Sai Baba the Master by E.Bharadwaja

[Guest guest]

Balabhate was a free-thinking merry-go-lucky type of man. He was a

mamlatdar at Kopergaon for five years, from 1904 to 1909. He used to say

that Baba was just a mad fakir and scoffed at those who visited Shirdi

often. Once some of his friends suggested that he should rather go and see

Baba before forming his opinion of him. So he accompanied them to Shirdi

and stayed there for five days. On the fifth day Sai Baba covered him with

a gerua or kashaya (ochre) robe. From that day Bhate was a changed man. He

did not care for earnings or work, and his only wish was to be at Shirdi

and serve Baba till the last moment of his life. Sai Baba made Dixit write

an application for leave for one year and, persuaded Bhate to sign it. The

District Collector granted him leave for one year. But at the end of the

year he still continued to be ‘mad after his guru’. He was granted a

compassionate pension of about Rs. 30/- p.m. as one afflicted with

‘religious melancholia’. When his friends asked him the reason for his

transformation he told them that the change came in him suddenly when Baba

put the gerua on him. “By that”, he said “my original frame of mind was

removed and, in its place, quite a new frame of mind was put in. After

that, attending to worldly duties – especially official duties – became

unthinkable”. He then lived at Shirdi, attending to his daily austerities,

like Upanishad-reading in the presence of Sai Baba and so on. Occasionally

Sai Baba offered useful comments on that reading. Bhate’s wife and family

came to Shirdi and lived with him.

 

The transformation of Bhate reminds us of the effect of Sri Ramakrishna’s

touch on Sri Vivekananda, the effect of the death-experience on Sri Ramana

in his sixteenth year and the effect of the guru’s touch on the boy

Tajhuddin who later became famous as Hazarat Tajuddin Baba of Nagpur. Such

perfect bhakti and his incapacity to attend to the merely bread-winning

official duties shows that he experienced certain higher form of samadhi

and that some of his higher charkas, to put it in yogic terminology, must

have been awakened. It is obvious that here, in Bhate, is one of those

very few that deserved something which Baba yearned to bestow on his

devotees.

 

(To be contd....)

 

Source http://www.saibharadwaja.org)