MY ENCOUNTER WITH A MODERN BEAUTY

One day I stumbled upon a new Apple computer in our school computer lab. I was struck by its look; frame and screen jet black, lost in primordial darkness out of which came light and life. God stood on the brink of darkness, and said, “Let there be light”, and light was born, says the Bible. The 22 inch monitor was sharply outlined against the snow while wall behind it, but the infinite darkness, however, did not lose its glory in the surrounding light. It was sitting majestically on the crowded table dwarfing all other systems around it. The poise, the detached unconcern, the shine of its skin as if merged in its soul, reminded me almost of the ultimate truth, that the outer and the inner are a single utility.

She was sitting there, ‘like a spider amidst its self-created net’, as the Upanishad says, and inviting the passerby to get caught in its silken wonder. It swallowed me up, and I became its devotee. Truly, I realized, devotion is all about being swallowed up. You retain a semblance of your personality, as much necessary as to feel how slowly you are disintegrating into your God. It was a piece of poem which was singing the greatness in its creator, Man. It had utility and beauty; mathematics, aesthetics, architecture, and ecstasy blended into a form, the dream of computer users. The keyboard stunned me, as if I encountered a prodigy, a child of complex intelligence, just a shade bigger than my palm, worthy of being held up in both, appreciation and reverence fused into its immaculate contours.

I stood at a distance, forgot (or feared?) to take a chair. Someone came and switched it on. Ah! She lighted up in all her glory, like a maharani suddenly unveiled, her dominance complete and unassailable. The fastness and promptness of her response to the tap of keys, the uncluttered opening and closing of programmes, the sharpness of the functions it performed took me to a world where harmony of thought, word and deed is the password.

Ah! Harmony! In a world ‘out of joint’ as Shakespeare called it. In a world ruled by ‘passionate intensity’ of ‘the worst’, where ‘the best lack of conviction’  (W.B.Yeats), here is a sage sitting on the table in front of me, wearing with great ease beauty in form, clarity in purpose, cosmic in vision, and harnessed power in its operation; all this an intelligent aligning of lines and numbers, of shape and colour, of matter and philosophy. “What a piece of work is man, how infinite in faculties”, wondered Shakespeare. “The greatest wealth of man is his creativity”, said the Dalai lama, and what a tantalizing thing is this creativity! While I stood there admiring the harmony of form and faculties of the little queen, somewhere out there she is being used to precisely destroy humanity and its creative genius, the civilisaton! ‘And yet, the quintessence of dust’, to remember Shakespeare again. Is contradiction an essential component of ‘all things great and grand’ ?

All things man has achieved have glittered and passed, appeared again with a new glitter and faded away. But man is going on, unfazed by the rise and fall of the great and the small, in his insatiable thirst for the infinite. He has not halted in his search for the ultimate achievement, though sometimes questioning it, pushing it away, yet never abandoning the search. From ‘the quintessence of dust’ he has risen to ‘in apprehension, like a god’, fallen back again, not satisfied even in a god. Even when ‘things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’ as W.B.Yeats lamented, like a phoenix he is born again and again to integrate himself and the race into the search for transcendence in transience. 

Is this little queen the new saviour? If anything can save man, lead him further in his journey towards the ultimate achievement, it is his knowledge harnessed to truth and beauty. It is not new to him either, he has done this several times in history, and will do it again. Man is moving from the individual identity to his own universal identity, and this is a perilous journey, fraught with unforeseen challenges, most of them coming from within himself. There is a constant struggle in his consciousness, like a baby eagle which emerges from his egg shell to come face to face with the limitless sky, finds suddenly it needs to grow and fly. We are discovering the inevitability of being the mankind within the small frame of our body and mind, and the exploding awareness of expanding consciousness we find difficult to manage.

This overwhelming feeling of being defeated by the borderless dreams man has cherished over time immemorial, bursts into a creativity unknown till now. In science, in power both military and political, in writings reviewing the human predicament, in search for comfort and unbridled pleasure, and in the total quotient of unhappiness, our times are bursting at seams to expand beyond all limitations. There is so much knowledge available to us, but sadly  we have failed to harness it into what we are looking for – a unified field of truth, joy, and balance. It is no more ignorance which is a threat to human existence, but unharnessed knowledge. But after my encounter with the Queen, the Apple computer, I was convinced, on a metaphorical level, that we can save ourselves, we can recreate ourselves. When the inherent limitless Self is impatient to break through imposed limitations, the time for turning of an age arrives. It can be a new big bang, a new melt-down into another mass of cosmic waste, or, if man can use his staggering knowledge acquired over centuries of painstaking search for the meaning of life, a new AUM to vibrate us into a world of truth, beauty and balance.

Can science be the Second Coming for a confused humanity?

The Dawn At Your Doorstep - 1

Once I was teaching a senior class a poem of Stephen Spender about the inadequacy of current educational programmes for slum children.

