STRONG CRITIC BECAME STAUNCH DEVOTEE OF BABA

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STRONG CRITIC BECAME STAUNCH DEVOTEE OF BABA

Balabhate was a freethinking 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 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 his 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

Bate 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 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 Tajuddin

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

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

chakras, 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.

(Written by: HH Pujya Acharya E. Bharatwaja in Sai Baba the Master)

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