Feeling like a Guru in India while working in Fiji

As I was so busy in Australia in the beginning of 2004, I did not get to see anything of the area around Brisbane. I went from the airport to the home of my hosts, had that one trip to the hospital and then went from home to the airport again. I flew back to Fiji where I had fixed program. While I was in Lautoka for the first program, I now stayed with a family in Suva, the capital of Fiji.

Here, again, I stayed with an Indian family who had arranged my lectures, individual sessions and also a visit to a children hospital. My host had got to know that I support children in India and that I love working with them and for them and so he asked me whether I would like to visit that clinic which was especially for children. I agreed of course and so we went there.

I met the staff members at the hospital who were happy to welcome me and show me their hospital and introduce me to their patients. I had talk with them and spent some time there, doing my prayers, mantras and the healing sessions that I gave in that time. I am sure many of those boys and girls were excited to see me. And maybe also to see the camera team that came in the door behind me! I was surprised to see that they had called the national TV news channel. They filmed and then gave this as news in the evening, too.

As you can hear in the news report, they called me a Hindu priest and more than that, I was seen as a guru by my hosts. In Fiji, more than 35% of the population has Indian origins. This means that I was once again living in a totally Indian environment. I was speaking Hindi, I was eating Indian food and the people around had the same questions to me as people had in India. They also had the same understanding of ‘guruism’ as in India – and thus I experienced exactly that from which I had wanted to escape by leaving India.

Of course I did all effort I could to let my hosts know that I did not see myself as a guru. Whenever the topic came up in any way, I told them. It was however simply their culture and in some way natural to them to pay me this respect. They were lovely people, don’t get me wrong, and they did what was right in their eyes – but I had changed.

That is why it was an experience of mixed feelings when I was there. Fiji is a beautiful small island, the weather was wonderful and in general I am anyway a happy and satisfied person – but there was this thought that I should rather not come back here if I wanted to avoid the experience of being a guru. I wanted the change and really, by being only among Indians, I wouldn’t really change. That I understood. So I thought, it would be better to do program among western people, as I had done in New Zealand. Obviously I had to think of my cancelled summer program in Germany – would I find some place to go and work in the time that was lying free ahead of me?

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