The year was 1962. Politically a very important year for India. As well as for the war that took place between China and India, in which India had a surrogated defeat. Many events had followed that year quickly one after another. Every incident that followed had some significance in one way or other. India’s economy was pushed back to a few decades. It was probably the biggest blunder of a decision after the decision of partition that took place in the year 1947 when India gained its freedom on the midnight of 15 August 1947. Destiny does not work according to one’s requirement. It works on its own principles whether you accept it or not. And it leads. It is the sum total of all the actions of a human being for many lives. The year 1962 has much other significance too. India lost the war with China but Daman and Diu, the last foreign-occupied territory of India, was integrated into India. This was the year when Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru was elected de facto Prime Minister of India. Thus it was a year of learning and teaching lessons.
In such a year of diversified occurrences of turbulence and achievement, I was born on Savitri Amabasya i.e. on the New moon day named after a pious lady called Savitri. Those who are acquainted with Indian spirituality or those who follow Indian tradition would know about Savitri Mahakavya, a very famous and a legendary epic poem which remain unfinished with 24,000 lines by Shri Aurobindo, an Indian philosopher, yogi, guru, poet, a nationalist and a spiritual reformer.
In any case, till today, the Savitri Amavasya is considered a very pious day for the women of India and they perform a specific puja (worship) with deep austerity for the sake of their husbands. In any case, the birth was not normal. The Medical Science had not developed much in India during the early 60’s and I was told that I took a long time to come out from my mother’s womb (an 11month child, they say). In any case, both I and my mother survived and I was born a healthy child.
My first remembrance of myself is very unconventional. I remember a question that bothered me from my early childhood. I always thought I have a father who is responsible for my birth, and my father has also a father who is responsible for his birth. So forth so on. Then who was the father of the first person who took birth on this earth? And who created the earth? If it was God, then who created God? Then something will start rolling inside me, making me restless. I remember I must be about 5 years old. It normally happened in the evenings after I come back home from the playground. I must be studying in 1st or 2nd grade.
Now when I look back, I think, the query must have started long back… may be from many lives of the past… nobody knows… nobody will ever know… the episodes which started in the early childhood… stopped suddenly, I don’t remember when. It was good. Because whenever that question came I was so much disturbed that I thought I would go crazy. I had completely forgotten about that for many years until I was about 25 when it came back to me again in completely different circumstances. To know that we have to go a few years back when I was 10 or 12 years old. That was the time when I was introduced to Swami Vivekananda. I was in school and we were given 10 paise for pocket expenses. 10 paisa was a big amount back then, I used to have to have good snacks with the money. One day while passing through a small roadside bookshop I saw a book Titled: “Thus Spake Vivekananda”. The photo on the front page attracted me a lot. And coincidentally the cost of the book was 10 paisa! I bought the book by skipping my snack. It was a very interesting book. That was my first book apart from study lessons. With the passage of time, I found many other titles like, “Thus Spake Shri Ramakrishna” “Thus Spake Shri Krishna” and similar ones. Those short books were very interesting for me, and I read almost every single book available in that series. And thus without my knowing, I had put my first step into the world of spirituality.
The first thing that attracted me in those books is the sayings of Swami Vivekananda. Bold and clear. And the first thing I learned from him that there is no God outside, neither in temples nor anywhere. God resides only in the hearts of a human being. This fallacy of idea occurred as I read and understood all this at a tender age of 10 or 11. It took me a long time to understand, what was actually meant by his saying that God resides within human beings. And I paid a heavy price for that learning. Then, when I was growing up I was influenced by Swamiji in many other ways too. I exercised a lot to make my body like steel, as he said in his books. And could convince my father, a doctor by profession, to get me a ‘bull worker’, an instrument used to build up the muscles of the body. I must mention one thing here. I was extremely attached with my father. And loved him more than anybody else in this world. He was like God to me. And even being so young, I always felt I must protect my father!! My father was a Medalist in Medicine and was very popular and famous for his treatment and extraordinary nice behavior. People used to say that they got half-cured just by listening to his calm voice. He was a very honest government officer and taught me many things in the course of conversation which helped me a lot later in my life. We were a very big family with seven sisters and two brothers, I was the ninth one, the youngest one. Being a very honest officer, we had a very limited budget. The salary was not very high and my mother had to manage the 11 members of the family along with the guests who came and stayed with us from time to time. She was an extremely efficient lady and a strict disciplinarian. All of us had to follow a routine. A little deviation would bring the punishment from my mother. All of us took breakfast, lunch and dinner at a fixed time. The food was limited so we all had to eat together. At most of the time there was no second servings. My mother was an excellent cook, so are my sisters. In the evening, as soon as the streetlight will be lit up, every one of us will come to the Puja room (Room for worship) and pray together and have Prasad (sweets offered to God). Despite the tight budget, my parents had made sure that all of us should be properly educated. Now when I look back and remember those days, I think they were the best days of my life. There were so much connectedness among all of us. A very strong bonding. Somehow or other we hardly fell ill. We had an Ambassador Car. And it was interesting to note that all of us could fit into that, one on another! Every summer we used to go to our maternal uncle’s house, a place about 150 kms away from where we lived, in that car. And on the way if evening comes, then all of us had to start praying together. And I would be given the task to read the boards on the road loudly so that my pronunciation would improve. My mother had six sisters and three brothers and almost everyone’s family used to come in summer. All of us had a great time together with all our cousins. It was really astonishing that how my mother could manage such a big family of ours with guests all around the year with only the salary of my father. My father never did anything like private practice or anything. Once after I became adult, I asked my father whether he was offered any money as bribe when he was in government service. I have seen many of his colleagues amassing a lot of money and possessing so many houses. He just smiled and said that he had many opportunities but he decided not to indulge. Then he said he had also been corrupt once, if one may call it corruption. While describing the whole story he started telling me the incident, that when he was posted in a particular district, one person, had once applied for a government land for constructing a Cinema Hall. That land was earmarked for an Herbal Garden by the Health Department. So naturally my father who was the District Health Officer disapproved the proposal. That person was a highly influential person. And he also knew that he couldn’t offer any bribe to my father. His reputation was very well-known. So the man approached the Health Minister. As a matter of fact the Minister also hesitated. After much persuasion, the Minister agreed to speak to my father in person not over telephone. Once on his visit to the district, he himself came to my father’s office and very politely asked if it may be approved. He was ready to allow another land to the Health Department for that herbal park a little away. My father said that he was extremely surprised as the Minister could have got this done just with a phone call. It was a very unusual act for a Minister to visit a government officer requesting him to get a particular thing done. When my father expressed his mind, the Minister said that he could have done it over telephone but as he was aware of my father’s reputation, he decided to do it that way. Anyway my father immediately agreed. And afterward, that influential man came to our house with a bundle of 100 rupees notes. My father’s salary might be around 300 to 400 rupees per month. But the man said it was just an act of gratitude as the matter was already resolved. When my father declined the offer politely but firmly he just put the bundle at his feet, like one offers it to the God. My father was not only moved but was perplexed at his behavior. So, in order to put all this to an end, he took just one note out of the bundle and returned the rest. So he said that he was also corrupt if one could consider this. My whole point of saying this here is that we all lived in a different world then. Unlike nowadays, there were many people like my father then and the Ministers also paid respect to these people. Now it is difficult to find such persons I such a vast country like ours. The behavior of most of the Ministers is better not described.
