Acknowledgments

Many friends, philosophers, and guides have helped us during our research career, which has led to development of our thoughts and themes for this book. It is impossible to thank each one enough. We wish to specially thank a few individuals and institutions for support, encouragement, guidance, and help.

We wish to put on record consistent guidance and support from the Elsevier team especially Stacy Masucci, Sha Stanton, and Julia Haynes which helped us to complete the task in time. Anonymous reviewers of Elsevier have immensely helped us to refine preliminary ideas about the book. Efficient copy editing by Davanna Cimino substantially helped to improve semantics.

Many internal reviewers gave excellent critic and constructive suggestions, which helped in revisions: Darshan Shankar, Sharda Bapat, Vinod Deshmukh, Prabhakar Lavakare, Padmaja Shastri, Girish Welankar, Kalpana Joshi, Kishor Patwardhan, Asmita Wele, Upendra Dixit, Madhav Khanwelkar, and Madan Thangawelu.

We thank Neelmudra Creative Carnival artists Ajey Jhankar, Shalaka Kalkar, and Yogini Gavai for excellent cover designs. We thank Principal, Bharati Vidyapeeth College of Arts and Mangesh Tambe for excellent graphic illustrations and figures.

BP thanks Savitribai Phule Pune University’s Vice Chancellor W.N. Gade, Jayakar Library, University and colleagues at the Interdisciplinary School of Health Sciences, Anita Kar, Aarati Nagarkar, Angeline Jeykumar, and Uma Chandran for continuous support.

BP also thanks Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, India for awarding visiting professorship, which facilitated book writing and gave opportunity to interact with many scholars, historians, and philosophers especially professors: D.N. Dhanagare, Sharad and Medha Deshpande, Udayan Misra, Radha Vallabh Tripathi, and Director Dinesh Singh. Special thanks to Gerard Bodeker for consistent interactions and advice.

GM thanks B.V.K. Sastry for his assistance and appreciates inputs from Pradeep, Meenakshi, Madhav, Sujata, Shruti, Madhuri, Meredith, Roy, and Nikita—members of his family.

GT thanks Serum Institute of India for award fellowship.

We are grateful to Jijnyasa foundation and in particular to its president Anil Deshpande, Orlando, FL, for his kind support to our undertaking.

We thankfully acknowledge various knowledge sources, which have helped us to get authentic and latest information on various subjects. We wish to specially mention Wiki, PubMed, Google Scholar, and Cochrane Library.