NEW YORK (TIP): THE WEEK magazine a leading weekly from USA and UK has selected 10 works of literature that were exceptionally hard to write.

Among them Indian author and poet Sri Chinmoy’s book Transcendence Perfection is included. Some of the other books are Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, President’s Mystery Stories by President Franklin Roosevelt. Futility a prophetic work of literature by Morgan Robertson released in 1898 a full 14 years before Titanic incidence but resembling the story of Titanic.

Before his death in 2007, Indian spiritual master Sri Chinmoy wrote at least 1,000 books, 20,000 songs, and 115,000 poems. Some he penned in his mother tongue, Bengali, and some in his second language, English. His poems won numerous awards and inspired countless writers and musicians. And while Sri Chinmoy was clearly a fast writer, he was never as quick as on November 1, 1975, when he wrote Transcendence- Perfection, a collection of 843 poems – all written in 24 hours.

How was Sri Chinmoy so prolific? He believed the key was meditation. As he once explained, “The outer mind is like the surface of the sea. On the surface, the sea is full of waves and surges … But when we dive deep below, the same sea is all peace, calmness and quiet, and there we find the source of creativity.” Sri Chinmoy was nominated for Nobel Prize of literature and Nobel Prize of Peace. See www.srichinmoy.org