Excerpt from David Godman's Article About Balarama Reddy

Now coming to Balarama Reddy,here is an excerpt from David Godman's article where Balarama Reddy carries on in similiar Fashion on Suri Nagamma and Devaraja Mudaliar and Krishna Bhikshu:

I will revert now to my discussion of which collections of his verbal teachings Bhagavan read and checked.

Most of the text of Day by Day with Bhagavan was not checked by Bhagavan. Devaraja Mudaliar showed the first few pages to Bhagavan when he started compiling his record, but dropped the habit soon afterwards, except when he was unsure of what he had recorded. Devaraja Mudaliar operated under the same constraints that the compiler of Talks did, so the same qualifications must also apply. One plus in favour of this work is that Bhagavan publicly pronounced himself to be highly satisfied with Devaraja Mudaliar’s skill and accuracy as an interpreter.

The letters that comprise Letters from Sri Ramanasramam were published in a Telugu journal during Bhagavan’s lifetime, but there is no evidence that Bhagavan ever checked the material before it went to the press. Balaram Reddy told me in the 1980s that there was a rivalry between the various 1940s recorders (Krishna Bhikshu, Devaraja Mudaliar and Suri Nagamma) with each accusing the other of transcribing irrelevant or inaccurate material. Bhagavan, following his usual habit of non-interference, refused to take sides or intervene in this. Balaram Reddy also told me that these devotees would give the writings of the other two to Bhagavan to be checked in the hope that he would publicly announce that there was some mistake in them. It was all a bit petty, but it did have the serendipitous result of Bhagavan going through a lot of material that he might not otherwise have checked.

This leads me onto another factor that has to be considered. Bhagavan would often read material that devotees had submitted and return it without making any corrections, even if the material was wildly inaccurate. The most famous instance of this was a Malayalam biography that was written while Bhagavan was still at Skandashram. It was a complete fantasy, compiled by a railway clerk who had had several children. In the book Bhagavan was portrayed as an ex-railway clerk with several children who had miraculous powers that he frequently exhibited. Bhagavan patiently went through the manuscript, correcting a few spelling and grammatical mistakes along the way and then handed it back to the author. None of the devotees in the ashram at that time knew Malayalam. Kunju Swami, a Malayali, was off on a trip, so no one knew what had been written in the manuscript.

When Kunju Swami returned the other devotees told him about the manuscript and asked him to translate it for them. Kunju Swami read it and was horrified to discover how badly Bhagavan had been misrepresented.

He approached Bhagavan and enquired, ‘Is any of this true?’

Bhagavan apparently replied, ‘It’s as true as all this,’ waving at the world around him.