This is me around 14 years of age when I used to have long hair!
As you can see I was very happy at school.
I was brought up as a hindu, as far as my mum was able, though there weren't any hindu temples in yorkshire. We had a small prayer room and used to sing the sivapuranam in tamil and tamil thevarams(devotional songs). My dad bought a stack of Amar Chithra Katha Comic Books from India on all the great indian tales. I still have these. This is how I initially learnt all the inspiring hindu stories. The comics have beautiful illustrations.
Our friends gave us a Children's Bible with pictures one christmas, and I remember particularly enjoying the old testament stories. In those days, schools in england had assemblies where we sang hymns, said the Lord's Prayer and had readings from the bible. Every year we had a carol service, and I still love carols. We went to the local Salvation Army Sunday school with the neighbour's kids. Eventually we had a picture of Jesus in our prayer room.
My dad learnt about Sai Baba from my aunt in Sri Lanka and we attended Sai Baba Bhajans in Bradford and Leeds where there were a lot of indian gujarati followers. This was the first time I met gujarati people, and I remember the bhajans were sung beautifully with accompaniment on tabla and harmonium. We had very tasty gujarati vegetarian food afterwards. We met one sri lankan tamil family through this and Aunty Manga taught us the chanting of sanskrit stotras and mantras.
My mum prayed regularly and still does, every morning without fail. My dad took an interest in reading and discussing religious books. He took us to a TM meditation course in sheffield and we used to go to some discussions in various people's houses. I remember reading "The Autobiography of a Yogi" in those days.
In the summer of 1978 we visited sri lanka for the first time since we left, saw all our relatives and toured parts of the country. We also went to south india for 2 weeks, my first visit to india. We flew into Trichy, was blessed by an elephant at the Ganapati Temple, went to Madurai Meenakshi Temple and had darshan of Sai Baba at Puttapatti.
It was around age 14, that I had a serious interest in yoga. I had no opportunity to go to any class but I had an old indian book on Yoga with black and white photographs. I remember going through it, getting up early as instructed, drinking hot milk with honey, and trying out some of the yoga poses. I was especially fond of sitting in the lotus and rocking in it.
No comments:
Post a Comment