10th and 11th June

Ganga Dusherra

The day that Bhageerath brought Ganga on earth.  There was a program in the evening.  Again, very good speakers and totally worth it wait for 2 hrs to sit in the front. 

The messages were:

•  Simple living and high thinking.
• Discipline yourself: your senses (especially tongue),  thought (don’t think, say, listen or talk bad), eating, money, time. 
• Control your mind (buddhi), pride (ahankaar), and thought (chitt).  These all are part of man.  However your decision is made by your buddhi.  So try to discipline  your buddhi by using Gayatri mantra and concentrating on one thing – best is the rising sun. 
• Man is supposed to be the superior species so how did we become so low in our actions? Your man is like an elephant – big and untamed.  To tame it you have to ask God for help.  
• Gayatri mantra is like the universal mother, she will give you what you ask for – so be careful what you wish for. 
• The person who does wrong never thinks he is doing wrong, he thinks he is right and everyone in the world is wrong.

Personal View

I have gone back to my old eating habits: samosas, dosas and jalebis! Shantikunj is full of people!! There are crowds everywhere, people are sleeping under the stars.  But no one cares where they sleep so long they have a mattress and a place to lie down.  Privacy has no meaning in Indian culture. There are public bathrooms everywhere and food is free in the bhojanalay.  Clothes are hanging out to dry everywhere...it is a huge city inside a city.  In a way it is nice to see that everyone is getting along.  I have not seen a single altercation or crime happening.  People may be rude or unhelpful but at least they are not having a full blown fight.   There is no doubt that Sharma ji has done something amazing in this place.

11^th June - Gayatri Jayanti

Got up really early (4 am) to find a nice spot up front to hear Dr. Pandya and Jiji.  I will never do that again –after sitting for 3 hours on the floor I was not in any shape to listen with complete attention.

Dr. Pandya spoke about the importance of Gayatri mantra and meditation. 

• Thoughts – thoughts should be changed for the better. 
• Character – after thinking about what you have done right or wrong, change your character for the better. 
• Action – apply action in your life – don’t just sit and think about things.  Get up and do things. 
• Meditation brings us closer to ourselves so we look inward instead of outward.

Evening program was the deep yagya.  Very pretty ceremony and really nice lecture also.  A lot of it was repetition of the earlier nine days – but still nice to recap.

Personal thoughts

There was a whole list of things to do today  including visiting the “Akhand Deep”…but the line was so long that I did not have the guts to stand with Maya in the humidity and the sun, and besides I was soooo hungry, I had been up since 4 am and now it was 11am.  So I decided to battle the crowd for lunch instead.  Victory was sweet and very tasty.  (For once food was actually tasty!!)

Luckily the other NRIs and I were invited by the Abroad Cell to visit Akhand Deep and get blessings from Dr. Pandya and Jiji separately.  Lucky us!! So I did everything Maya did, only sooner.  The other nice part of this was that I got to meet some of my fellow NRIs.