Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors
At the Feet of The Mother

Vasanti Rao

Biography

Vasanti Rao was born on 9 February 1930, she visited Sri Aurobindo Ashram for the first time in 1941. When she had the Darshan of Sri Aurobindo on 21 February 1944 she identified Him as the One whom she was looking for since her childhood years. She arrived at the Ashram on the 15th of August, 1947 and stayed there for good.

 
 
 

Vasanti is unique. Rich in spiritual experience even as a child, she was a brilliant student who delighted both classmates and teachers with wit, charm and innocence. Drawn increasingly to spiritual life, she recognized Sri Aurobindo as her guru and became an Ashramite at the tender age of seventeen. Vasanti arrived at the Ashram on the 15th of August, 1947, just as India won her Independence and just when spiritual India celebrated the 75th birthday of Sri Aurobindo.

Vasanti began her service to Mother in the Library. It was a natural fit, for Vasanti was and is a littérateur, fluent in several European and Indian languages, a connoisseur of all the world’s cultures, a blithe spirit with cosmic breadth. She joined the team working with M.P. Pandit a few years later, applying her literary, linguistic, and cultural skills to publication and management tasks. She eventually became M.P. Pandit’s editor and secretary.

Vasanti avoids the spotlight, always, preferring the quiet of her own cave of tapasya in the Ashram. While she was gladly yoked to M.P. Pandit’s relentless publication pace for decades, Vasanti is also esteemed for the purity and beauty of her singing voice. For years together, she opened M.P. Pandit’s public addresses in India and in international settings with her evocative chants. We have heard the moved members of those audiences report that her voice threw them directly into a spiritual experience or a deep state of peace and receptivity. Vasanti’s tunings of these sacred Sanskrit hymns and chants drew special notice from the Mother and still entrance spiritually-inclined audiences. Her public performances grew more and more rare over the years, and she has seldom been recorded.

(from The Integral Knowledge Study Center,
www.iksc.org/vasanti.html)

 

Photos

MUSIC PLAYER