The Charm of the Gita

By: Dinesh Chikkaballapur

Our culture has the required elasticity to embrace all the new dimensions into which our society grew in the march of time. The ideas enshrined in the Upanishads couched as discussions held by rishis and their disciples in the forest along the banks of the Ganga, the way of life and the eternal values that were promoted therein, inspired in people an association with the mountains, trees, the silence and spirit of retirement in the jungle.

As our culture evolved, the time came when people felt that to live Hinduism was to live in retreat, away from the rush, the noise of the marketplace, struggles of the rustic fields, and instead, move into the silence and quietude of the Himalayas. Arjuna himself felt the need to renounce the world and he refused to fulfill his duties towards the community in order to retire into the silent arbors of contemplation and meditation.

During such a crucial cultural crisis in our country, Veda Vyasa produced the Bhagwad Gita, all through keeping his pen faithful to the fundamental thoughts of the Upanishads, their sane conclusions, their demonstrated theories, and their spectacular achievements. Sai Baba advised his devotees to do ‘Parayan’ of Bhagavad Gita and Jnaneshwari regularly. When Baba received Tilak’s work ‘Gita Rahasya’ he honored it by keeping the book on his head.

Here in the Gita, we find a practical handbook of instructions on how best we can reorganize our ways of thinking, feeling, and acting in our everyday life, and draw from ourselves a larger gush of productivity to enrich the life outside and around us and to emblazon the subjective life within us. Sai Baba interpreted a shloka of the Gita to drive home ‘Jnana’ and ‘Ajnana’ to Nana Saheb Chandorkar.

The Gita unfolds a way of life by living which, we can grow to be socially more productive and individually more balanced and tranquil, pursuing our life at peace with ourselves. Without this inward balance and readiness to act well in the world outside, how can an individual ever successfully face his own set of problems in life? Sai Baba pointed that his devotees could draw tremendous energy from the Gita.

The more vigorous the national life, the more pestered must we be with our problems. Where there are no problems, there the community has decayed, and the nation is dead. Sai Baba felt that life is a problem only when we know not how to meet life’s challenges rising around us. When that knowledge is revealed to us, we know the solution and thus the problem is no more threatening or despairing.

Arjuna represents in himself the confused and desperate youth the world over. He is painted in the Gita as suffering from the universal disease of all young hearts – the problem phobia – to take things and happenings as problems where there are none and to feel despaired of them. The modern youth, the world over, is very much suffering from this problem phobia and Baba beautifully illustrates in the case of Hari Khanoba when he became jittery on his temporary loss of new footwear.

In the Gita, the science of the Upanishads is brought out of the forest to serve us where we are suffering – in the marketplace, in the slum huts, in drawing rooms, in the commune, and at the barricades! An entire chapter in Sai Satcharita is devoted to a never-ending search by four ‘Sadhakas’ looking for eternity!

We are completely ignorant of the security which the Gita’s motherly embrace can provide us today and the divinity of her reviving touch. The Gita is a readymade textbook that serves us where we are; whoever we may be, whatever may be our problem; irrespective of place and time, caste, and creed, the Gita serves us. This is a special charm of the Gita.