Recently, during my travels to America, a devotee-doctor in Washington, D.C., suggested that I consult a polio specialist to evaluate the long-term effects I might experience as I age and to prepare for them. However, because polio is now an almost extinct disease and the number of specialists treating it is vanishingly few, the booking didn’t work out at that time. Nonetheless, the doctor recommended that I read a book about living with polio in the second half of life.

As I flipped through the book, reading the first-person testimonies of polio patients as well as doctors who treat them, I felt a strong yet strange sense of disidentification with what I read. As I tried to understand that feeling, it struck me that I didn’t think of myself as a polio patient. More importantly, I didn’t want to think of myself that way. Most importantly, I realized that I didn’t need to think of myself that way—and this was the result of finding shelter and light in the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita.

Crippled physically, directed intellectually

To explore my relationship with polio, I went down memory lane, focusing on defining incidents in my life. I got polio in 1978 when I was about one year old. I was staying in a small town named Chandrapur in Maharashtra, India, where my mother dutifully took me to a nearby clinic to get the polio vaccine. Unfortunately, because it was a small town, the power supply was irregular. The previous night there had been a power outage in the area where the clinic was located. The fridge in which the vaccine had been kept had heated up, causing the germs in the vaccine to multiply.

Neither the attendant nor the physician noticed this. When I was given that vaccine, instead of preventing polio, it ended up causing polio. I was just learning to take my first steps, and a few hours after receiving that injection, I fell down suddenly and could never walk normally thereafter.

I don’t remember any of this, but my first memory is from when I was about two and a half or three. I was crawling around in the room where my mother was talking with a distant relative who had come to visit us. That aunt consoled my mother, saying, “It’s so sad your son got polio.” I remember my mother’s voice—calm, clear, and confident—as she replied, “Whatever he lacks physically, God will provide him intellectually.”

I don’t know why she said that. Whether she had observed some intellectual precociousness in me, or whether it was just her hope, her prayer, or her blessing—I can’t say. Still, the steadiness in her voice calmed my restless mind. Her words stayed with me: not the God part, but the intellectual part. I never asked my mother about it because I forgot the incident consciously, though it impacted me subconsciously. And when I was 15, she passed away due to blood cancer.

Nonetheless, as I grew up, I did notice that I could read rapidly, remember it easily, articulate it clearly, and analyze it deeply. Essentially, I did have intellectual ability that seemed special.

While my mother respected the Bhagavad Gita and encouraged me to participate in Gita shloka recitation contests, she never specifically said that the values she gave me were from the Gita. Almost two decades later, when I was introduced to the Gita and read in 18.35 about self-destructive thought patterns and emotional loops—described as results of the mode of ignorance, tamas—I realized that my mother’s upbringing and her words had helped me move toward the mode of goodness. In that mode, I had gained significant clarity about what my strengths were. And such clarity, as Gita 14.11 declares, is a hallmark of goodness.

My father also encouraged me to develop myself intellectually, bringing me many books from a library next to his office. The more I identified with my intellectual side, the less I felt constrained by my physical side, and the less reason I had to identify with my physical side at all.

Fairly unfair

Another incident that shaped me significantly occurred during my childhood. There were some kids in our neighborhood who would tease me about my disability, calling me “cripple.” One boy, in particular, was the leader of this mockery. He was an athletic genius, embodying everything I lacked physically. His name-calling annoyed me more than it hurt me, primarily because I didn’t care much about my physical condition. I would have been far more angered if someone had called me “stupid.”

One day, my mother told me that this boy’s mother had approached her with a request. Her son was struggling in school, especially with mathematics, and since I was good at the subject, she wanted me to help him. As my mother completed her sentence, my head started shaking vigorously. “I am not going to help him,” I declared. My mother persisted, “They are our neighbors, and he is your friend.” I shook my head even more firmly. “He is not my friend,” I retorted emphatically. But because my mother was insistent, I eventually gave in and agreed to help.