It suddenly appeared to me that the poet was not advocating a new educational programme or policy or a new syllabus for them. What he is trying to show is the divorce between the classroom and the reality outside the classroom. What the slum children learn in the classroom has no relevance with their life, and therefore has no utility. Then why do we build up such billion dollar systems which has no practical utility?

Swami therefore says ‘Education is for life, not for a living’. The current purpose of schools and universities is to teach some skills to the students that they can earn a livelihood. These skills do not equip a boy or girl to tackle the many questions and problems they face in life. Living a life is more important than acquiring the means to exist. All our creative years are spent in learning how to support the body while the mind and soul are kept starving. Education does not help us to relate to the purpose and problems of life, such as anger, hate, greed, violence, dogma, loneliness, relationships etc. We learn no skills to face them when they are upon us.

There is no syllabus to teach us how to tackle the mind. Even the most skilled person does not know how to face upsets in life calmly and positively. Boys and girls are not taught the value of life; not taught to think and contemplate, to see beyond what they see, hear beyond what they hear, to be more than what they think they are. Aren’t these skills more important than leaning to multiply the means of living? Isn’t it equally, if not more, important to feel joy when you see a flower, to feel revolted when a neighbour’s son or daughter is kidnapped, feel outraged when in the name of religion people indulge in exterminating whole communities, and feel elevated face to face with someone donating a kidney to save a friend? Does our education teach us how to relate to the world without and within us? Why does the gospel of living that our billion-dollar education machines churn out so assiduously have no answer to the fear, the insecurity, the anger that our society experiences more and more every day? Isn’t it because our education programmes simply has no programmes to tackle them?

Swami asks us to pick our highlighting pen and underscore LIFE, not LIVING. He does not stop there. He gives us the end goal too; The end of education is Character. Character is maturity to distinguish between now and ever, between the individual and the universal, between myself and my neighbour. In fact, it is to understand that there is hardly any difference. Life in all its manifestation is one. Does education as we envisage today teach us this unity? Does it teach us the humility of knowledge? TS Eliot questioned the whole edifice of education when he asked, “Where is the knowledge lost in information?” And is it surprising that Swami repeated endlessly true education in transformation, not information?

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A NEW ROBE

Give me a new robe
That I may walk out of this wrapper
Long worn out, stained,
And be worthy of your presence.
But, your eyes, you think
My skin might have earned
A few patches, flesh some ulcers,
Which would defile my new robe ?
You would rather wait
Until I buy some balms from your stores,
Paint the corrupting discolour,
Heal myself,
And then join the queue?
Ah! That of course is quite constitutional,
For you always say you are rule-bound.
I have no complaints.
But you can give me one of
Your old robes, you have used and put away,
For such purposes, your volunteers have
No access. Even if you do so,
It is not the first time you would,
And you shall be doing it to me
For the last time.

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Take A Ride With Him

“What have you learnt in all you life with God?” someone asked me.
“Please do not use the present perfect tense, use present progressive”, I replied.

He looked askance.

Learning is not a rounded up thing, a finished product. It isn’t a cricket ball, tight and solid, held together by the seams. When the seams weaken, the ball is good for nothing. Learning isn’t like that. It is a brook, it starts over the hills, fed by the clouds; runs into planes at various speeds, overcomes breaking bends, yawning chasms, wanton moods, fills itself again and again in intermittent showers, never loses its song until it jumps into the sea. Learning is a ceaseless experiment, an endless experience, a daunting adventure, and a powerful song. Learning continues for ever.

We learnt ‘Twinkle twinkle little star’ in class one. During the early seventies Prof Kasturi wrote a poem and read it out in Bhagwan’s presence for a kavi sammelan during dasara, and it started ‘twinkle twinkle little star’. The twinkling stars had so much twinkle in them that they pursued him seven decades until he composed that ecstatic song for Bhagwan. People like him always keep learning new lessons from old pages, for as their awareness continues to grow, vision continues to expand, the horizon of learning keeps on expanding. The Varnabodha we studied in our pre-primary classes contained a couplet which said, all that we see, hear, do and think, is known to God. Now at sixty plus, I see it validated every day, it still writes lessons for me everyday. Can we ever say ‘have learnt’? I dare not. I whisper to myself ‘am learning every day’.

One of the greatest things that engages our attention when we meet Swami is His gentleness to a fault. He never hurts anyone, never gives up anyone, never insults anyone. That is ahimsa in practice. We know that He knows us inside out, and our insides hardly ever make us proud. Yet He walks up to one, and asks, ‘When did you come, bangaru?’ Then His fingers churn the space, produce a ring, slip it into a particular finger of the receiver, and with a contented smile He moves on. The person who receives the gift is left behind in a daze of joy. Swami has just turned his life upside down! Someone kneels up to tell him the saddest story of his life, the death of a loved one. He stands there, listens to him quietly, pats him gently, and without a word moves on. And what a relief He leaves behind ! He creates a new man not with a bang, but with a gentle smile, a little ‘ash’, and a soft pat. At that moment the person begins learning lessons in gentleness, and I assure you from personal experience, that is going to be the most arduous journey. We slip into our old ways, remember Him, come out of it with a jerk, slip back again after a while, and the journey continues. I can never say, ‘I have learnt gentleness from Him’, for I am still learning.

