On the morning of April 16, 2011, I happily conceived the writing of what would be my most ambitious work: 12 novels that recount my travels around the world.
I was already writing pages about my stay in Philadelphia and Bishkek, but from the lucidity gained I realized that my intellectual battles for languages and cities, far from being a series of truncated aspirations, was a narrative of particular achievements:
In Bogotá, Colombia, I staged acclaimed theatre seasons of Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” and Shaw’s “Candida” at the Skandia Auditorium, of Ionesco’s “The Lesson” and “Hermione[1]” at the French Alliance, and of “Cortés y Moctezuma” at the Russian Centre for the Arts Leo Tolstoy. I also taught my colleagues how to exchange tickets for free advertising in “El Tiempo,” Colombia’s most circulated newspaper.
In Philadelphia, USA, I produced, directed, and acted as the main character in the first inter-ethnic Shakespearean film adaptation, “Hamlet Unbound” (2012), shot in digital video in 1998, with a delayed premiere due to the precarious editing software available at the time.
In Portugal, I wrote and directed a theatrical monologue, “Nórida Ocampo’s First Date,” as well as a documentary about the slums of Porto, titled “Ilhas do Porto” (2000).
In the United Kingdom, I taught actors without prior experience how to perform Shakespearean texts. I staged and directed a clever, minimalist adaptation of “Timon of Athens,” which was so successful that a colleague professor congratulated me several times, exclaiming “It’s amazing!”—something truly exceptional from a Brit. Unfortunately, the staging fuelled jealousy among other faculty members, and I was promptly excluded from future performances.
It was also in Manchester, UK, where I finalized the editing of my first novel, “New Manhattan Soirées,” initially published in Colombia. A second edition was released in Barcelona on April 23, 2002, by Editorial La Buganville.
In Kyrgyzstan, as an Invited International Professor of Journalism, I encountered for the first time the corrupt powers of a nation eager to destroy an incorruptible man. I recounted this epic tale of stoic resilience in my novel “A Kyrgyz Spring” (“Una Primavera Kirguiza”).
Back in England, this time working part-time in London in a menial job as a Porter Packer, I managed to edit the final cut of my documentary on Colombian agrarian reform, filmed in 1998, titled “Manatí, Portrait of an Underdeveloped and Happy Town.”
Finally, in Bucaramanga, Colombia, I directed and produced the first feature film shot in the city, “Kennedy’s Crimes.” For the first time in Colombia, a film addressed the pressing issue of ingrained corruption across all social classes.
And if fame, money, or power have not arrived, it is precise because I had renounced them since my adolescence, when, presenting a play about Ignacio de Loyola at the Colegio San Pedro Claver, I quoted, embodying Loyola, the phrase of the gospel that converted Saint Francis Xavier and took him to India: “What good is it for a man to win the world if he loses his soul by doing so?”
Isn’t a life without fame, experiencing the difficulties and hardships of most of humanity, better than surviving amid vanities, banalities, and appearances? How many lovers of this world I’ve heard quoting in a vain attempt to refute me: “Vanitas vanitatum, dixit Ecclesiastes; vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas. (Ecclesiastes 1, 2.)
And just that evening India, unlucky thoughts came to my mind. Today, after a distance of nine years, I consider them temptations of the devil, although, I confess, at that time I considered them as my hesitations. In his Spiritual Exercises, Loyola explains that an angel and a devil continually whisper in our ears and that it is up to us to discern them through an examination of conscience. Blake, as Sade, understands temptations as the fire where the blade of wisdom is wrought.
“Now that you know the secrets of the universe,” I heard myself saying, “Don’t you want to exercise them for your benefit? Wouldn’t you like to perform miracles that amaze others?”
I ignored such thoughts, concentrating on my writing, but they kept coming back with stinging insistence.
“Aren’t you going to take revenge on your enemies?”
I then remembered that in November 2010, when I was living at the SRM University headquarters outside Chennai, my assigned driver took me to a deserted beach one afternoon, next to which was an amusement park. I walked in and it was almost deserted.
I went on a roller coaster with 3 young Tamils. When I got out I found a lonely numerologist and astrologer in the open air, in the middle of a large patio, sitting at a table with an empty chair, who told me that our meeting was not accidental.
Since it was almost dark, I agreed to let him interpret my numbers for a few rupees.
“You will travel many miles in your life,” he told me. “Your mind is that of an octopus that needs to develop up to twelve projects at the same time; an extraordinary teacher, so innovative that it causes fear in his superiors.”
