9% were speaking Urdu, 8% speaking Telugu, 4% speaking Marathi, 3.5% speaking Tulu, 3.45% speaking Tamil, 2% speaking Konkani, 1.4% speaking Malayalam, 1.2% speaking Lamani, 0.44% speaking Hindi and 0.24% speaking Kodava. The remaining people spoke one or other of 155 mother tongues other than those mentioned. Therefore 34% of the population had a mother tongue that was not Kannada. They would not like their mother tongue to die under the onslaught of the Kannada linguistic policies. When India gained Independence in 1947, the Kannada-speaking people had been scattered in different political regions. There was Mysore Kingdom ruled by the Maharajah of Mysore. The old districts of Mysore, Bangalore, Mandya, Hasan, Tumkur, Kolar, Kadur, Chitradurga, and Shimoga formed the Mysore Kingdom. In 1784 after the Mangalore treaty with Tippu Sultan, East India Company gained vast areas north of the princely state of Travancore-Cochin. The idea of any linguistic state was struck at the time of division of Bengal into two by the British in 1905 to break the back of a united Bengali people. The division was done on the basis of religious majority. The east was predominantly Muslim. However the people in the rest of India took upon themselves to deny the Muslims of Bengal a separate state. Everyone demanded states to be designed on the basis of language and not on religion.

This book tries to fulfill a widespread aspiration among Hindus to be sure about the requirements if any to calll themselves Hindus in the modern world. All those who are born to Hindu parents are regarded as Hindus whereever they live. There is a question-and-answer format used in this book to provide explanations for many doubts and confusions in the practice of Hinduism. The author is a practicing Hindu and has modern high-level education which combined with his age (76) makes him an authority on the religion he belongs to. Hinduism is a religion that permits many kinds of beliefs and faiths and there is no law or any institution that can censure him for the kind of Hinduism he practices so long as all that he does is lawful and complies with the laws of the land he or she lives in. The book is in Kannada language to cater to Kannadigas. The author hopes to receive suggestions and criticisms in order to know how well the book fulfills the aspirations of the Hindus around the world.