Girish's Blog

SINDAVADAR ASHRAM, MORBI, GUJARAT 11-13 JULY Jai Baba Swami This time we decided to fly down to Rajkot rather than drive down. We reached the Ashram early morning at 8.30pm. The registration for the event was in the region of 9100-200, and if you take a 10% dropout average from past experience we still had 8300-400 sadhaks for the event. Lots of sadhaks had already reached the Ashram and had selected their bedding slots in the available residential zones. Due to a heavy downpour a couple of days earlier some of the arrangements made had got washed out, hence under emergency mode alternative arrangements had to be made. So the eating area was converted into living quarters so that the sadhaks could be accommodated. Also the exhibition had been cancelled and this area had been converted into Sahitya, donation counter, etc. Due to this situation the beds could not be numbered and hence it was a first come first served kind of a situation. We (Anant Khamankar, Ramnath Kamath...

I would like to begin by giving a brief background on the preparations for this unique Gurupurnima. In the last one month or so before July 21, I had been to Dandi on three of the Sundays and to be honest with you I used to wonder how such a gigantic task would get accomplished. Mind you, I had full faith in the Guru energies and in Pratapbhai’s organisational capacity and commitment to have the preparations completed in time. Just the Sunday before GP 2013, the heavens had opened up and the rains had really made the ground soggy and only the frame for the massive pandal had been put up. (When Pujya Swamiji had made us pray for rains in Shirdi and all over India, we had no doubts that there would be plentiful rains – but rain to such an extent and spread all over the country has not been witnessed in a very long time!) In fact I had been praying for the rains to stop for some time, and fortunately that day, the sun smiled at us after almost a week of incessant and heavy rains. As the ...