Good Guru Hunting

Between locally sourced coffee beans, artisanal dhoti pants and mud houses where industrialists, intellectuals and other followers roam in organic weaves, writer PRIYA RAMANI encounters new-age god-man and mystic SADHGURU JAGGI VASUDEV to probe his formula for happiness

- Priya Ramani

The children are waiting when Jaggi Vasudev drives up in his ultramarine 1976 Toyota Classic Land Cruiser. We’re at Isha Home School, located in a corner of the lush 150-acre Isha Foundation at the foot of the Velliangiri mountain range in the Coimbatore district of Tamil Nadu. Every time he visits, this ivory clad Santa pulls out treats of homegrown wisdom from his pocket with a “ha ha ha” flourish, and this time is no different. One six-year-old in neat pigtails quips, “I am in first grade, so I don’t know anything.” Sadhguru, as he prefers to be called, replies promptly, “Even when you’re in the 10th grade you won’t know anything. That’s the beauty of life.” The children laugh. “Look at them,” he often tells his disciples. “Children never seek happiness, they are happy.”

A SHAPE IN A DRAPE

At Isha Foundation, glass and chrome make way for brick, lime and mud. It’s all clean-green with the smell of red earth in rain. Rani pink and plastic—the colour and material of choice in New India—are conspicuous in their absence. There’s good coffee and the ashram store stocks pure white dhoti pants made by authentic inhabitants of rural India. The work of local artisans is everywhere. This guru has impeccable taste.

You can even buy one of Sadhguru’s gently-used shawls at the store; most are gifts that he wears a few times before he gives them away. Its virtually impossible to find two images of him draped in the same indigenous weave. He’s got the god-man look down pat, right from the measured tone to the hand-spun robes, a thick copper anklet (my shackle, he calls it), a garland of tiny, sweetsmelling flowers and, err, white sports socks.