After predicting my destiny from the numbers, he told me how to meditate and how to access the thoughts of others. “Anyone can question them in his imagination,” he told me. “The magic is believing. Believing that you can influence, with reasonable arguments, their thinking. Wisdom rules.”
Telepathy, I learned later, is very common in India. When we meditate we reach others through the imagination, but, like any gift, it is an act of faith, in no way verifiable.
There is not a single being in the universe that can prove with facts that what sh/e imagines is real.
Meditation, like our faith that we will still be alive tomorrow, is a belief.
“And you don’t want to start a new religion with your secrets?” said that voice to me. “After all, people are already tired of Jesus. Isn’t even Buddha more popular in your generation? What the world needs is a prophet to enlighten them.”
I entertained those thoughts for a few moments.
For a brief moment, vanity flattered me, but my reading and convictions alerted me.
Was I going to throw away all the blessings that God bestowed on me through Jesus, his most beloved son, and his mother, the Virgin Mary, the one who never disowned him?
“Nope!” I exclaimed out loud.
“My only God is the saviour Jesus Christ,” I thought in the prevailing silence. “If I have any gift He has given it to me because Jesus is the Messiah, who has allowed this last test before blessing me.”
“Oh, Lord! Don’t let the antichrist, the Arian heresy that erodes your clergy in Rome, keep me away from you!”
The antichrist is not a specific human being, although he is represented in the congregation by his hierarchs, and in the broker countries and banks by his CEOs.
The antichrist, the beast of 666, is equivalent to those who covet money, fame, and power and defend it by blood and conspiracy, earning hell in their lives. The combinations of these variables render 6 possibilities each one.
| CONTROL | MONEY | FAME | POWER | Anticristo / Alter ego mundano |
| MONEY | 1 | 2 | 3 | 6 |
| FAME | 1 | 2 | 3 | 6 |
| POWER | 1 | 2 | 3 | 6 |
Children and adults, rich and poor are manipulated in the illusion of achieving one of the 18 possibilities that govern this world of lies and inequality:
| The 18 Aspirations of the World | |
| 1 | MONEY |
| 2 | MONEY AND FAME |
| 3 | MONEY AND POWER |
| 4 | MONEY, FAME, AND POWER |
| 5 | MONEY, POWER, AND FAME |
| 6 | CONTROL OF MONEY |
| 7 | FAME |
| 8 | FAME AND POWER |
| 9 | FAME AND MONEY |
| 10 | FAME, MONEY, AND POWER |
| 11 | FAME, POWER, AND MONEY |
| 12 | CONTROL OF FAME |
| 13 | POWER |
| 14 | POWER AND FAME |
| 15 | POWER AND MONEY |
| 16 | POWER, FAME, AND MONEY |
| 17 | POWER, MONEY, AND FAME |
| 18 | CONTROL OF POWER |
| Examples | |
| 1 | MONEY: Liliane Bettencourt (L’Oreal shareholder) |
| 2 | MONEY AND FAME: Kim Kardashian (television personality) |
| 3 | MONEY AND POWER: Warren Buffett (investor and entrepreneur) |
| 4 | MONEY, FAME, AND POWER: Elon Musk (CEO of Tesla and SpaceX) |
| 5 | MONEY, POWER, AND FAME: Oprah Winfrey (television host, entrepreneur) |
| 6 | CONTROL OF MONEY: Ms. Kristalina Georgieva (IMF Managing Director) |
| 7 | FAME: Beyoncé (singer and actress) |
| 8 | FAME AND POWER: Barack Obama (former US President) |
| 9 | FAME AND MONEY: Cristiano Ronaldo (footballer) |
| 10 | FAME, MONEY, AND POWER: Rupert Murdoch (media mogul) |
| 11 | FAME, POWER, AND MONEY: Bill Gates (Microsoft co-founder) |
| 12 | CONTROL OF FAME: Mark Zuckerberg (CEO of Facebook) |
| 13 | POWER: Pope Francis I |
| 14 | POWER AND FAME: Angela Merkel (former Chancellor of Germany) |
| 15 | POWER AND MONEY: Michael Bloomberg (businessman, former NYC mayor) |
| 16 | POWER, FAME, AND MONEY: Xi Jinping (President of China) |
| 17 | POWER, MONEY, AND FAME: Carlos Slim (Mexican magnate) |
| 18 | CONTROL OF POWER: George Soros (NGO’s Mongul) |
The antichrist, beast of 666, is equivalent to those who covet money, fame and power, and defend it with blood and conspiracy, earning hell in their lives. The inclusion of the Pope is due to the persecutions to death that I denounced in previous chapters, as once carried out publicly by the Inquisition.
