For over 36 years, Sri Ruchir Desai has been giving life to his students, his fellow teachers and thousands of people from all walks of life and all parts of the globe through the gift of education. Though his title suggested that he is a professor of commerce, he epitomised and lived the dictum of his Swami, ‘education is for life and not a mere living’.He always achieved anything he set his eyes on but decided to focus all his energies only on ‘higher Learning’ rather than ‘higher earning’. And he did that by adding the capital ‘L’ of his love for Swami. Though he was a gold medallist, a university topper and a masterful lecturer who never carried notes but dictated the most complex balance sheets from his razor sharp mind, he never considered his intellectual genius as an achievement. He was a person who firmly believed the he was who he was in the eyes of God.
“The ultimate calculation is always with respect to how much good we have done and how we reach Swami. All other accounts are only incidental. I am spending the precious years of my life at His Lotus Feet and I am grateful that He has allowed me to call Him, my SWAMI. What more can I ask for in life?”
On 17 May 2021, the doubly auspicious day of Skand Shashti and Jagadguru Sri Adi Shankaracharya Jayanti, Sri Ruchir Desai gave up his life at the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences, Bangalore, after battling Covid-19 for a week. Within minutes tears and tributes from across the globe began pouring in. Many board meetings were halted abruptly as his ‘students’ and mentees across time zones gathered virtually to lend a shoulder for each other’s grief. Their outpourings were invaluable as they had been touched by the magical and mystical ‘Ruchir Sir’. In these stories of ‘Sir’, there were anecdotes of admiration, histories of humour and legends of love. This is a collection of those spontaneous outbursts from hundreds of hearts. It gives us a glimpse into the personality that was Ruchir Sir. Below are testimonials, across two score years.
