Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
8
'If I Didn't Want You to Leave This Place You Never Could'
BANGALORE TO VENKATAGIRI, 1977
If everyone wants to be a ruler, who is there to be ruled?
A ruler may have a few villages only to rule over but a beggar has all the world
to beg in.
- Telegu Proverbs
My experiences with Ray depressed me. I felt I'd lost track of my
purpose in coming to India, so I returned to England to resume
doctoral studies. Before long, though, tired of modern academia's
limits and its myopic view of spiritual matters, I looked for ways to
return to India. Sathya Sai Baba just wouldn't leave me alone.
Waking and sleeping - in dreams - I felt a profound need to return.
Oxford University was no place to be if you wanted to explore ways
of reining in the mind. Bangalore University, on the other hand,
had possibilities. I accepted a position there lecturing on Shakespeare.
Although my sole experience of Baba had been in Puttaparthi, he
spent much time near a place called Whitefield, an Anglo-Indian
community where he had started his first college. Whitefield was a
mere twenty-odd minutes from Bangalore.
Brindavan, as the college-ashram was known, seemed cool and
peaceful compared to Puttaparthi's raging inferno. The very first
day I sat there waiting for this Brindavan darshan, Baba told me to
go over to his house. I assumed this meant an interview. It didn't.
Crammed into a room the size of a Volkswagen bus, I asked the
dignified old gentleman next to me what he did for a living. He was
president of India. A few yards away was the prime minister,
Narasimha Rao. He wasn't the prime minister then, of course, but
he would be by the time I visited India in 1992.
When Baba entered, we all stood, and he inspected us like a general
with very substandard troops. I was informed by Dr. Gokak - then
