Glimmers of A Guru so Vast

Pooja V@mnp_pvk

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#1 · May 29, 2026, 12:49 pm

Quote from Pooja V on May 29, 2026, 12:49 pm
Muni Guru

First Memory:

My first memory of Guru is that of his sonorous voice, as heard while climbing the Brahma Vidya Mandiram pathway, on my way to attend my first Varkala Gurukula Convention.

On reaching the top I learnt that the subject was Janani Navaratna Manjari. I did not understand anything much that day. To an already apprehensive me, in a subject completely alien, it was a downer. I felt like a tenth class student with no clue of the core subject I was supposed to have learnt by then.

There was a huge sense of lack and guilt, of having failed at something important in life, but I could not get what it was. I could see a mountain in front, with no view of the access up. But there was also something age-old and fierce within, that was yearning to seek that road and its ways.

An Interaction:

Once when I met Guru I asked him the foremost cause of frustration in my mind at that time, when it came to Gurukula studies. Prof. Sabu had advised me to start from “Autobiography of an Absolutist” as a first step towards Nataraja Guru. And try as I might it was a mighty strain trying to decode his language. It was looping my brain wires hither thither. When content by itself is often inscrutable, language convolutions can make the path to understanding doubly difficult. So I asked Muni Guru the reason for the convolution in language. He said it was possibly the norm in those days, using Victorian English. That Nataraja Guru may have acquired or adapted his language during his European education period. That beautiful simple insight suddenly quelled my bafflement, thereby giving a little ease in approaching Nataraja Guru's autobiography.

Tribute:

I have had the good fortune of interacting with Guru only a few times over so many years. But the connect with his words and presence felt real and impactful every time. And I comfort myself in having had the good fortune of being at the least a passive listener and reader of the Gurukula and some of its Masters, both living and late. Ever grateful to, and offering prayers and flowers at the feet of the at-times child-like, always a master Muni Guru, who helped guide me along the charted and uncharted roads in the dense jungle of his Guru lineage' wisdom.

Love and Light

Pooja V

Muni Guru

First Memory:

My first memory of Guru is that of his sonorous voice, as heard while climbing the Brahma Vidya Mandiram pathway, on my way to attend my first Varkala Gurukula Convention.

On reaching the top I learnt that the subject was Janani Navaratna Manjari. I did not understand anything much that day. To an already apprehensive me, in a subject completely alien, it was a downer. I felt like a tenth class student with no clue of the core subject I was supposed to have learnt by then.

There was a huge sense of lack and guilt, of having failed at something important in life, but I could not get what it was. I could see a mountain in front, with no view of the access up. But there was also something age-old and fierce within, that was yearning to seek that road and its ways.

An Interaction:

Once when I met Guru I asked him the foremost cause of frustration in my mind at that time, when it came to Gurukula studies. Prof. Sabu had advised me to start from “Autobiography of an Absolutist” as a first step towards Nataraja Guru. And try as I might it was a mighty strain trying to decode his language. It was looping my brain wires hither thither. When content by itself is often inscrutable, language convolutions can make the path to understanding doubly difficult. So I asked Muni Guru the reason for the convolution in language. He said it was possibly the norm in those days, using Victorian English. That Nataraja Guru may have acquired or adapted his language during his European education period. That beautiful simple insight suddenly quelled my bafflement, thereby giving a little ease in approaching Nataraja Guru's autobiography.

Tribute:

I have had the good fortune of interacting with Guru only a few times over so many years. But the connect with his words and presence felt real and impactful every time. And I comfort myself in having had the good fortune of being at the least a passive listener and reader of the Gurukula and some of its Masters, both living and late. Ever grateful to, and offering prayers and flowers at the feet of the at-times child-like, always a master Muni Guru, who helped guide me along the charted and uncharted roads in the dense jungle of his Guru lineage' wisdom.

Love and Light

Pooja V

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