“I have come for your sake” - UG

UG and family

Countless were the times when UG stood by my side and steadied my life boat rocked by life’s swirling waters.

Anyone who dares to follow the dictates of one’s heart and refuses to toe the line and trod the narrow, beaten pathways of society or culture, would inevitably end up like the boat at the mercy of 'high winds on high seas'.

As I plunged headlong into my relentless spiritual pursuits and other social misadventures, it was UG, who played the key role of an anchor! His sagely and timely advice in moments of crisis greatly replenished my inner strength and courage. He made sure that one would never get sucked into the whirlpool of self-doubt and despair.

I had lived out such a checkered life! I was naïve and credulous, vulnerable and sentimental. Idealistic and dreamy to a fault, I would surrender my time, energies and finances to anything that appealed to me as noble and honourable. Perhaps these personal traits or infirmities were the ‘warty outgrowth’ of my value system!

My list of misadventures included unconditional, dedicated services to gurus or spiritual guides, who I naively believed, selflessly worked for the good of the world. At some point, I had also slogged as a freelance activist crusading against the ‘white collar crimes’ perpetrated by wily bankers, hell-bent on exploiting financially illiterate masses through dubious finance schemes and options.

I was blissfully unaware of the traps of social life and largely remained ignorant about the dangers involved while essaying the role of the good Samaritan!

Once on seeing me carry an old, invalid lady into an ambulance (Major’s mother-in-law in the Bangalore farmhouse), UG had gently chided me placing his palm on my chest, mockingly reading my heart, “Sir! I can feel the beats of your heart – you have a do-gooder’s high” but quickly added, “No sir! Am just joking! Thank you so much for helping her!”

That was me, impulsive, overly-sensitive, not really given to much thinking, planning or premeditation.

During the heady days of my active social life, salary was my only source of income. It was decent by any standard but fell woefully short of the demands placed on me by my own relentless social engagement. To support my beliefs and social commitments, I needed tons and tons of cash. Money had to be raised somehow. From where the finance was sourced hardly mattered , as long as it was legitimate! It could be a high-interest personal loan from a predatory bank or a high-risk credit card from a blood-thirsty multi-national bank. As long as they met my huge demand for ready cash to support an egalitarian mission, I thought all risks were worth taking!

My naiveté and foolhardiness knew no bounds.

Slowly but surely my finances were spinning out of control and I was getting hurled towards the brink of financial disaster. The writing was on the wall but I was a blind man, blinded by the glare of my ideals and values!

My fragile finances started to bleed. My monthly outgo toward loans was so huge that it siphoned off my entire salary on day one! Really speaking, I was no more than a well clothed beggar with a concrete roof over my head! To make matters worse, I was in charge of three hungry mouths. My wife and two little children had to be taken care of too!

To sustain myself, I started borrowing heavily and began to shop around for high-risk, high-liquidity credit cards. Many of my 'do-gooder' activities required instant cash! I somehow managed to get hold of not just one but three credit cards! I was plain broke and so would draw cash from one credit card to pay off the monthly outgo of another card and also continue to finance my social projects at the same time. This indeed is the most expensive form of credit. At one point, I had maxed the credit limit on all of my three cards! That essentially meant that my repayments primarily went towards servicing of the huge interest component rather than repayment of the principal amount!

The compounded interest on the ‘roll-over’ credit of a typical credit card could be anywhere up to a whopping 58% p.a., based on a beguiling 3% monthly interest that sounds harmless!

This is a gut-wrenching piece of math and truth!

The financial wisdom, “Credit card is for convenience and not for credit” eluded me at the time! Though an engineer by profession, I was ‘financially-illiterate’ a bloke unaware of the traps of high-finance and the fraud-ridden ‘fine print’!

It was Terman who nailed it, when he said, “Reading the fine print is education; not reading the fine print is experience!”

My car, purchased on credit, gathered dust and rust in my parking lot with a dry fuel tank. I was not able to afford gasoline! I began to walk the streets of Bombay while on daily errands unable to afford the auto rickshaw and resorted to public transport while commuting to office!

Unsuspectingly, I had walked into a ‘Debt Trap’ - the most feared form of financial illness of modern times - the bane of salaried middle classes across the globe who endlessly borrow to satisfy their ever growing greed for comfort and style !

Deep down, I had at least the satisfaction that all my borrowed money had gone primarily towards sponsoring social causes, serving many an egalitarian purpose. I was financially down but not out! Somewhere deep inside of me, I heard a sanely voice that egged me on, ‘Keep on going! This Too Would Pass’!

I had borrowed money from every available source with interest rates ranging from single to double digits! In spite of the crisis, I had never defaulted on a single loan!  I continued to remain 'respectable'!