That night of fighting against the 18 heads of that hydra, I prayed, bending over the carpet while my heart was besieged by thoughts of all those who had hurt me at some point in my life; lies, conspiracies, traps and frames.
Some believe that there is nothing wrong with being rich, famous or powerful in this world, but Jesus already indicated that no rich, powerful or famous could achieve divine grace unless she stripped himself of her possessions. I have also had times of prosperity in my life, but my compassion towards others is such that I have invariably invested my money in the well-being of others, whether in theatrical productions, films or documentaries that provide bread and work to actors and filmmakers, causing me loss; responding to those who ask me for financial support and giving away goods such as computers when they request it. Today, in 2024, the Lord tells me that that time ends with this writing, because we know how advantageous men are when they know that someone is generous or likes to help others.
This statement not only of the Antichrist, but of the network of interests that he exercises over us today in the world, has not been pronounced by any philosopher, priest, imam, rabbi, yogi or guru until today, and it is because on the one hand everyone craves some of the 18 heads of the hydra that controls us, and on the other hand they fear that by denouncing it they will be annihilated, as they have already tried to do unsuccessfully with me on several occasions.
Only those who trust in God, like me, Hugo Noël Santander Ferreira, will not fear the 18 heads of the beast.
Because, according to the current order of the world, to reach those 18 peaks you need to be cunning, this is lying, deceiving colleagues, breaking the illusions of others and taking away their opportunity to place themselves there. As Mario Puzo writes as an epigraph to Mario Puzo’s novel “The Godfather”, quoting Balzac: “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”
The Catholic Church itself was shaken by Saint Francis of Assisi, who preached poverty as salvation; His voice was heard and hypocritically filed away.
Only after fourteen days of meditation and solitude would I understand that it had been a litmus test, after which the Lord would compensate me, as I never thought I deserved, for having been faithful to his precepts throughout my life.
My retreat during the months of April and May was interrupted by two short trips. At the end of April, Thomas, a colleague who professed the Roman religion and who had received me like a brother, invited me to his house in Kanyakumari, in the extreme south of India, right where the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea meet. ; I shared two days with his parents and his brothers, who also invited me to a wedding by the seafound out about my trip through my photos on Facebook and called me to reproach me for telling him that during my meditation days, she would not travel. So I accepted his invitation to travel to Pondicherry, the French seaside resort outside Chennai.
I had few friends in India, but I always attended to his requests with a generosity that, I knew, would not be adequately reciprocated.
I gave Ponraj a digital camera for his birthday, because, he told me, he had always dreamed of photographing his baby.
I invited Thomas to lunch several times and then once a week; in the end, he looked for me every day. He never paid a bill, and I never demanded it.
I met Niraj as an actor in my super 16mm film A Shortcut to India. He told me that his dream was to act in Hollywood and that an astrologer told him that he would do it with the help of a foreign director, so he carefully cultivated the friendship of several foreign film directors.
I was the most recent of all. The truth was that my life was comfortable in Chennai. Another would be the story in Hyderabad, as I will relate later.
Before leaving Chennai, I gave Niraj a computer, with which he managed to contact Tamil film directors, which has allowed him to survive as an actor until today.
However, he would also have friends from India’s upper caste: Mr. Bergrana and his grandson Loki in Chennai. Unfortunately they later turned out to be false friends, jealous of my spiritual epiphanies. In 2021, Loki asked me to write a script about ending the life of Ashwatthama, the immortal. While I was writing it I realized that they actually took me for Ashwatthama. Before writing the final act I asked Loki to get paid for my work and he not only ignored me but also insulted me and told me that he was going to embarrass me in front of the whole world.
Like so many people who decide to destroy a prophet of God, he died a few months later after suffering an agonizing illness. His grandfather had already died in 2017.
I told Niraj that I didn’t want to leave home, but he was so insistent, showing himself at the door of my apartment, that I agreed to travel with him for two days. We went, took pictures, and came back. My mind was not present in those places that I had recently visited, but in my bedroom’s quietness. When I returned, I did not hide my discomfort at having traveled against my will, and several months would pass before we resumed our conversations.
Back home I constantly thanked the Lord for His manifestation, calling me three times, but years of college education persuaded me to relegate that experience to my wild imagination.
“It was my subconscious,” I concluded, bringing up the theses of a French psychologist, “which processed that information to give me the consolation of a picture of Jesus in my room.”
The almanac with the image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus had not been hung up, since it lacked tools; I had leaned it against a wall above my mirror.
Despite having rationalized my beliefs, growing happiness filled me, so that I found delight in solitude, or, to use the phrase of Saint John of the Cross, in my solitude in God.
