Homage To A Spiritual Guru: Vijay Kumar Deutale!

 

We call him Bhaiya that means ‘Brother’; his official name is Vijay Kumar Deutale, originally from Nagpur in Maharashtra. He was tall, lithe, bespectacled and bearded with a predominantly grey tinge. He had a baritone that was always pleasant and soothing to the ears. I don’t remember him ever getting angry or raising his voice. He was always smiling, at times bursting out with free-flowing and pure laughter and merriment. Bhaiya had been known to us since the year 2003, and all these years he had been our spiritual guru, family friend and philosopher-guide in everything he chose to speak about us or we requested him to provide answers to our inquisitive questions. It wrenches away a part of our heart and soul to say that he is no more.

 

Vijay Kumar Deutale was working as a civil engineer in the government of Maharashtra. On a quest to explore life and meaning of life further he took voluntary retirement a few years back and started doing his personal work more intensively along with a stint in a private construction firm in Dubai for some time. Then he came back to India, and around 2017-18 he began experimenting with the medicine supply chain. He had been progressing well in this line, work mostly done online, keeping only a very limited number of close associates. During the lockdown period too, he was going ahead with his online activities, only perhaps missing his daily outings, mostly to his closest friends who had been his beneficiaries: in terms of spiritual advice and guidance.

 

Like Gautam Buddha, Bhaiya too left his family and kin very young in age, took the course to meditation and spiritualism, and made his life a success on his own; only that he never got married. His parents and siblings never approved his ways and, in a way, disowned him completely. Bhaiya had been living alone since then, and making a success of his materialistic career as a civil engineer as he bought his own flat in a central Mumbai suburb a few years back, and had been living alone there since.

 

He was all in his divine elements, like a live god, and was actively counselling and guiding his limited friends/associates/colleagues when a common friend introduced us to Bhaiya in Mumbai. In the days after the introduction we used to feel his presence constantly with us, and particularly during the nights I felt him treading around our home, perhaps to study us in all details. He confirmed his out-of-the-body experiments when I asked him about his nightly rounds. Aided by my rather intuitive nature and active alpha thinking I started having experiences of the ethereal type: Bhaiya helping me to delve into people’s, the ones concerned to us, minds or even bodies to find what was wrong, reading wordless messages emitted by living people in various ways, feeling the presence of good or bad spirits at times and find what the immediate future holds for us or our friends and kin. Whenever we queried him about our future or the justifiability of certain future plans, he used to close his eyes partially, his eyelids flapping, and then embark on a non-stop counselling and future-telling, never readymade solutions, but ways subject to severe conditions or dedicated efforts. Truly spiritual, he never recommended stones or jewels or talisman or anything to wear.

 

Vijay Kumar Deutale initiated his own technique of spiritualism and meditation thanks to his relentless forays into this mysterious and invisible sphere. His utmost thrust was on removing negativity from body and mind, making the body and soul pure. He never bothered what people eat or wear, but emphasized on proper meditation to rid negativity. His meditation technique consisted of selected mantras, depending on the people in consideration, that had to be chanted for a designed time-period, preferably every day. Chanting can be loud in the beginning; with the practitioners gaining command chanting then can be through only moving of the lips, and at the final desirable objective chanting must be done silently, without even moving the lips. As per the goals in life of the practitioners there can be objectives like health or success in work/projects or in relationships assigned to the mantras which means that the positive energy emitted through the chanting can be channelized for the accomplishment of the goals. The said goals can be materialized by making certain pledges to be assigned to the mantra-chanting.

 

His technique was fraught with grave dangers. Bhaiya used to tell us that if someone manages to remove his/her negativity the whole of that negative force bounces back on him, the originator of the process. We were appalled by this fact: the kind of negativity he must be bearing on himself thanks to all his beneficiaries. Of course, at his supreme level of spirituality he was very much capable of throwing off such forces with ease. However, one other fact remained. The negative forces did impact his physical body. For a couple of years, he was tackling with a persistent problem on his left leg up to the thigh, constant swelling and pain. He said this was due to all the forces he had been welcoming on to himself. Perhaps, this integral part of his method partially explained why his physical body ceased to exist so suddenly.

 

Vijay Kumar Deutale knew about this probability too. On various occasions he told us that his divine guru, somewhere in the Himalayas, used to send him errands, what to do or whom to enlighten next. Coming to us, he said, was a divine message and this perhaps was one of the last few errands left for him. As is proved by happenings a few years after our initiation, Bhaiya started reducing his divine practices/counselling gradually, stopping it almost completely after his voluntary retirement and his stints on various earthly jobs. On many occasions too, he used to warn us that he might vanish suddenly anytime and therefore, we or all the people enlightened by him must try utilizing his knowledge fully and fast.

 

Yes, we were astounded by his immense knowledge of almost about anything. Without any formal stint in music he used to tell my wife Ragini about the most profound and intricate things in music: in all forms, from the purest classical to the most modern, theories or practice or anything. He also wrote devotional lyrics to be tuned and sung. Unfortunately, like most normal human beings, we had not been able to gain from his acquaintance fully: on many aspects we were not able to follow his path devotedly and on many practical jobs we could not proceed as he desired. However, only his physical self has gone, we still hope to go on acquiring the knowledge and wisdom from his ethereal self.

 

On the evening of 13^th June 2020, he felt unwell with a severe stomach pain, and informed his closest associate, a lady doctor residing in Nagpur. As per the doctor’s instructions a neighbor admitted him in a hospital in Mumbai. The doctors there reportedly found a hole in his intestines, and a septic that was spreading throughout his body, affecting all the organs. He had to be given ventilator support, a day later. He passed away on the 16^th June 2020. No clinical theories can explain his demise. He left his physical form on divine errands.

 

And, we came to know about this four months later, through the same common friend who introduced us to him in 2003. It is believed now that he issued instructions not to inform anyone, except for a certain family, about his demise. This was most probably due to the fact that he sensed the misery of his close people going through during the prolonged lockdown, and he never wanted to distress or depress them further as long as possible.

 

Vijay Kumar Deutale, Bhaiya, had been a down-earth-person, never resorting to the luxuries of life and always living as a common man. He never made a living out of his divine prowess nor earned money from it; he traveled to everybody’s house whenever requested on his own, taking the local trains or the city buses. And, he had always been publicity-averse, requesting us never to create any form of publicity about his activities and powers. This directive from the spiritual guru put me in an existential dilemma: to tell people about him or not. I wanted to tell his story, desperately. Perhaps, in my meditation one morning, after a very long break, there was an abstract communication with his soul which seemed to permit me on my objective. People, maybe a limited number of them, must know about him and get inspired by his life. He is a celebrity in the field of spiritualism, a silent crusader, and I am privileged to be able to let people know about him.