The roads are jammed for a few miles outside Nawada, deep in the heart of rural Bihar. Tractor trailers, tightly packed with women in bright saris, their heads veiled, and men in bulbous white country turbans; auto-rickshaws, lorries, mini-vans, buses and cars, all bursting at the rivets with people, are tangled together into a knot that tightens as more vehicles arrive. In the distance is a long, patterned tent wall and far beyond, barely visible in the dust and heat haze, a large LCD screen. Several passengers get out to join the rivers of people flowing towards an opening in the tented wall.

Inside, a vast crowd stretching almost as far as the eye can see, is already seated. People have been arriving throughout the night and are now crammed, hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder into every available inch of an immense fallow field. Crowds in India can be large, but this is enormous. Almost 300,000. People squeeze closer together, as more arrive. Everyone is good-humoured, laughing and chatting, looking forward to the programme. No one complains.

Suddenly there is the distant drone of rotor blades. The crowd looks up: a helicopter, its fuselage glinting against the sun, is flying in low. People stand to wave, eyes shaded against the glare. A roar of joy goes up from the crowd as the helicopter circles the field and comes in to land behind the stage. Music plays, and then an MC comes out to welcome everyone. The crowd quietens. Videos begin playing. Despite the crush, there is pin-drop silence.

At last, to thunderous applause from the vast crowd, Maharaji comes on stage in a brilliant white kurta and dhoti. He welcomes everyone to the event, commenting on the temperate weather, and then he begins to speak. 

‘People pray to God for things they want: a son, or money, or a job. People want God’s blessings to fulfil their desires’, he says. ‘Yet God has already blessed you. His hand is on your head, for the greatest blessing is the coming and going of this breath, which keeps you alive so effortlessly’.

Maharaji uses examples that resonate with these Indian village farmers. And his message is simple but profound: to be fulfilled, to find the ‘priceless diamond’ in your life, discover peace within. He speaks for just over an hour to a rapt audience. And then, in a whirr of helicopter blades, he is off, taking his message eastwards along the great Gangetic Plain, deeper into the heart of rural India.

Throughout the spring and before the driving heat of the Indian summer, Maharaji has travelled across north India and into the Himalayas, covering over 1,000 miles and speaking to almost a million people, at eight different locations—from India’s capital, New Delhi, to Ranchi in the far east, and Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal. 

Some of the crowds have been huge like Nawada or Hardoi, in Uttar Pradesh state, where 150,000 gathered in wheat fields to hear him. Some have been smaller, like Mirzapur, south of the pilgrimage city of Varanasi, where 10,000 people attended. Yet as Maharaji himself said, while speaking of his vision for the future, what matters ‘is not whether an event is big or small, but that it is done with love’.

For years, Maharaji has spoken of wanting to take his message beyond the cities to the villages where 90 percent of south Asia’s population lives. Now, these large appreciative audiences and his own relaxed manner and obvious enjoyment, are proof of the success of his vision. He jokes with the crowds who seem to relish his grasp of their circumstances: the need for rain to water the crops; the politicians wanting votes in the forthcoming elections; the desire for children. They are simple people, and he urges them to be simple.

When he speaks to audiences who are familiar with his message, he relaxes even more and goes deeper, often putting a new twist on well-known truths or on something he has said before, but differently. ‘Everyone knows there are drops in the ocean’, he says. ‘But who knows that the ocean is in the drop? Who is that drop? It’s you. What is that ocean? It’s right inside you’.

Sometimes, he offers sage advice: ‘If you apply a little discipline, your life will become very simple. Get up at a certain time, eat at a certain time, take time to turn within. If you do this, your life will improve greatly. So use the understanding you’ve received. Practise a bit of discipline, so your life becomes fulfilled’.

Always, he speaks to people directly. To their hearts and their individual lives. Understanding their worries, soothing their fears, offering a solution.

NB: Quotations from Maharaji are from notes translated from Hindi, not from an actual transcript of his address.