Here is a very special photograph taken when I was a marching captain at the Ashram. We also have formed a marching group in our Centre. If you want to see me in my role as a captain, then you can preserve this photograph. It is a collector’s item!
The young boy who is on my right side was a dear friend of mine. Some years later his mother became seriously ill. When he went to serve his mother at her place, the mother was sleeping on a cot and the son was sleeping on the floor. Early in the morning the mother was calling her son aloud, “Jai, Jai, Jai!” Jai was in perfect peace. Alas, he was no more. He had come to look after his mother, but in his sleep he passed away at the age of forty-five or forty-six.
The young man right in front of me always criticised my running style in the hurdles, but I was the unbeaten champion in sprinting for sixteen years. Nobody was able to defeat me. He himself was nowhere in the world of sprinting. When I was the football captain for six or seven years, sometimes I used to select that fellow when we were going to play against an outside team.
I was twice decathlon champion, in 1958 and 1959. In 1960, hostile forces attacked. I was waiting; I was the last person to do the pole vault. Out of the blue, heavy rain descended from Heaven to destroy my pole vault. Because of the rain, my vault was ruined. On that occasion I lost the decathlon by only fourteen points. Otherwise, it would have been three consecutive years that I was decathlon champion.
The fourth gentleman on my right side was Nolini’s eldest son. He was sometimes a critic of mine, but four or five years ago he wrote an article saying that I was the best athlete that the Ashram had produced! In the Ashram magazine it came out. Your so-called critic may speak very highly of you, and again, your so-called friend, like the young man in front of me in the photograph, may criticise you and make fun of you.
The last time I was at the Ashram, I went with my brother to visit our sports ground, where we used to have all our races. For the last two years I lived only sixty or seventy metres away from the track. For eighteen years I stayed at one particular place, but for the last two years I was very, very near the sports ground. Now the critic of my running style is in charge of that place. Alas, during my visit he said that, if I wanted to take a picture of the sports ground, I needed special permission from Pranab, the sports director, who is wearing white in this photograph.
29 May 2002, Aspiration-Ground, New YorkFrom:Sri Chinmoy,Depend on Grace, Agni Press, 2023
Sourced from https://srichinmoylibrary.com/dg