Tag Archives: Bangalore

Trip to India – Part 5

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Wife, Sowmya, and a friend of the latter employed themselves the next day mostly shopping (goodness knows what they shopped – I think my wife bought a shalwar chameez). I stayed home, mostly  sipping warm lassy. The following day (Saturday) my wife was taken by Ravi (our taxi driver) to visit two temples and she took some photos. Next day – Sunday – we all went to the karyalaya, centre of activities of Sw. Subraya Sharma. A large group of students, both young and adult, were sitting around in the large room – as they do every Sunday – to study Advaita Vedanta under the direction of Subraya Sharma. They all speak Kannada (definitely better than they do English, at least to my ear), so no problem. Continue reading →

Trip to India – 3

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On the third day Sowmya, my wife and I went over to Ramachandra’s house and he accompanied us to visit Subraya Sharma. Ramachandra Iyer, a saintly swami with a persistent gentle smile in his face and of few words, is someone you can be quite at ease with in company, so unobstructive and unassuming  is he. Sowmya  (I was told) calls him ‘uncle’, even if there is no blood relationship between them. He has just turned 72 years of age and lives with his wife, one son and his wife, and two young  and sprightly grand-daughters.

At Subraya Sharma’s home (he is the one who took care of Swamiji for 16 years of the latter’s life) we were offered milk in a small glass and some granulated sugar (one was supposed to drink the milk and swallow the sugar after putting it in the palm of one’s hand and may be grind it between one’s teeth before swallowing – this is what I did). Continue reading →

Trip to India – 2

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As I wrote in part l of this Travelog, I never expected that I would be talking on three occasions in front of an audience and in three different locations. Before departing to India I had asked Sowmya (a 29 years old MD and accomplished Advitist) what could I talk about if the occasion arose, assuming that there would be at least one presentation I should be making. Sowmya told me that the topic  could be the article I wrote (published serially in Advaita Vision in 2017) in defense of SSSS (‘Swamiji’ henceforth) which took me so long to write – 16 pp long vs. the 40 pp of the article by Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian. Continue reading →

Trip to India

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Trip to India – l

(Don’t expect here a sequel to ‘A Search of Sacred India’, by the well-known author Paul Brunton)The thought of going to India came to mind – despite my advancing age and unsteady gait- through the contact with a user of Quora with whom I had been relating quite well through that medium. There are a number of such users who are either followers of the great Vedantin of the past Century, Shri Satchidanandendra Saraswati, or acquainted with his writings. Through that contact I learned that two Swami-s who took care of SSSS, one of them during the last 16 years of his life and the other during the last year (1975) were still alive and living in Bangalore, the city where my contact, Sowmya, lives (there must of course be other close followers of that sage in other areas of India, but we are now talking about Bangalore (or Bengaluru, as recently renamed) and some of the people who live there. With the indispensable help and support of my wife, we took to India without thinking it twice. Continue reading →