Another thing that hits us hard is His absolute unselfish love. Millions have come to Him across the globe, and they have been immediately sold out to His love. No one can love so many for so long with such undiminished depth. He had nothing to gain from them, but they had everything to gain from Him. There was no expectation in that love, no motive, not even a desire of publicity in it. In fact when someone, in his first visit to Swami, asked permission to write His life, He told him, ‘What do you know about me that you want to write? …First make your love steady…’ Our loves bind us, imprison us, for they are based on our selfish desires; but His love is the power of freedom. Do you ever realise what it takes to say, ‘love never asks anything for itself, while it gives away everything of itself’ ? He alone could declare, ‘Just as I love myself in you, you learn to love yourself in me’. That starts a learning process which takes us to ‘I end in you, and you in me’. I again assure you my dear readers, there is no more exciting journey than this. This game of ‘I in you, and you in me’ can teach us fresh lessons every hour, every day till eternity. I can never say, ‘I have learnt that love from Him’, for I am still learning.

The third thing that overwhelms us is His complete focus on spiritual truths. Once Swami went to the Primary school at Prasanthinilayam and spoke there to the kids between seven and seventeen. Prof. Kasturi translated His talk to them. After He came back to His room in the Mandir, Kasturi told Him, ‘Swami you spoke to them about Atma and Paramatma. What the kids would understand?’ Swami replied, ‘Kasturi, I can speak only truth, and there is no truth more than Atma and Paramatma’. His every word, every example, every deed points towards God. Once after distributing ice cream to school kids Swami pointed out to them how God is like ice cream! He wants us to learn that God is a greater reality than the world around us. And this is like eating ice cream from an endless cup! That is being tuned to God all the time. We must see the world imbued with God, ‘see not the stone in God, but God in the stone’. Does this ‘seeing’ ever cease? Seeing is becoming. So long becoming continues, seeing does, and learning too. Swami says, ‘Being is lost in becoming’. Becoming brings us closer to Being. To see God in everything we see, is to be God every moment we be. Can you ever say you have learnt seeing Him in all you see? I dare not, for I am still learning.

Being with Swami has been a constant challenge. He is within you, as well as without. To take the without within, and express the within without, that is the challenge. We divide Him in so many ways, like far and near, loving and indifferent, divine and human, and then try to integrate them! It is like the child Birbal who first asked Akbar to cut the sugar cane into pieces, and then asked him to join them to make a single piece! We have to learn to see Him as one undivided wholesome Truth. That is the challenge. As long as the challenge continues, learning continues. Living is synonymous with learning. When learning stops, becoming stops; and when becoming stops, life stops. We are as good as dead. When water stagnates, it rots; when blood stagnates it is death, when learning stagnates, ego takes over, and that is the undoing of whatever you have done over a lifetime. In the Upanishads too life is defined as a constant movement, and the student is urged by the guru to keep learning in the forefront. ‘Keep moving in the forefront, for movement is progress, movement is fulfillment, movement is achievement, movement is learning’.

You still ask me what I have learnt being with Him?

Well, I am excited about riding with Him, and learning lessons every day.

ONLY LOVE

Across my window sill
I noticed a bird in quiet reverie
Nibbling at the young leaves
On old, hard stems –
Biting, breaking, spitting out.
I asked her, aren’t you hungry, dear ?
I am, too much; but I relish
My hunger, more than its appeasement.
My jaws dropped in wonder –
You surprise me little birdie, I said,
How can pain be sweeter
Than its relief ?
The relief kills the pain,
And then, both are ordinary, neither
Have any significance, both forgotten
As if they never were.
Have you ever lost a game
When you were about to win ?
Or, won when about to lose ?
Which perpetuates what ?
True, losing hurt me more,
But for days though I cried,
My yearning for a win
Was a greater reality than my failure.
You understand now, don’t you
Pain has a sweetness better than relief.
My beloved has flown away,
Leaving me to feed on his sweet company;
Though I know he is for ever gone,
For-ever is too short
For what he has left behind.
We sat together here,
Ate these young leaves together,
Looked at each other’s eyes
Till time ceased to be –
Can he take that away ?
Can he erase from the ceased time
His ceaseless presence ?
So my friend, the bird told me,
I would be my hunger,
And my hunger he,
Until there is no me and he,
Only Love.

