November 6th, 2009 - Day 19 of the yatra

 Sandeepany classes start at 5:30 with meditation.  A few of us made it to the meditation while others caught up with sleep.  All of us attended the 7:15AM class on Taitteriya Upanishad by Swami Advaitanandaji.  He left us with something to ponder – Satyam Vada can be summarized as follows –“THINK before you speak”.  T-H-I-N-K – which means speak : Truth, Helpful, Inspiring, Necessary and Kind.

After breakfast, we got a conducted tour by Mahesh Rao, brother of our own Chittaranjanji.  Starting with Vivekalaya and Vairagyalaya, the male student’s residence, where Gurudev first stayed and personally supervised the initial construction, we got to walk around and see the staff quarters, student quarters, offices, publications division and book stall before we were lead to Pujya Gurudev’s Kutia.  His Kutia is kept immaculately, and the attached satsang hall was beautifully decorated.  Sharadaji sang a bhajan which took us into a meditative mood.

All of us then poured into the bookstore.  It is bigger than it used to be, once this was reconstructed after the 50th anniversary celebrations, the book sales went from 65K to 6 lakhs annually.  It was hard to pull us away from the bookstore.

Pujya Guruji’s Satsang followed at 11 where he went over the history of Tara Cultural Trust, Central Chinmaya Mission Trust and Sandeepany.  He gave us a quick statistics on the number of students who apply, join, finish and practice under Chinmaya Mission on a given Vedanta Course.  It was quite an eye opener for us. He mentioned how the Brahmachari course is supported by donors like us and indeed one donor had sponsored two separate courses in their entirety.

Paduka Pooja followed lead by the resident Purohit at Sandeepany, who is a graduate of the first Purohit course held at Chockahalli. After this we had lunch where we enjoyed live bhajans by Brahmacharis!!!  What a wonderful treat and great atmosphere!

After lunch we quickly packed our belongings and got into two buses to head to Pune.  On our way, we stopped at the brand new Chinmaya Mission facility at Navi Mumbai, named as Chinmaya Prerana, just inaugurated this past Vijaya Dashami.  Since our bus driver missed the exit, we missed the show for Chinmaya Prerana, and ended up stopping there for a very quick snack break instead.

Back in the bus for Pune, and we stopped again at the Ganesha Temple, where Gurudev gave his first talk.  This is of prime historic importance to Chinmaya families.  This is located in an older part of Pune city and we were ably escorted there by the CHYKs from Chinmaya Mission, Pune who made sure that all our needs were taken care of during our visit. We got to enjoy beautiful bhajans by Kalyani there, did temple darshan and we were back in the bus heading to Kolwan.

We reached Kolwan by 8:45, where we were welcomed warmly by the Vibhooti sevaks and staff.  They efficiently showed us our rooms for a quick wash and after dinner, Guruji gave us the plans for tomorrow.