When I tried helping him with basic math, I soon found that he simply couldn’t understand it. He tried, but he just didn’t have the intellectual ability. While he struggled with simple arithmetic, a part of me wanted to laugh at him, just as he had regularly laughed at me. But then something inside me stopped me with a pointed question. I am probably phrasing it more clearly now than I did at that age: If he mocks you for your physical limitation, and you mock him for his intellectual limitation, how are you any different from him?

That thought freed me from any residual resentment I might have had about my polio. I realized that everyone struggles with limitations. Some limitations, like mine, are visible and obvious. Others are invisible, yet they can be equally restrictive.

That realization opened me to a broader reflection of life’s fairness. I could have thought that life had been unfair to me. I could naturally ask: “I hadn’t done anything, as far as I knew, to deserve this disability. Why did I have to suffer this?” But then I realized I could turn the question around. “What had I done to deserve the intellectual ability I enjoyed?”

Life is unfair, but in the big picture it is fairly unfair. Sometimes we get worse than we think we deserve, but at other times we receive better than we deserve. Maybe life is like the clouds overhead: sometimes, they block the sun; sometimes, they provide nourishing rains. Many years later, when I read about the concept of karma in the Bhagavad Gita and understood how we all carry a mixed karmic baggage from our past into this life, I found a precise philosophical framework to make sense of what I had experienced.

Monkhood and evolving self-identification 

In 1996, when I was in the third year of my study of Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering at the College of Engineering, Pune, I was introduced to the Bhagavad Gita through devotees who conducted college programs. So inspired was I by its wisdom that I decided to become a monk and dedicate my life to studying and sharing its teachings. I have explored my rationale for this decision in other articles; here I will focus on the polio theme. 

When I expressed my desire to join the monastery in Pune, the head asked me how I would cope with my physical handicap. I replied that it hadn’t stopped me from staying in a hostel without assistance, so it was unlikely to stop me from living in a monastery. I pointed to the caliper I wore to support my leg. To me, it had become just a part of me, like the glasses I used to correct my vision. Every morning I would put on my glasses, and then I would put on the braces for my leg. The second task took more time and was less convenient, but it didn’t make too much of a difference. He accepted my reasoning, though I later came to know that what persuaded him was not the force of my argument, but the force of my conviction animating that argument. Whatever persuaded him, I am grateful he provided me the opportunity, which I was able to tap when I became a monk on 1 Jan, 1999, after I finished my graduation and briefly worked in a multi-national software company. 

Over the years, the Gita’s fundamental teaching—that we are spiritual beings beyond our physical shells (2.13)—had become a firm philosophical conviction for me. Even before formally learning this truth, I didn’t identify too much with my body; I identified far more with the thoughts in my head. The Gita’s wisdom then helped me shift my identity deeper still—beyond the subtle thoughts, to the spiritual soul who is the thinker of those thoughts.

A painful fall, a peaceful heart

In 2011, after more than a decade in the monastery, I was visiting the temple at Juhu, Mumbai, for giving classes. During the morning prayer session, I slipped on some spilled water. I fractured the hip joint of my left leg, the same leg affected by polio. The fall was minor, but the impact was major, because my leg was already weakened by osteoporosis, and the caliper twisted my body as I fell.

Intense pain shot through me, racking my body with unbearable heat-like sensations. I had never experienced such agony. In desperation, I tried to chant the Hare Krishna mantra, but did not feel any relief. While others crowded around me to help, I shifted to reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita—and immediately, I found relief. I kept reciting as I was taken to a nearby clinic for an X-ray and then rushed to the Bhaktivedanta Hospital, a devotee-run hospital about an hour and a half away. Throughout the journey, I continued reciting the verses—most of the 700 Gita verses I had memorized.

Physically, it was one of the most painful experiences of my life. Yet at the level of consciousness, it was one of the most peaceful and even joyful experiences, as I felt the Gita’s wisdom lifting me above my body’s agony. When the emergency doctor at the hospital saw my X-ray, he remarked, “This cannot be your X-ray. A person with this kind of fracture would be screaming in pain.” I smiled gratefully, knowing that if I had any composure, it was not due to my self-control but because Krishna, through the Gita’s wisdom, had blessed me with absorption in Him. The fall might have triggered a fire that was burning my bones, but the Gita had bathed my mind in a cooling stream of nectar. From that time, Bhagavad Gita 18.58—where Krishna declares, “If you become conscious of Me, you will pass over all obstacles by My grace”—has become one of my top five favorite verses.