TWO INDIAS

I was waiting at the window to draw some money from a bank. There were a lot of people in the line, and since I wasn’t in any hurry, I preferred to linger on in the air conditioned lounge until the long queue has spent itself a little more. Presently a middle aged gentleman, immaculately dressed, rather overdressed for an Indian summer, came to the sofa, gave me an aristocratic smile, and bumped into it. I gave him a little more area of operation, returned an unconvincing smile, and secretly eyed him. Expensive denim trousers, a designer sea blue full shirt, sleeves rolled up. Clean shaven chins except a goatee, rimless photo sensitive glasses, a new generation huge wrist watch, and a leather purse, big for a purse, small for a portfolio bag. An image of contentment and pride that new wealth has given Indians to cherish as status symptom.
‘How d’ U do’, he said still looking at the bunch of documents he had in his hands.
I returned ‘how d’ U do’ with the same formality.
Do you belong here? he asked.
Yes, I do.
You see, I used to come here to see Sai Baba at least once a year. So I bought a flat here to stay in some comfort. Now he is gone, so I would like to sell it away. I bought it for ten lakhs, spent another ten to add some more conveniences. I would give it away for around fifteen. Single bed A/C apartment on the fourth floor. Quite comfortable.
Oh, I see. So you are here to seal some property deal.
You can say that. Sai Baba was a genuine holy man. So I used to come to see him. Now there is no need to come here. So before I leave the country and go to California to settle down with my son, I thought I would come and dispose of this property. But you see, Indians have no proper sense of value. They are asking it for no more than eight lakhs!
So you are kicking off to west. I said matter-of-factly.
What is here in India that I drag myself around until I eat dust? You have never gone to the west. Once you go there you will hate India. Look at their roads, their discipline, their science, their literature, look at their liberated society, look at their administration, their economic strength…. Tell me any aspect of their life which you can remotely compare with yours.
Obviously. You are correct. The west can not at all compare with anything genuinely Indian.
So you agree with me.
Can not agree any better.
Then what are you doing here? Come out there, and live a life of comfort and plenty.
I am looking for my genuine India. The India you see around today is a superimposition of the west. The imitation can not be as good as the original. The true, eternal India can not be seen by the eyes that sees comfort and plenty as the only purpose of life.
I noticed that the queue had substantially reduced. I excused myself to join the line.

Then I went to the General Hospital. I had to meet a doctor there. I parked my scooter in the shade and looked around to guess where exactly I could see him. Suddenly I overheard two persons talking. They had both passed their middle age, lower middle class as far as economic status is concerned. One is either from a village in UP or Bihar, the other from the suburbs of Hyderabad, as I gathered from their conversation. They both spoke Hindi. Both came to be here in Prasanthinilayam for Sivaratri. The Bihar person developed some health problem, and stayed on for a check. Probably they were just acquainted with each other. I will reproduce their conversation.
H – Ram Ram bhayya.
B – Ram Ram bhayya.
H – When are you leaving?
B – What to do bhayya, suddenly my old lower abdominal problem recurred. I thought I should see someone here in Sai Baba’s hospital. They suspect all is not well with my kidney. Human body
you know is home to a thousand diseases. But why are you here?
H – I have got my wife for a check. She got chest pain again. I left her with the doctor and came out.
B – Sairam will look after her. In our village people said Sairam is gone. I told them, where will He go? He is always present everywhere.
H – Yes bhayya, Ram to shaswat hai (Ram is eternal), Ram is inside you, inside me, and outside also.
B – Therefore bhayya, my pain recurred here. If I had it in my village where would I go? Sairam gave me the pain here so that I can see a doctor here. How kind is our Sairam.
H – My wife wanted to come here for Sivaratri. I told her she had chest pain, if something happens ? You know what she said? She said, ‘If I die taking God’s name, I will get moksha. Is there anything better than that?’
B – Yes brother, what can be better than that? Inside, He creates a disease; outside, He takes us to a Doctor! Look at His leela.
H – Happiness Ram gives, pain Ram gives, then He alone saves you from pain. Why does He do all that bhayya?
B – Arre bhayya, happiness He gives, because He wants us to be happy. Then pain also He gives so that we do not forget Him. But when we cry, His heart melts, and He saves.

Ah, what excellent homegrown solution! I was enthralled. A suburban dweller saying God is eternal! And he isn’t quoting anybody; his conviction was apparent in his eyes and his voice. A nearly unlettered woman assures her husband she would get liberation if she has God’s name on her lips at the last moment, and tells him that it is the best thing to happen to a person. A villager knows pain and suffering are both God’s gifts for our own good. His God is both human, for you must ask his help if you need it, and divine, for He knows all, loves all, can do all. None of them have any ‘stress’ either with a ‘heart problem’ or with long standing ‘abdominal problem’, while even our 3rd class kids suffer from ‘exam stress’ in our big cities. Both of them are reconciled to pain, suffering, and death, and need no psychiatrist for ‘management of reality’. This is my true India.

