I was not just a ‘not-good’ student, I wasn’t even a student.

 

Today was a special day for Mahajana First-Grade College in Mysore. One of its more illustrious alumnus paid it a visit...

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Yes, Sadhguru dropped in for a brief visit to the school where he was once a ‘student’ in the loosest sense of the term. As he himself explained in his discourse to the students, “I was not just a ‘not-good’ student, I wasn’t even a student.”

Sadhguru seemed to remember every detail of the school, from the buildings, the classrooms - even a particular board which had displayed "Classroom 8B" during his school days! This school saw him through 11th and 12th standard, many years ago.

The function started off with an invocation sung by one of the students. The principal then welcomed and introduced Sadhguru and Isha Foundation to the audience which mostly consisted of 11th Grade students and teachers. The principal’s description of Sadhguru as a motorcycle riding yogi who both zips around in racecars at 340kmph & treks to sacred Mt. Kailash brought a few gasps from the crowd. The principal expressed his desire that Sadhguru should visit the college often so that both the students and staff may benefit from his wisdom.

Sadhguru, the president and secretary of the Maharana Education Trust then lit the ceremonial lamp.

Sadhguru’s talk then began on a rather nostalgic note when he explained how even though he had been travelling across the world, he had never visited Mysore to give a discourse because he felt rather embarrassed at giving a discourse to an audience that consisted of his friends and teachers. He then recounted how the teachers would probably like to forget him because he had given them enough troubles as a student. Sadhguru joked about how one of the teachers, whom he decided to leave unnamed, after a particularly confounding afternoon with Sadhguru had declared, “You must either be the Divine or the Devil, and I think you are the latter.”

Sadhguru then elaborated on his desire to start a school which children would actually want to go to and how this desire resulted in the founding of Isha Home School at the Isha Yoga Center. He said that education should not be about mere survival or about earning a living, it should be about enlarging the child’s horizons. He encouraged every student in the audience to go ahead and work towards what they thought was most important. Rather than just doing something to survive, he urged them to do something they cared for.

Questions from the audience came one after the other, ranging from the impact of human beings on life around them to the question of ‘survival of the fittest.’ At one point, he encouraged “working and studying joyfully rather than working or studying ‘hard’" – a most fitting statement to be said within the walls of his former school!

Sadhguru brought the Q&A session to a close with a message to the students of the school urging them to realize that as human beings, nature has left life open for them, and that this was their freedom. He told them to become conscious of this freedom and to do something in their life that they cared for rather than investing their entire life in just earning a living.

At the end of the program, Sadhguru launched the school’s weekly newsletter “The Achiever.”