I had to undergo major surgery to deal with the fracture. Because my leg was now substantially weakened and vulnerable, I was advised to stop using the caliper and shift to crutches instead. While this made my disability far more visible to others, it actually made me less conscious of it. I no longer had to spend time wearing the caliper, and with two crutches supporting me on both sides, I could walk much faster than before—almost keeping pace with those who walked at a normal speed.

Across the world on crutches

Since 2014, I have been traveling on speaking engagements almost incessantly, except during the pandemic. In the last two years, I have hardly spent more than 15 days at my home base in Mumbai. Interestingly, international travel has paradoxically been less difficult than national travel. Earlier, when I traveled by train to various youth centers across India for outreach, the journeys were long and strenuous. With international air travel, however, wheelchair assistance has made the process much smoother. In fact, I think that my traveling is more inconvenient for those facilitating it than for me, because it is they who have to push my wheelchair or carry my suitcase, whereas I rarely think about my polio.

Once, I was caught in a train for 90 hours on a journey from Kolkata in East India to Mumbai in West India because floods had caused the train to be delayed for several hours, repeatedly, turning a one-day journey into a nearly four-day journey. When any of my flights get delayed or cancelled, and I am stuck at the airport for a few hours, I try to remember that train journey; and my annoyance disappears. 

Nonetheless, air travel has had its adventures. Once in New York, where I entered America after having visited Vrindavan, India, the dust from the banks of Yamuna in Vrindavana had got inside my crutches and it triggered a security alarm. When the security officials stated that they would have to break the crutches to see what was inside, I was initially alarmed, but their concerns, and mine, were allayed when they managed to examine the dust by opening the crutches instead of breaking them.

Once at Hyderabad, during the security check-in, my crutches somehow got misplaced, and the wheelchair assistants had to help me walk the distance where the wheelchair couldn’t reach. 

For the first two decades of my speaking engagements as a monk, I have hardly ever referred to it in my classes. But as I became more familiar with people in different parts of the world—people coming from diverse cultural and conceptual backgrounds, very different from mine or the tradition I represent—I found that the spiritual message I wanted to share became easier for them to appreciate when I shared my human story. And my polio, undeniably, is a significant part of that story.

Given identity, chosen identification

The Bhagavad Gita does not require us to deny the material aspects of our identity. Rather, it calls upon us to recognize that there is more to us than our material side. While it takes time to fully realize our spiritual identity—and I am still on that journey—it is possible to emotionally distance ourselves from the limiting parts of our material identity, and to resourcefully focus on its more positive parts. Krishna told Arjuna in Bhagavad Gita 2.13 that his essential identity is spiritual. Yet Krishna did not tell him to reject his identity as a warrior or as a member of an illustrious dynasty (2.14). Instead, He instructed him to use those roles constructively—for external service and for inner spiritual growth.

Guided by Gita wisdom, I have found it helpful to differentiate between identity and identification. My identity includes being male, Indian, an engineer, a polio patient, an author, a speaker, a thinker, overweight, dark-complexioned, short in stature, scarred on the right side of my face. Some of these aspects are empowering, while others feel disempowering. I do not have to reject or resent the less favorable aspects of my identity. But I can choose to focus on the empowering parts.

My identity as an intellectual, speaker, and author has aided me in two of the most fulfilling features in my life: outer contribution and inner connection. Externally, I have been trying to provide others with resources to raise their consciousness; internally, I have been endeavoring to connect with my Lord Krishna, who is the center and purpose of my life.

To my readers who may feel disempowered by some aspect of their present identity, I offer my heartfelt wishes: may the wisdom of the Gita help you distance yourself from those limiting identities. Even if only through conceptual conviction, may you situate yourself in your spiritual identity and identify with the roles that empower you.

This has been my journey, and I hope it will be yours too. 

***

18.58 If you become conscious of Me, you will pass over all the obstacles of conditioned life by My grace. If, however, you do not work in such consciousness but act through false ego, not hearing Me, you will be lost.