H – But then why so many people suffer so long, almost all life?
B – My old mother used to tell me, ‘Son, if you have any problem, first tell Ram, then if you want, others’. But now we never tell Ram, we go to a doctor first, and if the doctor can not do anything, we scold Ram! We first go to adalat (law court) to settle a quarrel, never go to Ram!
H – That is true brother. When my younger brother quarrelled with me to partition our old house, my wife went to our puja room, and prayed to Sairam to solve it. Whole night she sat there praying. Next morning my brother came to her, fell at her feet and begged to forgive him! Look what Ram can do! If I had gone to court!
B – It takes more than two days to come here from our village. We got food for one full day. Next day lunch time the train stood in the platform for a very short time. I could not get down to buy food. What to do ? Just before the train began moving away a young man came to us and gave us two packets of puri, and said, ‘Uncle I went to get some food for myself. I noticed you did not have any food, and you were not going down. So I got for you too’. You see, he did not take any money for that! We thanked Ram, and then thanked him. He was in our compartment, and we became very good friends. Who asked him to get food packets for us? Sairam only. In his heart.
H – All Ram’s work brother. He is in everyone’s heart; so if you love Him, everyone will love you.

I was stunned at the utter simplicity of God-man relationship. If you love God, everyone will love you. The whole society, which has no borders, is a single family. You do not need in India a Jesus, whom you can crucify for telling inconvenient truths, to ask you to love your neighbour. An unknown young man gets down the train, and buys food for you without your asking, and even refuses to accept money for it. In the school of life in India love, affection, unselfishness, mutuality, neighbourliness are an integral part of a beautiful canvas where man and God move hand in hand. Here philosophies are lived unconsciously, not left to debate halls of universities.

At this time I saw the doctor coming out. So I went to see him.

That was another India, my eternal, genuine India. This India does not live in metros, in high rise blocks, in university halls, in state of the art labs, corporate offices, or power corridors of politics. That India, my own India, lives in my heart, in my noble convictions, my beliefs, my understanding, my love for God, and my love for my fellowmen; the India where sages walk unknown, Avatars come to mingle with men, people celebrate a birth and a death with equal élan, and where even unlettered people live philosophies perfected over millennia. We have successfully driven this India out of our minds, and the consequences have been fear, violence, loneliness, disease and insecurity. Bhagwan came to revitalise this India. The other India which the gentleman in the bank was running away from is a garbage heap of undigested imported stuff, alien to the India that the villager from Bihar, and the gentleman from Hyderabad suburb live, the never-dying real Bharat which was so dear to Bhagwan. May we deserve to live in this punyabhumi bharat.


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are you listening

It was some important day in the college calendar. Some guest speaker had been invited to address the faculty and the students in the auditorium. I had joined the faculty the year before, and was already drawing attention as a dashing teacher. I was 27, full of assumptions about myself, quick with a comment for everything, and expected people to pay attention to what I said.

I listened to the talk for first five minutes. At the end of the seventh I was looking around to discover if anyone else was listening. By the tenth I had looked at my watch three times, and yawned once. In twenty minutes I was thoroughly bored, and was telling myself, it was awful to sit through such an insipid talk. I wanted to exchange some my favourite quips with my neighbour. But he was sold out to the speaker, as if it was the greatest day in his life. I was disgusted. I tried to catch a word or a phrase from the talk only to convince myself that this should be the last talk in his life.

The one hour talk took ages to end, and before thanks were fully said I jumped to my feet with a loud sigh of relief. My neighbour looked at me with a smile, and said, “The talk was wonderful, wasn’t it?” I retorted, “It almost killed me with appreciation”.

We had a small black scroll hanging in our staff room. We had made a habit of writing everyday on it some quote from some famous person. Usually the first thing I do on entering the staff room everyday is to go the scroll, read the quote, and make a comment. The next day I found scribbled on it, “Don’t say yes, or no to anything; yes attaches you, no repulses you. They don’t lead you to truth. Take from both whatever promotes your search for truth”. The source was mentioned as ‘Be a Man, My Son’.

I was confused. I knew a famous poem of Rudyard Kipling that ends with those words. But the quotation was not from the poem! The words, though, caught my imagination. Next day I found another quotation scribbled on the scroll from the same source: “Growing up is automatic, but maturing is a matter of choice”. I could take it no more. I found out that the colleague who was my neighbour during the talk had done this. I saw him a little later in the day, and asked him about the ghostly source. He simply said, that was the topic of the talk which the other day bored me to death. He was quoting from the talk. He waited for my unfailing habit of making a comment. When it was not forthcoming, he said, “Listening is half the wisdom”.

It was a great eye-opener for my arrogant youth. I was bored because I was not listening.

We get bored when we refuse to listen to sounds that abound around us. Life speaks to us through many voices. The tweeting little bird on a tree across our window sill, the whish-whish of the passing breeze, the pattering raindrops on the cloudy asphalt, the humming of someone in the bathroom under shower, a haunting Lata or Jagajit ringing the mobile, rolling voices of kids playing next door- a million anonymous sounds help us to mature into noticing the composition of life around us. We can’t hear them because we hear only what we choose, and the poverty of what we choose easily bores us. Someone inside us wants to hear all the voices of life endless, and explore the infinite ways our living can be enriched, while we bore ourselves to death in our utter poverty. We are afraid to explore, afraid of fresh frontiers, scared of the sights and sounds our ‘programming’ can not handle. We have lost our freedom before seeking it. And naturally, in bondage to ourselves, we break.

