Juginder Luthra, Weirton, WV          e-mail:   dolgin1968@gmail.com

“Life is a package deal. No different from a conducted tour. You may not like some parts of the tour or may want more of something else. But you adjust to the chosen package. Not everything in life or your fellow travelers will be perfect. Learn to adjust and compromise.”

With such and many more examples, Swami Shivender Nagar, often simply called Nagarji, gives discourses on Bhagvad Gita in India and several other countries.
He was born in 1965 in New Delhi. As a young adult, he had the ambition to choose a career in hotel management and settle in Switzerland. Six months into the management course, spiritual inclination directed him to drop the course and join Bible School in Geneva. The studies did not answer all his questions.

He returned to Delhi after one year and started seeking a guru. Fate connected Nagarji with Parthasarthiji, founder of the Vedanta Academy in Lonavala, near Pune, India. Nagarji was one of the eight students in the first class at the Academy. The three-year intensive course was taught in Sanskrit and English. He stayed for one extra year learning from Vedanta-related books in Hindi.

Parthasarthiji asked Nagarji to go to Delhi and start spreading the message. He started giving weekly classes on teachings of the Gita. Mrs. Rita Puri of Pittsburgh happened to be in the audience in Delhi. She invited Nagarji to come to Pittsburgh in 1995 to give discourses in homes and the Hindu Jain Temple. The yearly trip to Pittsburgh has continued, which resulted in him becoming the teacher at the Hindu Jain Temple Summer Camp. About 100 children and counselors receive training through classroom discussions and interactive games. This is followed by a week-long series of evening lectures on different chapters of the Bhagavad Gita at the Temple.

He sprinkles his lectures with easy to remember one-liners:

Seriousness is a sickness. 

Hard work hardly works. When you enjoy your job it is not work, it is fun. It becomes hard work when you don’t enjoy it. 

When you demand definite results from your actions, you are pretending to be God. 

Several families, including Shashi and Ashok Marwaha, in Pittsburgh have hosted Swamiji at their homes. We met him in 1999 in Rishikesh, and have continued our association with him ever since. More people imbibe his messages in their lives.
Nagarji is married to Prema. They have one daughter, Stuti. When asked if his mother lives with him, he quickly answered “No” and after a short pause he continued, “We live with my mother! I have done it all my life.”

His plan in India is to start Gita Academy in Uttrakhand near Rishikesh. Six-week long residential courses will be offered to individuals between the ages of 18 and 30. In addition to teaching the Gita, he also offers self-improvement courses including how to set goals in life and mind management (including stress, anger etc.). With this much commitment in India, future overseas trips will become less frequent.  Summer Camp in 2018 will be held from July 29 to August 4, with lectures at the Hindu Jain Temple held around those dates.  He can be contacted here: shivender@hotmail.com.     ♣

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