Tuka Says

Tuka Says: For This Alone I Had Striven is a contemplative English rendering and philosophical unfolding of one of Sant Tukaram’s most profound abhangs: 'Yajsathi kela hota attahas.'In a few lines, Tukaram gathers the entire movement of a human life: intense striving, the wish that the final day may be sweet, the end of the running born of thirst, wonder at the life spent, the auspicious grace of the Name, liberation arriving as a bride, and the remaining days passing in play and companionship.This book does not treat the abhang as a distant devotional artifact. It brings Tukaram’s voice into a living conversation with modern life. Why do we strive? What do we mistake for living? What must a life finally resolve? Why does desire never reach home? What happens when tomorrow no longer owes us completion? How can the final day become sweet without denying pain, loss, or mortality?Written in an oral, reflective, and deeply readable style, the book moves line by line through Tukaram’s vision. It remains faithful to the devotional heart of the abhang while opening its meaning for seekers, thinkers, readers, teachers, and anyone who has felt the pressure of achievement, comparison, possession, unfinished desire, or existential restlessness.At its centre is a simple but transformative insight: the value of a life does not lie merely in what it produces or accumulates, but in what it finally resolves. Tukaram’s wisdom does not lead to escape from life. It leads to a different relationship with life-one in which striving can complete, desire can lose command, expenditure can become auspicious, liberation can become intimate, and the few days that remain can still be lived in companionship and play.Tuka Says is both devotional and philosophical, Indian and universal, ancient in source and contemporary in relevance. It is a book for those who wish to read Tukaram not only as poetry, not only as saintly speech, but as a profound guide to the architecture of a resolved life.