Boredom is a sign of our slavery to our programming, our surrender to inputs filtered through a rigid mind. When we fail to see beyond what we see, hear more than what we hear we are bored. Pundits of economics tell us that ‘insatiable desires’ of man are a key to economic growth. Moral philosophers tell us that these desires are responsible for all our sorrows. Vedantists are of the view that man’s craving for unlimited happiness is a pointer towards his own limitless Self. Life is a metaphor for non-linear growth. When we stifle it, life rebels with boredom.

In my teens I loved to chant the Mugle Azam thriller ‘pyar kiya to darna kya’. Later when I heard the Subhalakshmi classic ‘mere to giridhar gopal’, I cried. One day when I came home after a couple of days from a tour, my 4 year daughter came running, jumped on me and said just one word, ‘papa’, I again cried, and suddenly understood the two songs as I never did till then. I travelled between my teens, and my thirties, and the whole stretch of time lighted up with a new wisdom. The mundane and the sublime lost their borders.

Over the years since I woke up to the need of listening, I have learnt that life is a beautiful gift provided we don’t ration out its abilities.

EDUCATING YOUR HEART – 2

Swami says ‘Awareness is life’. The entire purpose of education is to generate this awareness in the pupils. Without it men and women become centred in themselves, and live for themselves only. Bhagwan teaches us that true realization is ‘seeing of all in all you see’. ‘If you can not see God in your fellowman, how can you see Him in a stone idol?’ He asks. Education is ‘expansion of love’ not its contraction. Swami has Given us a new recipe of education, and has showed us how to cook it.Compassion has never been part of a system of education except in Bhagwan’s university.

This started from a very ordinary, and sadly so, incident. Ha, it is but ordinary ! they say; can we afford to bother ourselves with such trifles ! A newspaper reported that a mother killed her children and herself driven by extreme poverty. Did it create a ripple in the minds (for the heart has taken a holiday!) of our progressive millionaire society ? But it drew a pearl of love from our Bhagwan’s eyes,
and He scripted a new syllabus for our university and school students. A symbolic intense drive into surrounding villages, predominantly poor, to explore a new dimension (and the truest) of education: two weeks of practising compassion. Compassion is the common denominator between God and man. Man becomes godly only when he identifies himself with the divine in all things in the creation. The God on earth now decided to teach at least His students the first alphabets of real education. Now for more than a decade Gramseva has been an inalienable part of Sathya Sai syllabus for true education. Hridaya has to be the seat of daya.

Ben Jonson wrote, “In small measures life may perfect be”. So a big thing, a big idea need not start in a big way. In spite of scientists insisting that the universe started in a big bang, Bhagwan says He put the universe together quietly, like a painter who puts pigments of colour silently to create a big picture, “I created the world with one word….” Compassion can start in small measures, with people we meet everyday, with animals, with environment, with the elements. I have seen expression of this rare quality in an old couple quite close to me. The gentleman takes a rikshaw (later an auto) from home in his shopping expeditions. When he comes back he usually passes on to the man 5 or ten rupees more than agreed upon hiring charges, and if it is summer, he offers him a lunch too. Not only that. He would ask the man to rest a while on his verandah before going out in the sun again. He was by no means a well to do person. He was a small school teacher who found it very difficult to support a large family with his meagre salary. But his compassion stopped at nothing. Now the lady of the house. She buys vegetable from vendors who call from door to door. In villages people usually do not buy vegetable from vendors, for they mostly grow their needs in their backyards. So people who depend on the sales for supporting a family find it very trying to make both ends meet. When such a person calls at the door, and tells her that she hasn’t sold anything till then, she buys out the whole headload, even if she does not need all that, and give her a little more than the cost. In addition, she would sometimes steal a sari from her own box and pass it on to her quietly. Offering the vendor a little water-rice (cooked rice soaked in water, a typical poor man’s fare) was never infrequent. When the gentleman died, people from four to five villages around gathered at his house at midnight hour just to be with the family, and attend his funeral next morning. When his youngest son got a good job, and wanted to offer his first month’s salary to father in gratefulness, the father went and quietly built a large shed in the cremation ground to be used by people who bring the dead for a ‘warm’ send off. And when the lady passed away at Puttaparthy about two years ago, Swami looked after her funeral entirely. Compassion for fellowmen always attracts compassion from God. That is where man-in-God, and God-in-man meet.

