Gurudev

I came to the Bangalore ashram in 1992 for an advanced meditation programme, and found out there was a Guru attached to it only somewhere halfway between Bombay and Bangalore. I was not against the idea. I was a Parsi boy, and sceptical the way we are.

That evening I sat in satsang next to an old Turkish lady. She asked if it was my first time. I said it was. She said, “Don't see Him with your eyes, see Him with your heart,” and I had no idea what she was talking about.

Then Gurudev floated in. Elegant white robes, and His feet barely seemed to touch the floor. Floated is the word I would use. He settled on His swing, closed His eyes, and meditated for a while, then opened them and spoke.

Something happened to me that evening that has not gone away since. It was the feeling of having come home, of feeling at ease and of belonging.

I reached the ashram in the evening in May 1995, left my luggage at the admin block, and somebody told me He had gone for a walk towards the lake. I asked for directions and rushed there.

He was coming round the other side with about two hundred people behind Him. We met somewhere in the middle. I did a pranam and He said, “Aa gaye!”

You have come. As though He had been waiting for me the way I had been waiting to see Him. I cannot explain what went through me at that moment beyond saying that it was a rush of pure niceness.

If you ask me what He is like when nothing is going on and nobody is watching, it is this. He is at ease. Completely at home wherever He happens to be, in a stadium or on a lawn or in somebody's kitchen, and it does not change from one to the other.

We were in Rishikesh in the middle of March, and it was already hot. Eleven in the morning, full sun, and a group of army officers had come to meet Him. They were gathered on the lawn. There was no shade out there and nothing to put over His head, and I was the only person around who could have done something about it.

He came down from His room, looked at the sun, looked at me, smiled and winked. Then He went and sat down and started talking to them.

Within a few minutes there were clouds in the sky. That bright sky went properly overcast and a cool breeze got up. Somewhere in the middle of what He was saying, He looked across at me and winked again.

He was there with them for more than forty minutes. Then He got up, went back towards His room, and on the stairs He turned round and winked at me a third time. I stepped outside and looked up. The clouds had gone.

That was one of the first miracles I saw Him do, and I knew He was different.

We had been put in charge of the youth programmes of the Art of Living and had built something we were rather pleased with. We were booked out. Courses back to back, one after another. We thought we were doing very well, and by any sensible measure we were.

Then one evening we were sitting with Him and He asked what our plan was. We enthusiastically told Him. Six or seven months of courses lined up, a hundred to two hundred people in each course.

He looked at us and said, “Two hundred people? You will not reach even a fraction of a percentage of the population in your entire lifetime. Not this lifetime, not the next one. You should be teaching courses of two thousand people.”

Nothing in our heads had a shape for that. But He had said it, and off we went to work on it. It took us and our fabulous team of volunteers about three months, and we had more than two thousand people on that course. It went beautifully.

Afterwards we came back to Him and said we simply did not understand how the whole thing had happened. He smiled and said, “Reality is only restricted by your imagination.”

That line comes back to me constantly. Every time I find myself stuck, it turns up, and I remind myself that my reality is indeed restricted by my own imagination.

I had the good fortune of being His secretary during the Silver Jubilee celebrations and the World Culture Festivals in Delhi and Berlin. Millions of people from something like a hundred and sixty countries, all arriving at once.

An event of that size does not go smoothly. Things fall over daily. Hourly. What I watched Him do, through all of it, was handle every situation and every person with such Grace and skill. And through it all He never lost His composure and His smile.

He used to say that when you take on something great, obstacles will come, and they add glory to the outcome. That is not a saying to me. I was standing next to Him while He lived it, and I have carried it since. Take it lightly, know it will work out, because your intentions are good. Obstacles only add glory to the big story.

This was in Arosa. Gurudev was on stage talking on the Bhagavad Gita, and He needed something. I rushed up to hand it to Him, and I was wearing socks. A smooth wooden stage plus socks plus my hurry were a disaster waiting to happen.

I almost slipped. For a moment I was certain I was going down, in front of the whole hall. But suddenly, I felt held, and as I found my balance, I saw Him looking intently at me, and I was perfectly fine. I smiled and went up to Him.

The mic was right there in front of Him. He said, “Girne ka abhaas hoga, par girne nahi doonga.”

You may have the sense that you are falling, but I will never let you fall.

As far back as I can remember, I was quite an angry person. Small things set me off, and I held grudges for months at a stretch. It ran in the family. My grandmother was exactly the same, so I had grown up thinking of it as simply how one is.

Once I started doing the Sudarshan Kriya every day and teaching the courses, the anger stopped coming as often. When it did come it came and went instead of settling in. I have hardly any grudge left against anybody.

When I look back at myself before 1991, I am looking at a different person. That one was frustrated and had no sense of balance, funny and happy enough in his own way, but unsettled underneath all of it.

Now I feel settled. At ease. The person I was seems to be from some other lifetime.

Somebody in satsang once asked Him to show them a miracle. He looked straight at the man and said, “Of course! Just look. A black cow eating green grass and giving white milk. Isn't that a miracle?”

On another evening a lady stood up in the public satsang with a complaint. Her husband was doing the advanced course, where you meditate, keep silence and do some seva around the ashram. She said that here he is the epitome of a husband. He mops the floors, he sweeps, he cuts vegetables in the kitchen. At home he does none of it.

Gurudev smiled mischievously and said, “Yes, but at home you are also not in silence.”

She laughed hardest of all.

We were in Stavanger. He had been invited to speak at a conference of Nobel laureates and had a couple of hours free before it, so He said come on, let us go for a walk.

Four or five of us set off through the streets with Him, chatting and laughing about nothing in particular. Then He asked whether there was a devotee living nearby. One of the locals with us said yes, this person stays right here.

He said, “Come on, let us go and surprise him.”

We walked up and knocked. Imagine opening your front door and finding Gurudev on the other side of it. He went in, we sat and chatted, and He asked whether anyone wanted something to eat. We nodded, and Gurudev Himself went into the kitchen and made guacamole out of whatever ingredients happened to be in that kitchen.

That is the one recipe I know that was taught to me by Gurudev Himself, and the spontaneity around it is what I cherish most.