I told myself 'enough is enough' and decided to take charge of my tottering finances. All through the crisis, I stubbornly refused to seek help from my dad or brother, who I knew, would not hesitate to stretch their fragile finances in order to dole me out of my dire straits. I didn't want to bother or burden anyone!

I took the responsibility for my mess and earnestly and sincerely started working towards a solution. It kept eluding me for quite a while!

Finally I did what anyone would do under such gruelling circumstances. I decided to consolidate all my loans into a single fat loan financed from a public sector bank with a simple and transparent interest rate. Thus I would end up paying a single monthly installment and would not be saddled anymore with multiple, needless and burdensome transactions. If I were lucky, I might even end up with some extra money that I could use for my purposes after settling all the existing loans! I would certainly gain some traction!

Why choose a public sector bank? Because these banks in India still have a face! If you discover a scam, you could slap a manager! Yes, he or she is still human and hence answerable and accountable for your hard earned money. But you can never nail a private or an MNC bank! Private bank is just a piece of faceless electronics –it is essentially the answering machine! You can hardly penetrate the thick-layer of pseudo customer-care ('customer-scare', really!) when you are faced with a real problem. You will get bounced around with various push button options or worse will be subjected to the never-ending recorded voice messages or boring tunes. 

Many scams get perpetrated on the guileless public, thanks to the façade of the phone banking system and its ubiquitous answering machine!

Finally, I zeroed down on a bank for seeking the 'mother of all loans'! I promptly submitted my documents and complied with all their instructions. I was pinning my big hope on this big loan that would end my big trouble. As the bank pursued its due-diligence, I crossed my fingers and waited with bated breath!

As days passed, my anxiety grew and finally my sanction letter arrived through the courier. I was in for a rude shock! My loan eligibility was Rs. 40, 000 said the letter, less than half of my take-home salary!  

Gosh! My salary income from my airline job combined with my mortgaged home together with my hypothecated car, all of these added to my net worth of Rs. 40, 000! The harsh reality was that my credit worthiness was not very different from the net-worth of a stone cutter or a plumber who slogged hard for his daily bread!

I was brutally hurt! I stayed back home that evening contemplating of my next course of action. Sleep deserted me as I mulled over my worth in the eyes of the financial world and recounted my looming liabilities and commitments. As my wife and children slept in the next room, unable to sleep , I began pacing up and down in the main hall, through the night, unable to digest the piece of truth. 

Yes, it was a shocking proof that I was indeed a financial wreck and could no longer survive under the circumstances without some angelic intervention.

It was nearly 3 0' clock in the wee hours of the morning when my physical and mental exhaustion finally took hold of me and I dropped down on my sofa and fell fast asleep.

I suddenly woke up to a call from Kamal, my friend! The time was 4:30 a.m. Kamal gleefully announced, "UG has just arrived in Bombay. Am calling from airport. He is on a short visit! He wants to see you. Start immediately. (UG was shouting 'Pronto!' in the background). See you soon at Parekhji's place, am about to drive him there!"

By the time I made my way to Santacruz, many UG friends had already arrived at Parekhji's place. As I settled down on the floor in front of UG, he turned to me, looked me in the eye with great intensity and poignantly remarked, "Sir, I have come for your sake!"

It was instant relief!

Coming straight from UG, given my plight, his words meant a world to me! It was the most reassuring statement I had heard in years! Only the one who is connected to you at such a deep level could offer such assurance and confidence.

Only UG, it appeared in the entire world knew what I was going through!

Needless to say, my difficulties soon came to an end! Shortly after UG's trip, I found a friendly bank manager who forwarded my loan application with high recommendation citing my 'impeccable' record of previous loan repayments and got me a sizable loan to help me knock off all my existing liabilities.

I was given a lease of life! First time in years I started breathing easy!

My deadly encounter with the debt-trap had left me with invaluable lessons on personal finance. Through this nerve-wracking experience, I garnered tremendous insights about housing and personal finance - the bedrock of social finance!

I began to share my learning with all and counselled many of my colleagues and friends on personal finance. I played the role of a lead negotiator for my airline and crusaded against unethical and unfair trade practices of financial institutions in the ill-regulated Indian banking sector. This effort earned me the much coveted invitation from the Indian Express group to do columns for their Sunday Express supplement.

UG in a strange way had come to my rescue and had averted a paralysing disaster! When he learnt of the invitation from the media group, he openly and unequivocally supported my role as a columnist on financial literacy.

  

" Poverty Will Never Be Eradicated!" - UG

Slum and shanty posters alongside Swiss rail tracks (2010)

It was somewhere in the late 90s.