There was this woman I personally know. She loved to feed monkeys. Whenever she goes to buy vegetables for her kitchen, she always has a special budget for her friends, the monkeys. They would come to her kitchen window, and she would feed them in her own hands. If they don’t come on the day after she has bought bananas for them, she is upset, and would pray to Hanuman to send his flock. One day she went out to pick her sari from the clothes line outside, and there stood a huge
monkey in front of her gripping her waist ready to maul her. It was a very notorious gang leader who
had bitten flesh out of many people. There was a small crowd of neighbours standing at a safe distance from her, voicing various expressions of sympathy, but no one dared a step nearer. This women stood there calmly, and told the rowdy monkey, “Why do you threaten me ? I haven’t done any harm to you”. The monkey gradually slid down, walked a few steps away and stood guard lest any other money hurt her. She took all the time in the world to collect her sari, smiled at the rogue monkey, and entered her house.

Compassion has no barriers. It does not distinguish between a friend and a foe, a sadhu or a thief. During 70s I was working in a college in Odisha, and we were staying in an old thatched house with a walled courtyard, and an inside verandah opening to the courtyard. We used to keep our clothes of daily use on a wooden frame placed on the verandah. One morning we discovered that almost all clothes hanging there had been stolen during the night by someone who climbed over the wall to enter the courtyard. My wife was terribly scared and wanted to change the house. The next night Swami came in her dream and told her, “Why are you worrying so much ? After all nothing much is lost. That man is very poor, and needed these clothes”! Look at Bhagwan’s compassion. The whole world may hate the thief, but He had nothing but love and understanding for him. He even chided her for contemplating to report it to the police.

The new syllabus for higher education of Bhagwan’s students has caught the attention of the thinking world, which is growing increasingly aware that the most educated class is a threat to the world itself. Gramseva makes you aware that out there, there is a large humanity, basically an extension of yourself. Current education has done nothing to unite the academicians with the rest of the humanity. No syllabus, no teacher today, teaches us that education is essentially a process of self-extension. It has therefore turned out to be a process of self-alienation ! No other university has yet shown the courage to re-examine their syllabus in this light because the untempered mind is still the high priest there, and compassion the lamb at the bloody stump ! God is too non-secular, non-academic to enter the university gates !


(Published in h2h March 1st, 2011, Link : http://media.radiosai.org/Journals/Vol_09/01MAR11/09-get_inspired.htm)

EDUCATING YOUR HEART – 1

“It is the heart that reaches out to the goal, not mind”, Bhagwan says. According to Him heart is not the seat of irrational emotions, as commonly believed. It is the spiritual centre of an individual, which promotes intuition, and discrimination(vichara).The sense urges are purified here, and the ego, the feeling of separateness, is moulded to merge in the universality of God. The primary function of education, therefore,is educating this heart centre with compassion, or Daya, or empathy. Bhagwan says education is not confined to the four walls of a classroom, the whole universe is the classroom for a willing learner.


Some decades ago once around eight in the morning I left home to go somewhere within the town and hired a cycle rikshaw, a bicycle turned into a three-wheel passenger car to be manually driven by one man, the cheapest transport system for short distances within a town or city. It was a Sunday, and the town was just waking up to the business of living. I took to the road, littered with yesterday’s leftovers of the clients of many mobile chat vendors for which this particular street was well known. The clients stand around the four-wheel kitchen-cum-sales centres, fill their leaf plates on their out stretched palms, and eat the dainty dish of a mixture of at least half a dozen hot-sour-sweet items that rejuvenate their afternoon taste buds. Then they drop the plates on the road wherever they stood to be taken care of by the gods of democracy, the roaming cattle, or the scavenging street children ! People pass over the unfortunate heaps in their cars, scooters, cycles, bullock carts, on covered or uncovered feet. The droppings of bullocks and the stray cattle mix all that into a nameless paste to be finally become one with the tarred road which gradually loses its identity. Once in a while the khaki clad representatives of the omnipresent democracy raid the mobile restaurants, threaten them, take a few free plates of the famous chat and add their powerful leaf plates to the heap before performing the ritual of hitting a nearby tea vendor’s stall in order to attract a ‘pecial elaich tea’ to top a satisfying afternoon.

That street has a number of open sky meat stalls where meat is offered fresh and bloody. My rikshaw plodded through the familiar dirt and tried to speed up. Suddenly I noticed half a dozen cars and more than two dozen scooters, bikes, bicycles of all description parked by the roadside and people in their bedroom dresses, lungi and banyans, relaxing, gossiping, smoking as if there isn’t a hurry in the world. My rikshaw slowed down not to offend the civilized humans exercising their human rights. While the driver was maneuvering his rider through a relaxed Sunday, I peeped out trying to gather what had attracted the educated elite, juice of the emerging society of a resurgent India, to the street this morning. As soon as I peeped through the crowd, I pulled back in shudder, and asked my driver to hurry away.

By side of the road there was the bloody stump of a mighty tree, and stood there two half clad hefty men, one with a fearsome butcher’s knife, the other holding the neck of a poor hapless lamb between his fingers on the stump. The knife was running on the goat’s neck, and blood was dripping into a bowl placed below it. A dozen specimen of a highly accomplished educated elite were eagerly looking at it, probably thinking of a luscious Sunday lunch with family. I recognized one of them was a Doctor, some sort of a specialist, and the other a professor of Literature at the local university. Another was a deputy secretary of some govt department, famous for his huge mustache. They were eager to carry
home parts of the lamb’s body, its sinews, veins, pieces of bone, its heart…. I felt so sick, I returned
home by another road, and tried to sleep the whole afternoon in order to nurse my frayed nerves. But the fact that the incident is still visible to me, four decades later, proves how indelible was the impact of that moment on my mind.