In any case, coming back to my bull worker, I started working out to build up my muscles. And fortunately neither my sisters nor my mother said anything as the bull worker was an expense out of the planned budget. It saved me from some troubles at home. Thus life was good, normal. My visits to bookshop was still continuing. And I was in search for highly discounted books. The shopkeeper also gave special discounts to me looking at my interest for reading books. Then when I was 14 or so, I found a book titled “Yoga For Mental Power” by Dr. Phulgenda Sinha, the then Director of the Bihar School of Yoga which is till date one of the most well-known and a highly distinguished Training School of Yoga founded by Swami Satyananda Saraswati, in Munger, Bihar in 1963, a disciple of the great saint Swami Shivananda Saraswati. Swami Shivananda, a doctor by profession before he became a saint, and founded the Divine Life Mission, in the year 1936, a world-wide non-profit organization, promoting Karma and Bhkti Yoga. Swami Sivananada had three highly distinguished disciples. One of them, Swami Satyananda, chose the path of yoga, and founded the Bihar School of Yoga, the second, Swami Chinmayananda, chose the path of Gnana (Knowledge) and established highly renowned Chinmaya Mission, a worldwide non-profit organization, to spread the knowledge of Advaita Vedanta, the non-dual system of thought found in the Upanishads. The third one, Swami Chidananda decided to stay back with his Guru Swami Shivananda Saraswati to promote the aims and objectives of Divine Life Society, and became the President of the Society in 1963, after the Mahasamadhi of Shri Shivananda Saraswati in the year 1963. He remained President of the Society till he passed away in 2008.
Coming back to the “Yoga for Mental Power”, I must say, it was a milestone in my life. Till date I have not found a better book than that. It gives one an experience of full Yoga if one follows the instructions and practice just for fifteen minutes every day. I loved the book and practiced the Yoga Asanas religiously for about 14 years, without missing even a day ever, till I got married. The best part in the book was a technique to fulfill one’s all material or any desires by a Yogic Technique through Savasana, and Tratak. They are to be done very carefully and after mastering the basic Asanas. Although they are the advanced techniques, I could do those very easily as if it was known to me sometime earlier. That book made my fundamentals very clear and I was greatly benefitted as later I imparted Yoga classes later in my life for a long period of time. I have read many books on Yoga after that but still I find that book is the best, especially for a householder. Now doing yoga made me really mentally very strong and brought a clarity which I didn’t possess earlier. At the same time it also brought a kind of detachment. All my studies seemed meaningless. I thought they all were redundant. Life’s target remained elsewhere, which no formal education could provide. Rather they all are hindrances as high education does not only create a false ego but it also gives one a wrong direction away from the real purpose of one’s life which is to find out the real purpose of the human birth. The prevailing education is good for making money and to enjoy other worldly affairs. I was not interested in all those activities. I was more interested to go deep into my self-analysis. But there was tremendous peer pressure. Life had suddenly turned into very difficult journey. It was a period of great confusion for me. But destiny had other plans for me. I had no idea. I was too young to fathom the complicacy of life then. Although I thought I knew many things I was rather ignorant of many things, which became clear to me afterward. It is interesting to note amidst all these the question that bothered me in the childhood had not reappeared. I had completely forgotten about that. And when it came to me later on in a deep spiritual experience, many other memories of childhood also came back. That experience was a turning point in my life. No matter what happened I will never forget the trauma I went during that experience. But later on I thought it was worth all the efforts. I will speak about it shortly. In the meanwhile all my sisters had got married. In India, marriage of a daughter then was a great headache. It still is. But the society has changed. All my sisters were married to good families of doctors and engineers. They were all happily settled. My elder brother who was a Merchant Navy Officer was settled quite nicely. Then, I was on everyone’s attention. I was still in college. And had not decided to what to do. And unfortunately I couldn’t tell anyone what was playing in my mind. They definitely would have thought I had gone crazy. I couldn’t say anything even to my friends. I was in a great dilemma. Being very young I always defied destiny. I always thought that a person was the creator of his own destiny. It was true to some extent. But I accepted it as an absolute truth. So I thought of an innovative idea.
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