GURU STORIES | we saw ourselves standing on the stage, with Guruji staring at us! WOW! What a miracle.

We all are well versed with the way we behave when GURUJI is our town, right? And no matter how many teachers educate us on how to behave, we end up being just the opposite! One such was my story. It was a great day for all of us studying in IIT Delhi. Guruji was to visit us that day! We sat in the IIT common room for the volunteer’s session with Avinash Tiku, who was preparing us for Guruji’s upcoming visit to Delhi, explaining to us that it is not wise to ‘chase’ the Master, especially when He is in our own city, and that it is way more important for us to ensure that new members of the Art of living, or the new volunteers should get their own moments with Guruji. This made complete sense to almost all of us in that room. Guruji was in Delhi the next day, big reason to be happy. But a bigger reason was that He had agreed to give an hour of His time to all the YES!+ volunteers. This much awaited session was being organised by a dynamic group of teachers and volunteers in an auditorium in South Delhi. My duty for that particular day was to ensure that every individual in the IIT campus, who was interested in meeting Sri Sri, should get a fair chance to meet Him! We quickly floated messages, emails and pasted posters in the campus and decided on meeting at the “round-about” at 5 pm sharp (for the session was to begin at 6:30 pm). As usual, by the time we gathered our friends and acquaintances, it was already 6pm! No one wanted to miss meeting Guruji, and so to ease the restlessness in the volunteers, I started sending them in groups in different autos that were available. Finally at 6:25 pm, it was just the four of us left. We quickly grabbed the last auto and asked him to fly us to the auditorium. All of us were extremely happy that we would finally get to meet our master after months of wait; we were deciding on different kinds of questions we would ask Him, and while our excitement grew, my phone rang. It was an unknown number. I hurriedly picked up my phone and a girl spoke to me; she was incidentally from my hostel. She had not done the AOL programme yet, but was very eager to meet Sri Sri. She was in her first year and felt terribly scared to travel alone. A big dilemma set into me, for it had already been 10 minutes since we had crossed the IIT campus, so going back to the campus and picking up that girl clearly meant we lose out on 30 minutes with Guruji. This was a struggle between my conscience and my mind, and well, my conscience won! We reversed our auto and decided to go back and pick up that girl from my hostel gate. It was 7 pm and we were now 5 of us, and no-where near the auditorium! My mind was in a state of complete chaos – “What if I miss Him?”, “What about my question?”, “Will I get a seat so that I at least get a glimpse of Him?”, “Please GURUJI, delay this event”, “Oh! Why do I always have to be nice”, “Why can’t autos have wings? We finally reached the venue at 7:20 pm, almost an hour late. But then what happened next was completely inexplicable! We ran towards the main entrance, and this tall lanky guard stopped us. He said to us, “This is not the right entrance for you, I will suggest another entrance”. He pointed at some door. We didn’t argue much, nor did we apply our heads, we just barged into the door. I was running first, and behind me were my four friends. The door was just leading us onto some sort of a maze, a maze made up of cardboards and flower pots, and I was convinced that we had lost our way. We still kept running, and before we could even realize anything, we saw ourselves standing on the stage, with Guruji staring at us! WOW! What a miracle. Inadvertently, the guard had made us enter the auditorium through the backstage!! Guruji saw the four of us and laughed and told us to sit on the stage itself (as the auditorium was jam packed). I was so grateful. A few moments ago I had been grumbling and complaining to myself, while just the next moment, I was sitting right under the nose of my Master and blushing, as HE winked at me saying “Happy?" JGD. 

- Shreya