I prayed for long hours of meditation, and endlessly wrote pages of my novels, whose settings capriciously jumped between Bishkek, (Kyrgyzstan), London, Manchester, Philadelphia, Porto, Bucaramanga, Chennai, and Bogotá.
I cut off all communication with the outside world, turned off my cell phone, and never checked my emails again. I only called the corner restaurant around noon to order my lunch, which I divided into two meals.
I checked Facebook at night, where I recorded, motivated by the problems or joys of my friends, advice inspired by the wisdom that the experience of the previous month gave me.
It was there that I discovered the song of the Spanish Musical Group Van Gogh’s Ear (La Oreja de Van Gogh), Muñeca de Trapo (Rag Doll).
It attracted me from the beginning, and like any song we love, I did not stop listening to it over and over again.
His lyrics, unbeknownst to me, were preparing me for the sublime experience I would have in early June.
As I listened to it, I saw, pictured in my mind, that my writings were fresh red roses sprouting from my chest, floating to their future readers.
Here the reader must undress his prejudices about good and evil, religion and atheism, the devil and God, about the imagined and the concrete.
We enter the mysteries of Demeter, an ancient Greek would say.
Like any poetic text, the word becomes independent to adapt to the experiences of the reader or listener, as Jorge Luis Borges prescribed in Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote.
That song had been-I discovered years later, inspired by the divinity in a Spanish group so that I could listen to it just in those days.
It was- then I did not suspect it, Jesus Christ who, in his infinite love, sang to me.
What I write in parentheses is the interpretation that each verse would receive after several years of meditation in light of the events I experienced in 2011 and 2012:
An inhabitant of Chennai dreamed of three creeds united by faith. A dream that the King of Kings will make come true with all the faiths of the world.
Towards the end of May, I received a strange call from Joseph, a young evangelical pastor I had met at the SRM headquarters outside of Chennai in Kattankulathur.
During the sixty days that I lived there, I met very few people, and on one of my lonely afternoons I went to his chapel, the only Christian one, where I heard him preach. He was in the company of several young men and maidens.
“I want to participate in your services,” I told him.
“Oh! Of course!” He told me in a voice so distant that it made me cringe.
I came back several times, and he even gave me his phone number, but he always had someone else to attend to, and on several occasions when I wanted to join his parish activities, he did not answer my calls.
His sudden appearance was therefore unexpected.
“How are you, Noël?” he asked me, her voice trembling with emotion. “We have remembered these days.”
I knew that in his prayers, the Lord had revealed to him that I was not the bachelor he had prejudged as a threat to his flock.
But my solitude was so pleasant then, that I didn’t want to see anyone.
I fired him with the truth. “I’m praying,” I told him.
“Promise me you’ll call me,” he insisted.
“Someday,” I promised him.
I have not heard from him since, but I do not doubt that we will meet again.
The job in India was offered to me on May 1, 2008, by engineer Gopal Ramayana, a mathematician who had won a national competition as a teenager, earning him a scholarship to Harvard and a position at NASA.
“I admire his work,” he told me, referring to my novels, my movies, and my essays.
“You’ll be dean of the Faculty of Film and will be in charge of a television station.”
Palace intrigues extended the signature of the contract for two years and reduced the offer to associate professor, with the possibility of being in charge of a television station.
The family that owns SRM University is, in fact, very wealthy and powerful in India, and while Vikram, the heir’s son, had approved of my hiring on the idea that a western academic and free thinker could better shape the character of the future artists of his nation, his father’s friends, resistant to change, conspired to drive me away.
Thus, when my contract was confirmed in early August 2010, the connivers’ first step was to refuse to submit all the documents required for my work visa.
I had a ticket to travel to Chennai on September 10, but the Indian embassy in Bogotá refused to grant me a visa due to lack of proof, and that ticket of two thousand dollars was wasted.
So I proposed, given that I also have French citizenship, and that India does not require any document from the French-unlike the dozen documents required from Colombians, that they allow me to travel to Paris to fill out my work visa.
Chennai accepted and I travelled at the end of September.
The day after my arrival I went to the embassy, but the diplomats already had instructions from the conspirators to deny me a visa.
“It will come out in one or two months if it doesn’t require more time,” the consul told me with cruelty that left me stunned.
I will not relate here the vicissitudes that I suffered staying with my life savings in hotels in Europe.
It was, as I have already written, the Virgin of the Miraculous Medal, before whose sanctuary I threw myself in supplication, who intervened so that I would receive the long-awaited document.
When I arrived, the semester was almost over, so I was given two months to adapt to the local culture.
