Life changes!⁴

India’s greatest dancer, absolutely the topmost dancer, was Uday Shankar. He was the number one dancer — nobody could come near him. He was the brother of the great maestro Ravi Shankar. I saw Uday Shankar once at the Indian Consulate when I was working there. He came to our Visa Section. He was very tall and majestic.

Uday Shankar wanted to come to the Ashram and dance for Sri Aurobindo, but Sri Aurobindo did not want to watch dancing. In Sri Aurobindo’s handwriting appear the words, “The Divine does not want a dancer.” Life changes! Today I do not want something, but tomorrow that very thing I may want. In my case, for instance, I disliked weightlifting from the bottom of my heart. As soon as I heard or saw anything about bodybuilders or weightlifters, I said to myself, “They are brainless!” That was my opinion of bodybuilders and weightlifters. In my Ashram life, on two occasions I took exercise with twenty pounds in a big gymnasium. Those two days I can recall, because I did not want to ruin my sprinting with weightlifting, and again, I felt that weightlifters were brainless. That was the opinion I cherished. Then, how things changed in my life!

We do not know at what point we are going to do something in life. In the Sri Aurobindo Ashram also it was the same. In those days in our Ashram life, dancing was forbidden. Then it was permitted. Uday Shankar’s wife’s name was Amala. She opened up a school in the Himalayas. One of the Ashram girls was sent there by the Mother to learn how to dance. She went, she learned, and then she came back and taught not only the Ashram girls, but the boys also. Some of the Ashram boys knew how to dance very well.