Why did the sight affect me so deeply ? Is it because I have been a non meat-eater ? Is it because an innocent lamb was killed ? Not necessarily. Buying meat from the butcher to cook a lunch may look innocuous, but I am not sure standing by without reacting while a butcher’s knife runs into the neck of a helpless animal, its blood dripping into a bowl, and think of a delicious lunch it is going to provide, is any admirable sign of a civil society. Enlarge this canvas, and you needn’t be surprised if you see Kasab & Co mauling down people at the Taj.

Newspapers, TV channels, websites spill out every minute great real life instances of men and women outsmarting animals in every field ! They also tell us that new international standard schools are coming up everywhere in a great hurry; new universities, medical institutions, management establishments, art centres, involving billions are raising their proud heads all over the country to announce the incredible pace of education. The governments are in a hurry to aid them, academicians are in a hurry to catch up with knowledge explosion, investors are in a hurry to push their dividends graph up, developers are in a hurry to capture farmlands and green areas to build skyscrapers, everybody is racing towards happiness – my happiness sans my neighbour’s !

What has happened to our sensibilities ?
Do they have a place in our ‘incredible’ civilization ?

In a very striking judgement the apex court of India recently expressed its agony at the way even educated people refrain from reacting to public humiliation of women, allow political parties put up people of questionable characters as our representatives without bating an eyelid, and then without any qualms anoint them with power !

Bhagwan says, the heart should be the seat of compassion, Daya, in order to justify it is educated.

Therefore education isn’t primarily a provider of a living, it qualifies the kind of life we choose to live. Living may promote life, but life has to define living. But in our progressive syllabi the heart is no more than a blood-pumping device. The new priest of education is an untempered mind, and all our freedom is held hostage by it. Characteristically, however, the most elite of our progressive society worship this camouflaged tiger. All programmes in our schools and colleges are aimed at making the
intellect keener, sharper, cleverer, not deeper with empathy. One teacher of the recently opened Smt Eswaramma English medium School at Puttaparthy was recently telling me about a certain student of hers in the first standard. This girl would always watch her friends eating their lunch during the school lunch time. If anyone does not have enough dal or vegetable to go with rice, she would save that from her own lunch, and offer it to her friend. The moving thing about it is that she always feels happy doing so. Does our education promote this spontaneous empathy ?

There is another kid, a boy, she told me, who always comes a little early to school. He would put his bag in the classroom, and wait near the gate. When class one children arrive in autos, or busses, or in their parent’s scooter or bike, and he finds that it is difficult for a certain child to carry the luggage to his or her class room, he would do it himself. One day it was raining, and when the other kids arrived at the gate without an umbrella, he was found taking them one by one into the school building under his own umbrella. Another day it was drizzling when the school closed for the day, and he was found taking out his own towel from his bag and drying up a teacher’s wet scooter parked under a tree. When asked why he was doing that, he replied, “How can ma’m go home on a wet scooter ? Her sari will become wet.” The remarkable thing about this seven year old is that nobody ever asked him to do such things, and he does this quite naturally, without any self-consciousness.

Do we have any programmes in our schools and colleges to build up this precious aspect of true education, empathy ? We award medals to percentage of marks, to a keen intellect; what about a heart filled with compassion ? I personally would feel honoured to honour such a child. Bhagwan has been defining the end of education as character, and end of knowledge as love, for decades now. Character can blossom only on the ground of compassion and love, but they are misnomers now in our education set up. I remember here a stunning experience about poverty of our intellectuals. A friend of mine was a programme executive in a certain branch of All India Radio. He was a good Sai devotee, and wanted to record a symposium on Bhagwan’s famous saying ‘End of education is character’ to be broadcast on some occasion. He invited a well known professor of English, a journalist, an administrator to the studio, briefed them about the project, and asked the professor to initiate discussion. The professor interpreted the statement with quite an intellectual tinge saying, ‘Every object in the world has a certain character, so education too has a character…’ etc. Consequently, the symposium was never aired.
Mind is endowed with such power that if it chooses to lead the instruments of pleasure it may take the host down the dusk, but if it is led by instruments of perception, it may power the steepest climb to the
hill top dawn to achieve freedom from all darkness below. That, Bhagwan says, is the real education, to be free from darkness, untruth, and violence(mortality). The higher we climb, the greater is the sweep of our vision, the deeper our sensibilities to the breathtaking view of all created things linked up by an incredible thread of enlightened existence. That is compassion, and that is Daya, too.


Published in H2H, Link - http://media.radiosai.org/Journals/Vol_09/01JAN11/09-get_inspired.htm