Following the precept of a child who survived Auschwitz, I fell in love with food until it delighted me. How much I miss it today!
I learned the 247-symbol Tamil alphabet and memorized the elementary phrases to survive.
I was put up in a faculty residence on that campus, next to its beautiful library, a bit kitsch for Western tastes.
They were scrutinizing my behaviour; they discovered that he read and wrote, drank a beer only now and then, and smoked the raw tobacco so popular and cheap in India.
The appointment with Vikram, the heir to that dynasty, was scheduled for early December.
The plotters intervened again and my driver, who was supposed to arrive at three in the afternoon, did not arrive on time nor did he answer me on his cell phone. I called TV Rolan worried, who told me with that innocence so typical of those who intrigue:
“You said to pick him up at four.”
“But the appointment is at four!” I replied.
“Didn’t you tell me five o’clock?” he insisted.
Despite my protests, my driver, Ponraj, took an hour to arrive.
“Excuse me, Sir,” he said to me. “They had sent me to an area where there is no good cell phone signal.”
Fortunately, Ponraj was already my friend, by that unwritten convention among Hindus: to be honest with whoever is honest with them.
“Fly to Chennai!” I told him.
And, indeed, we cover shortcuts until we reached the center.
Despite Ponraj’s best efforts, I arrived at my appointment with Vikram, the University Vice Chancellor of SRM University, at half past four in the afternoon, that is, thirty minutes late.
Vikram received me warmly, but he had already conversed for half an hour with Rimal, a gentleman from North India–which for the Tamils is equivalent to a foreigner whom the plotters had chosen to be in charge of running the TV station.
Rimal was otherwise a master hypnotist.
He made me blush when writing the previous sentence, but that’s India: full of mysteries incomprehensible to the Western mind. Thus, when Vikram asked me about the reasons for my lateness, and I wanted to tell him about the delays due to TV Gopal’s ineptitude, my voice dried up, and I had to make a great effort not to cough.
I could not talk! Rimal quickly intervened, switching from English to Hindi, which I barely knew, and reduced me to a mere deaf and mute spectator of his engagement.
When, after a short prayer to Our Lady (since then I know how to confront these gurus), I got my voice back, Vikram asked Rimal if he wanted me to assist him on his TV station.
“Of course!,” He lied cheekily, and smiling from ear to ear he added: “As soon as I need it, I’ll call you.”
Back at my residence, I knew that the promised position that would consecrate me as a professional would be reduced to teaching.
I had been deceived in such a way that I had lost not only my savings but also my apartment in Bucaramanga.
It would take me five years to recoup my investment, but my contract was due at the end of October.
“How can there be such wicked people?” I asked the Lord, distressed. “At least,” I consoled myself, “I will have known India.” And I recited the verses I had composed during my tortuous stay in Paris.
If you suffer an injustice,
Rest your chest on Jesus Christ,
Let your tears mingle with theirs
Kattankulathur was a town built around the SRM University campus; there was the Faculty of Communications.
In mid–December, I got to know the newly acquired campus in Chennai, where the first university film school in India had been installed.
“Where do you want to teach?” TV Rolan asked me days later. “In Kattankulathur or Chennai?”
Without hesitation, I said that in Chennai. The film campus was close to the big studios, cafes, theatres, and cinemas.
The conspirators wanted, however, that I had the least contact with the students, which is why, at the beginning of the semester, when I went to see my office, they showed me a cramped room without a window or air conditioning, and stacked with lighting equipment.
They gave me four courses, including documentary, but as soon as they saw my documentary on Manatí they decided it was too subversive and reduced me to film directing, film history, and screenwriting. Then, in April, as I have already written, I was left alone on that deserted campus.
The plotters expected me to get bored and leave India in a month or two; madness was also a possibility. How many men endure four months locked up without any contact with the world?
Years later I compared that experience to that of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp. An evil vizier sends Aladdin to a cave to give him a ring.
Aladdin obeys, but the Vizier locks him up, condemning him to certain death. Neither Aladdin nor the Vizier suspected that among the treasures of that cave, he would find the greatest of gifts.
And so, after two months of meditation and solitude, at noon on June 1, 2011, the King of Kings, the Risen Lord Jesus, manifested himself in all his majesty in my humble abode, in the centre of Madras.
[1] The first version of 1100 verses was titled “Hermíone”, then it was corrected and increased to 1600 verses, the average of a Greek tragedy, such as “Medea Bacatá”, and staged at the Bernardo Romero Lozano Theater in 2015. The text is available in La Casa del Libro Total and on Amazon..
Hugo Noël Santander Ferreira 