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Good morning. Thanks to my mother’s advice, since childhood, I’ve been scraping off the charred areas of my toast in case they may be carcinogenic. But, still I baulked when the Food Standards Agency proclaimed this week, that my favourite breakfast should be pale yellow rather than a delicious brown to avoid too much acrylamide entering my system. My resistance was fuelled, in part, by the ensuing debate: acrylamide is bad for mice, but what’s level of risk to humans? And, how many rounds of toast or roast potatoes can we safely consume? Or, is the advice more about encouraging us to follow a broader and more balanced diet? Meanwhile, we learnt from one of President Trump’s aides, that, along with varying opinions and interpretations of facts, you can now have “alternative facts”; which seems to contradict a key principle of logic proposed by German philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz, that asserting the negation of a fact must necessarily be untrue. The President’s team may not have meant it quite as it sounded. Even so, in this era of information, perhaps it’s harder than ever to find truth. For Mahatma Gandhi, this was the real objective of life. Hinduism, he said, was a relentless pursuit after truth. You may believe or deny many ideas, he noted, but you cannot deny truth. However, according to the Hindu tradition this quest for truth requires serious effort and determination. And, although generally aimed at questions about our existence and purpose, the principles of how to identify truth have wider application. The Bhagavad-gita recommends that to learn truth we should approach those who have already achieved it - those who’re suitably qualified in the wisdom of the past and the present; and who are realised in those precepts to such an extent that their lives demonstrate the virtues and benefits of the truths they extol. We should interrogate these teachers, the Gita says, from all directions. And, only when our doubts are satisfied, should we submit and allow the knowledge to enter our hearts and blossom as truths discovered for ourselves. As Swami Vivekananda said: it’s not about accepting some doctrine or dogma, it’s about realising truth; it’s not about believing, but about being and becoming. The search for existential truth certainly requires hard work. But, should it be so difficult to find out how many people attended the Presidential inauguration – or how many pieces of toast are safe for us? No, those day-to-day facts should be straightforward and easy to confirm and accept –that allows us to concentrate our limited time and energy on truths of much greater concern, value and mystery.