An Interesting Person

There's a very nice MahaGanapathi temple in Whitefield, which I keep visiting it as it's quite close to our place.

Sometime back, I met an interesting person outside the same. I had gone "over" the temple to have a darshan from outside, when I ran into this person (Ravikrishna Yerramsetti) waiting outside. I got chatting with him and mentioned that the temple has an awesome power. The person agreed and said that one of his friends also felt the same. After some time, his friend came out of the temple and Ravikrishna mentioned that Mr. Bharathi was an astrologer and that they were staying in a room right opposite Sri Satya Sai's Brindavan ashram. It turned out that Mr. Bharathi had been personally blessed by Swami and told to do astrology predictions!

Anyway, I met Mr. Yerramsetti again last (25.MAR) morning and he told me an amazing xp, which convinced him of the divinity of Swami:

In the early 1980s, late one night, Ravi was traveling in a bus in Chennai, which was making a wide turn in a "bucket" road in T Nagar. Absent-mindedly, he got down from the bus, in spite of the conductor's warnings. As he stepped out, Ravi couldn't balance himself and was sucked into the path of the wheels, which narrowly missed crushing him. The whole of his right hand, from the shoulder to the elbow, was a bloody mess. However, he could get up and, seeing this, the driver of the bus carried on.

On the desolate road, Ravi found a person behind him. The person was in a khakee uniform and had the halo hair of Swami. The person passed his hand over the upper part of Ravi's right hand and everything became all right! There wasn't any more blood on him. The person asked Ravi to go home and sleep and wished him "Good night" and, even though the road was straight as an arrow in both directions, the person disappeared soon after.

I was totally overwhelmed by this.

Later on, Ravi made an interesting point. He said that only the study of astronomy had the ability to make a person humble. We discussed about the billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy* and I was reminded of Arthur C Clarke in that wonderful movie on Stanley Kubrick:

Behind everyone alive today stand 30 ghosts for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, about a hundred billion human beings have walked on this planet. Now, a hundred billion is about the number of stars in our Milky Way galaxy. So this means that for everyone who has ever lived there could be a star. And of course, stars are suns, with planets circling around them. So isn't it an interesting thought that there's enough land in the sky for everyone to have a whole world?

* Some say that the term Aditya refers not to our Sun but the star at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. What a monster that should be!

"It's the way you carry the load that breaks you"

This Sidhuism (in today's ToI) grabbed me by the gullet first thing in the morning.

There are some people from whom all troubles drop away like rain off a slicker. There are others who carry the load as Atlas once did. Well, Atlas shrugged and felt better ;-)

It also reminded me of one of the slogans used by the Indian Railways: "Less luggage, more comfort", which has been translated into Tamil as "Chinna Saman, Periya Sugam" with a wicked meaning, but that's another story ;-)

Lessons from a water-can

The other day, I noticed an interesting funda with our 3-litre Milton water can, facetiously referred to as Terracan. This has an inner and an outer lip, for its two lids.

I was filling up the same when I noticed that the water had overshot the inner lip. I had two choices:

• Open the tap at the bottom, to allow the excess water to drain
  
• Angle the Terracan to let the water overflow over the outer lip.
  

I couldn't help being amused by the first option in its similarity to the human condition. As someone remarked: "Rid of my seed; cleansed of my mind"!

Today, while doing pooja, I realized that tears of joy shed in love of the Lord were like the second option.

The Mind Keeps Out The Sentient Being

I was quite impressed with this article (The Mind Keeps Out The Sentient Being) that was featured in the ToI.SpeakingTree a couple of days back (03.MAR.2004).

Past midnight, I unearthed Evelyne Blau's wonderful book ("Krishnamurti -- 100 years") that I bought on 04.JUL.2001 and had a great time. It had the full text of Jiddu's speech on Truth is a Pathless Land.

Later, I was mentioning to my good friend how I have been trying to apply some of the fundas from the same, and find Life that much more fulfilling. Incidentally, it also helped me think of the following analogy:
~~~~~
Sun : Moon == Atma : Mind
~~~~~

Like the Moon which reflects the light of the Sun, the Mind is only a reflected version of the much more effulgent Atma. The person who listens to the Atma without bothering about the distractions of the mind is truly a realized soul.

It also brought into sharp focus one of my pet fundas, which I suddenly shot off during a 199x review at Infosys:
~~~~~
In Life, you're either attached to the Truth, or to yourself. You have to make up your mind.
~~~~~

Visit to Brindavan

Yesterday (01.MAR), made a visit to the Brindavan ashram of Sri Sathya Sai Baba along with HPR. HPR was wearing his mobile like the Infosys IdCard and the folks out there retained it. Mine was quiet on the belt under the T-shirt and, after the snaffle, I hoped that it didn't ring inside the book shop ;-)

To accommodate more visitors, they have covered the ground outside the Sai Ramesh hall. The new look is quite pleasant. The slight slope also ensures that visitors have a "cinematic" view of Swami during his darshan. The net effect is that the charming image of Mother Saraswathi is now covered from the Sun.

What amazed me was that the folks had started working on this when I last visited the ashram on 05.FEB, when I bought "Divine Journey". I was quite impressed with this book and, so I bought a magnum opus called "The Message of the Lord" by the same author (G Venkatraman). This is an interpretation of the Gita from the teachings of Swami and looks pretty solid.