UG was in Mumbai and was put up in Bandra in Mukesh Bhatt's ( Film Director Mahesh Bhatt's brother) place.

Nataraj, the German astrologer and self were hanging out with UG that sultry afternoon.

Nothing much was happening. At some point, UG went over to the balcony and stayed out for a very long time.

Curious to know what kept him busy, I joined him at the balcony. There he was with his hands folded behind, motionless, looking transfixed at a 'chawl' (slum in Hindi), right in front of the apartment! It was a beehive of activity with cascading rows of shanties and crisscrossing lanes, bursting with people, full of noise.

After watching the scene for a while, I finally broke the silence and muttered, "UG, these poor people live in such pathetic conditions!".

UG shot back,

"Sir! Poverty will never be eradicated. It supports many lucrative careers. It will be maintained at all costs! 

Ending poverty means end of career for the politician who gets elected on the promise of ending poverty; 

It will finish the saint who peddles hope & salvation to the miserable and 

Will put an end to the box office collections of our man (referring to Mahesh Bhatt) who sells dreams to all those hopeless people. 

Tell me ! Do you think, you and I will ever buy a ticket, that too in black, to watch his worthless films? It is these people who have made him rich!"

Leaves me wondering about the message of those posters in the picture - Is that a stark reminder of the harsh poverty across the globe ? Or is that art and entertainment for the rich on a jaunt in Switzerland?

"Let him go! You are only prolonging his suffering by holding on " – UG

 

Kamal, a long time UG friend, went through a terrible crisis during the days his dear father lay sick in Delhi battling out cancer in its most deadly and 
painful form. 

He, like any of us in such circumstances, tried real hard to save dad's life and left no stone unturned to get the best medical care out there and to see if dad could somehow survive and live on for some more years for their sake.

It was indeed a losing battle and the disease continued unabated, wreaking havoc as it spread across vital organs. I recall Kamal sourcing most expensive medication all the way from London, a single shot costing as much as $500 to be given on a daily basis! Human love and sentiment knows no limits!

Death is a 'moment of truth'!

No sooner than his father was admitted into the Intensive Care, Kamal turned to his only source of strength and succor, UG for advice! Calls to Switzerland became regular and every twist and turn was reported. UG would calmly listen to the long distance calls and let Kamal unreservedly express his pain, fear, hope and sentiment. UG did not check him even once!

As days progressed, calls from the hospital turned more frequent and the inevitable began to stare the family in the face!

Finally, in a last ditch attempt, Kamal called on his ever reliable friend, philosopher and guide UG to provide him with a solution!

UG remained a mute listener all through the call and heard out Kamal for the last time. Kamal was now almost on the verge of breakdown! 

UG poignantly said, "Kamal! Don't hold onto your father! Let him go! You are only prolonging his suffering by holding on! You have no right to make him suffer just for your sake!"

UG's words hit him hard, it suddenly opened his eyes to a piece of naked truth that had escaped him all along – the danger of human sentiments and how they could wreak a havoc in people's lives! We could remain blissfully unaware of what a suffering soul undergoes when he or she has to simply respect and reciprocate our feelings, our expression of love and affection. Sentiments could be blinding, binding, demanding and debilitating!

Kamal was a changed man as he put down the receiver. He had received a lesson for a lifetime!

This extraordinary lesson from Kamal's life helped me immensely as it was my turn to witness my comatose dad slowly decay away in front of my own eyes. As the doctors in the intensive care kept pumping chemicals into the withering body and kept resuscitating the heart every now and then, I could hear UG's words ringing clearly in my ears. They steeled my spine giving me a tremendous inner strength to take a call and halt my father from being made into a vegetable. There was even the likelihood of amputating one of his limbs as the gangrene had set in.

As it turned out, UG was my savior too! A senior surgeon at the hospital where dad lay in comatose happened to be UG's friend and he promptly came to our rescue. He greatly helped us in releasing him from the clutches of the clueless medical fraternity and technology by letting my old man slip away naturally and gracefully. He breathed his last very soon without having to suffer further torture of life support systems that had needlessly prolonged his suffering for weeks!

In fact, I had received a timely call from Major Dakshinamurti, a very close associate of UG, bang in the middle of this crisis! The call was a reminder of my responsibility and duty, a call to respect my old man's death as much as I regarded his life! It was a wake-up call not to disregard dad's situation anymore! He had already lived all of his rich and full life of 85 years, body had served him well and now it was slowly turning into a liability!

UG had strangely intervened and helped through a friend!

Countless friends have benefitted from the stoic and sagacious UG, his powerful words, when they had to confront the death of their near and dear ones!

