Vyasa Purnima, also known as Guru Purnima, commemorates the dawn of the venerated Saint Veda Vyasa, an incarnation of Lord Vishnu, with an exclusive mission of imparting wisdom to humankind. Today as we celebrate this auspicious occasion, I am flooded with the thoughts of my Guru.

Thanks to my mother, who fed my dinners in the corridors of Rasika Ranjani Sabha, in Chennai, India, while the entire family was listening to the discourse of my Guru, in that auditorium. Between the morsels of food that went in, I heard enchanting tales in the sweetest of voices I have known. I must have been only 4 years old then.

While addressing a gathering of hundreds of people, comprising Vedic scholars and spiritual aspirants, engrossed and seated like statues before him, to appeal with as much intensity to a playful 4-year-old, far away in the corridor, call it his inimitable style of narration or the power of the words he professed, to my mind it was the first taste of his kindness and grace.

In the years that followed, I grew up watching him, hearing him, and found utmost peace and life in all those still moments. It was a spectacular experience every time sitting through his two- hours discourses, spellbound and transported to a different world of Saints and Gods, laughing and crying, living through the stories and their emotions. Those moments were the most enriching of meditative experiences that I have been through. 

The words “Sthitha pragyanyasya ka bhasha?, Idham shareeram kounteya!, Kshipram bhavathi dharmatma!, Yo me bhaktha sa me priyaha!,” from the Bhagavad Gita that I first heard him utter in his discourse when I was 13 years old, their import though way beyond me, their sounds etched deep in my mind and still ring in my ears. 

Although I remain a faulting human after all, yet the feeling of being guided out of darkness every time reminds me to be grounded, grateful and aware of this guiding light.

If nourishment was what my mother intended to give me, I am thankful to her as much, for I felt nurtured and nourished, inside out and then on.