Early India tours

The second India tour was 1979-80 and that began with flying from the UK to Delhi with Shri Mataji. We stayed at Shri Mataji’s daughter’s house. It was a tour, but it wasn’t like the ones that followed because we used to just travel around in either the car with Mother or we used to go in the train between places. We were there two and a half months.

My remembrance of Delhi was that it was a circle of about half a dozen Sahaja Yogis and we had a Shivaratri Puja, which was on the roof of Sadhana didi’s house. There couldn’t have been more than fifty, a hundred people at the very most because the roof wasn’t that big. Mother said Delhi was a bit westernised and that’s why they’re all thinking too much, and there was a lot of corruption. At that time, She was never very positive about Delhi, but since then they’ve become so good.

Then we went down to Mumbai for perhaps a couple of weeks and during that time there were public programmes. The programmes were large by English standards, but there weren’t fields and fields of people. They were in their hundreds, rather than in their thousands. After that we set off into the interior of Maharashtra. We went to Pune, Rahuri, Aurangabad and all these places.
That led to the next year, which was 1980-81, which was the first proper tour, in a way, because that’s when they hired the first coach, just the one coach and that fitted in whoever came. The majority of the thirty-five or more people were Australian. That constituted the first tour and it went to the same places as the previous year.

Shri Mataji took us to villages and we had processions. There was one particular village that we used to go to for maybe two or three years, where Mother would be on a bullock cart with the banana leaves in big arcs and then the Sahaja Yogis and the band would be in front dancing. You lost that shyness of dancing in front and you even lost your shyness of dancing in front of Shri Mataji. We really enjoyed it.
We had a lot of close contact with Shri Mataji on that tour because quite often after the pujas we would go to Mother’s room and Mother would always tell us to take the vibrations that weren’t absorbed by the Sahaja Yogis. Quite often when you did take the vibrations like that, you’d literally shake with the vibrations.