The Garuda Purana speaks of many hells. Twenty‑seven realms of suffering, each devoted to a particular form of torment. These descriptions are not gentle. They portray the extremes of pain a human mind can imagine. In one hell, souls are beaten until they collapse, only to be revived and beaten again. In another, called Ruru, serpents coil around the souls, biting and crushing them without pause. Elsewhere, vast cauldrons of boiling oil await those who are plunged into them again.

There is a hell where souls are forced to run under unbearable heat until they collapse, only to be driven forward once more. The attendants of Yama strike them with whips made of razor‑edged leaves. Souls stumble over stones and thorns, fall, rise, and fall again. Some are stabbed until they faint, revived, and the cycle continues.

In yet another realm, souls are cast into blazing furnaces. When night comes, insects and serpents consume their bodies. Once the bodies are gone, new ones are given, only to be consumed again. Some souls are made to embrace iron statues embedded with diamond‑sharp needles that pierce them through. And then there is the Vaitarani River, a river of filth, blood, and decay, inhabited by terrifying creatures. Souls thrown into it are attacked from all sides and must endure the stench and pollution of its waters. Some are cast into wells where they are insulted, cut, and humiliated by Yama’s attendants.

The imagination of the Garuda Purana stretches to the farthest limits of human conception. And yet, as I sit here on the road leading to one of the darkest places in human history, I realise something unsettling. One and a half million Jews were tortured and murdered here. The cruelty inflicted upon them surpasses even the most terrifying visions of the Garuda Purana. After spending the day walking through ghettos, segregation camps, and finally arriving at this place, I can say: the hells described in the scripture fall short of what humans have done to one another.

The next time you flush your toilet, remember the Vaitarani. Countless organisms and tiny lives exist within us. Many are expelled with our waste, feeding on what they find, enduring their own forms of suffering. Life exists at every scale, and so does pain.

Animals live in complete ignorance. Humans live in partial ignorance. Most see only their ignorant half and remain blind to the other half, the divine. Those who see only their ignorance live no differently from animals. Heaven and hell are not distant cosmic realms; they are here, on this very earth. The world becomes beautiful only when humans awaken to their divine half.

I am sitting on the infamous railway track leading into Auschwitz, where countless people were transported in cramped wagons toward torture and death. This place contains every hell described in the Garuda Purana and many more. Our Puranas remind us that such darkness appears in every Yuga.