Guru Kripa: The Grace of Aatmaram Baba and Shirdi Sai Baba
A family. Four generations. Seventy years. And one hand that never let go.

The story begins in 1955 in a sickroom at Tilha Dharamshala, Gaya. A young woman lies unconscious, and the doctors and vaidyas have given up. Her husband is a sharp, sceptical lawyer who has no time for holy men. He makes a simple demand: if this saint is real, show me proof. Aatmaram Baba comes. On the third day, under a bunch of herbs, she opens her eyes and gets up to cook prasad with her own hands. The atheist falls at the Guru’s feet, and a family’s faith is born.

What follows reads less like a book of miracles and more like a family album where every photo has someone standing quietly in the background:

A four-year-old caught by a live wire in a half-built house. Bajia Nana holds the boy while he thrashes and screams, because the Guru told him one thing: don’t let go.
A rasgulla set aside one morning for a child not yet born.
The author’s own birth. The doctors say his mother cannot be saved. Baba walks 108 times around the hospital, then sits in silence until she opens her eyes.
1982, the forest road from Danua. A father comes home in a blood-soaked car and lives. Months earlier Baba had asked, “Woh sadhu kya, jo bhagya na badal sake?” (What kind of sadhu cannot change destiny?)

Then the book becomes the author’s own journey, and it gets surprising:

A dream turns him away from the career he planned. A stranger on a bike at a Pune bus stand takes him to the right door, and the house he stays in is called Guru Kripa. He skips an interview at SIMC to go to Shirdi, and SIMC admits him anyway. That leads to Aaj Tak and a television career of nearly 24 years.
Stranded at Pune station with six friends, an ATM gives him exactly the ₹1,000 he needs, not a rupee more.
2008, near the military camp in Gaya, two days after his brother’s wedding. A car flies into a pit and a crowd gathers to see the bodies. Everyone climbs out without a scratch. That night he dreams of an old man walking ahead of him, wrapped in bandages and plaster.
2014, the Yamuna Expressway at night. He falls asleep at the wheel twice. Both times his brother shouts “Right lo!” and he swerves past a truck. Each time his brother is fast asleep in the next seat and never said a word.
COVID. At the office he prints his Aadhaar card, and a picture of Sai Baba comes out of the printer instead. His test is negative. In the second wave his wife collapses and he cries out one word, “Baba!”, and she comes round. His daughter’s oxygen falls to 70 and no hospital bed can be found. Forty minutes of prayer later the oximeter reads 99, and the doctor thinks he is joking.

Alongside these family stories the book weaves parallels from the Shri Sai Satcharitra and Autobiography of a Yogi: Sai Baba thrusting his arm into the fire to save a blacksmith’s child, Sri Yukteswar burning his disciples’ karma in a fever. Seen together, the scriptures and the family’s lives tell the same story. The Guru takes our wounds as his own. Even the Satcharitra calls Sai Baba Aatmaram, which is the key to the book: two lamps, one light.

It ends not with a conclusion but with folded hands, and with three words every devotee carries home: Shraddha. Saburi. Guru Kripa. (Faith. Patience. The Guru’s grace.)

A journalist trained to check every fact sets out to record what he cannot explain. The result is a book that makes you look back at your own life and wonder who was walking beside you all along.