I have bowed before only one sanyasi in my life, and that is Sri
Chandrasekhar Saraswathi, known to the world as the Parmacharya. It is
not that I am arrogant or that I have no respect for sanyasis and
sadhus. In fact I respect many sadhus in this country for their
learning and social services. But my upbringing, first in an English
convent school, and then ten years in USA had created a distance
between me and traditional Hindu culture of bowing and prostrating
before any elder, or anyone in saffron clothes. Therefore, I was the
“modern” Indian, believer in science, and with little concern for
spiritual diversions.
In fact till the age of 30, I had not even heard of a god like human
being called Sri Chandrasekhar Saraswathi. It was a chance meeting
with an Indian student at Harvard in his room in the university
hostel, that I saw a picture of Parmacharya on top of this student’s
TV set. I asked him: “Who is he? And why are you keeping his picture?”
The student just avoided the question. I also forgot about it, except
that Parmacharya shining smiling face in that photograph got etched in
my memory. Six years later, as my Pan American Airways plane was about
to land at Delhi airport during the Emergency, I saw that smiling
Parmacharya’s face reappear before me for a brief second for no reason
at that time. I was coming to Delhi surreptitiously to make my now
famous appearance in Parliament and subsequent disappearance, while a
MISA warrant was pending for my arrest in the Emergency. At that
moment, as the plane landed, I resolved that whenever the Emergency
gets over, I shall search for Parmacharya and meet him.
In 1977, after the Emergency was over, and the Janata Party in Power I
went to Kanchipuram to see the Parmacharya. It was in sheer curiosity
that I went. Some friends arranged for me to come before him. It was a
hot June evening, and Parmacharya was sitting in a cottage, a few
kilometers outside Kanchipuram. As soon as he saw me, he abruptly got
up, and turned his back on me, and went inside the cottage. My friends
who took me there were greatly embarrassed, and I was puzzled. Since
no body including the other sadhus at that ashram had any idea what
went wrong, I told my friends that we should leave, since Parmacharya
was not interested in giving me “darshan”.
From the cottage, we walked a few hundred yards to where my car, by
which I had come to the ashram, had been parked. Just as I was getting
into the car, a priest came running to me. He said “Parmacharya wants
to see you, so please come back”. Again puzzled, I walked back to the
cottage.
Back at the cottage, a smiling Parmacharya was waiting for me. He
first asked me in Tamil: “Do you understand Tamil?” I nodded. In those
days, I hardly knew much Tamil, but I hoped the Parmacharya would
speak in the simplest Tamil to make it easy to understand.
He then asked me another question: “Who gave you permission to leave
my cottage?” The Tamil word he used for “permission” was of Sanskrit
origin, which I immediately understood. So in my broken Tamil with a
mixture of English words, I replied: “Since you turned your back on me
and went inside the cottage, I thought you did not want to see me.”
This reply greatly irritated the priest standing in attendance on the
Parmacharya.
He said “You cannot talk like this to the Parmacharya”. But
Parmacharya asked him to be silent, and then said that when he saw me,
he was reminded of a press cutting he had been keeping in store inside
the cottage and he had gone inside to fetch it.
Leave a Reply