UG never preached but lived out his words. He walked the talk!

UG's extraordinary strength and fortitude were on display during his own son Vasant's death. Kaushalya Ben, Parekhji's wife recalls the day when UG's son died. UG was their guest in Bombay at the time. When she knocked on his door early that morning with his cup of coffee, she was shocked to discover that UG had already left home to be at the hospital. UG, it appears had a hunch about the impending tragedy and had walked several kilometers, on foot, all the way from Santa Cruz to the far away hospital in downtown!

When UG discovered that the hospital would not let him have the possession of the body till he settled the pending bills, he laughed out loud at the irony and pointing to Mahesh Bhatt said, "You can forget about your sentiments and solemnity surrounding death. In the end it all comes down to money."

In 'Mind is a Myth', someone queries UG: "Some of your followers want to scatter your ashes…" and UG replies:

"What for? Very often people ask me, ' Are you not going to leave any instructions on how we should dispose of your dead body?' What the hell! Who wants to leave any instructions? It will begin to smell and become a nuisance to society…It's not my problem, but society's"

In a dispassionate voice UG called up Chandrasekhar Babu from Switzerland and gently reminded him to extract and recover the gold tooth from valentine's body before her cremation.

One is reminded of the ancient tale from China that bolsters UG's stance on the end-game, "Death is a shuffling of atoms, a balancing of energy!"  

On seeing Chuang Tzu, the Taoist sage, playing a drum and singing next to his wife's dead body, his friend Hui Tzu was shocked and wanted to know the reason for the inexplicable behavior:

Chuang Tzu said, “That is not how it is. When she just died, how could I not feel grief? But I looked deeply into it and saw that she was lifeless before she was born. She was also formless and there was not any energy. Somewhere in the vast imperceptible universe there was a change, an infusion of energy, and then she was born into form, and into life. Now the form has changed again, and she is dead. Such death and life are like the natural cycle of the four seasons. My dead wife is now resting between heaven and earth. If I wail at the top of my voice to express my grief, it would certainly show a failure to understand what is fated. Therefore I stopped.”   

When we reached the electric crematorium to perform the last rites of my father, a huge painting on the immense wall greeted us at the main hall. This was my first ever visit to such a place. This was a painting of Lord Shiva, revered as the Lord and God Head by the Hindus. It was a gentle reminder to me that we were now guests at His abode! Graveyard is supposed to be Lord Shiva's place of residence!

I wondered at the wisdom of sages in conjuring up such magnificent and grand symbols.  What a contrast this is –Lord Shiva is sculpted as 'lingam' , a phallus, a symbol of creation in the holy temple but the same Shiva is depicted as the Lord of Death in a graveyard, the final destination in the human sojourn.

When we had set out from the hospital mortuary, a priest had joined in the hearse to accompany us and to help us perform the final rites. He carried with him a tape of Vishnu Sahasranamam, an ancient, timeless hymn extolling the thousand forms of the Lord that kept us engaged throughout the final journey.

Lord Vishnu is considered as the Lord of Life (Energy) and was being invoked even at the solemn moment of Death. This hymn is a replay of the original instance where it was first chanted during Bhishma's death in the holy epic of Mahabharata!

Lord Vishnu and Lord Shiva, one a Celebration of Life , another a Celebration of Death depict the obverse and reverse of the same coin in the Hindu pantheon of gods which holds Life and Death as a unitary process!

Another equally popular hymn sang at ceremonies commemorating the dead is Sri Rudram, a favourite of UG , also immensely liked for its import and sonorous rendition by Mahatma Gandhi. There is an interesting verse therein:

 ( Oh Death in The Form of Rudra ! Those countless nooses of Yours by which You destroy all mortal creatures, we shall loosen them by the efficiency of our worship of you. I offer this sacred food offering in sacrifice to Rudra, the Lord of Death!)

When I had first conveyed the news of my dad's death to brother, he was shocked. He had hardly slept a wink during the night vigils, almost for two years and had relentlessly, untiringly nursed my dad! He initially resisted the idea of letting go of his life support before finally giving his consent, "If he gives me a chance, I would love to serve him some more!"

When the end came, my brother was deeply affected and went silent for a while. On the morning of immersing his ashes in Cauvery River, he thoughtfully observed, "See Death is so kind! Imagine if there is no end to suffering and pain –Life would then become a torture! That is why I think we extoll Mrityu Devata (Lord of Death) as part of our daily worship !"

  

In a true incident, an old dying grandmother advised her grandson, incidentally my friend, "Please tell your father not to put a tombstone on my grave and prevent grass or plant growing on it!"