We call him Bhaiya which means ‘Brother’; The official name of him is Vijay Kumar Deutale, originally from Nagpur in Maharashtra. He was tall, slender, bespectacled, and a beard with an efficient gray tinge. He had a baritone that was always pleasant and soothing to the ears. I don’t remember him ever getting angry or raising his voice. He was always smiling, sometimes bursting with pure flowing laughter and joy. We had known Bhaiya since 2003, and all these years he had been our spiritual guru, family friend, and philosopher-guide in everything he chose to talk about us or ask him to answer our probing questions. It tears our hearts and souls to say that it no longer exists.

Vijay Kumar Deutale worked as a civil engineer in the Maharashtra government. In a quest to further explore life and the meaning of life, he voluntarily retired a few years ago and began to do his personal work more intensively along with a stint at a private construction company in Dubai for some time. He then returned to India and around 2017-18 started experimenting with the drug supply chain. He had been progressing well in this vein, working mostly online, keeping only a very limited number of close associates. Also during the period of confinement, he went ahead with his online activities, perhaps just missing his daily outings, mainly to his closest friends who had been the beneficiaries of him: in terms of guidance and spiritual advice.

Like Gautama Buddha, Bhaiya also left his family and relatives at a very young age, took the course of meditation and spiritualism, and made a success of his life on his own; only he never married. His parents and siblings never approved of his ways and, in a way, completely disowned him. Bhaiya had been living alone ever since, and succeeded in his materialistic career as a civil engineer when he bought his own apartment in a suburb of central Mumbai a few years ago, and had been living there alone ever since.

He was all in his divine elements, like a living god, and was actively mentoring and guiding his limited friends/partners/colleagues when a mutual friend introduced us to Bhaiya in Mumbai. In the days after the presentation we used to feel his presence constantly with us, and particularly during the nights he felt him walking around our house, perhaps to study us in every detail. He confirmed his out-of-body experiments when I asked him about his nocturnal rounds. With the help of my rather intuitive nature and active alpha thinking, I began to have ethereal-type experiences: Bhaiya helped me delve into people’s minds or even bodies, the ones we are concerned with, to find what was wrong, reading wordless messages given by living people in various ways, sensing the presence of good or evil spirits at times, and finding out what the immediate future holds for us or our friends and relatives. Whenever we asked him about our future or the justification of certain future plans, he would close his eyes partially, fluttering his eyelids, and then he would begin a continuous advising and prediction of the future, never ready-made solutions, but forms subject to severe conditions or dedicated efforts. Truly spiritual, he never recommended stones or jewelry or talismans or anything to wear.

Vijay Kumar Deutale began his own technique of spiritualism and meditation thanks to his tireless forays into this mysterious and invisible sphere. The extreme push of him was to remove negativity from the body and mind, making the body and soul pure. He never cared about what people eat or wear, but he emphasized proper meditation to remove negativity. His meditation technique consisted of mantras selected, depending on the people under consideration, to be chanted for a designated period of time, preferably every day. The singing can be loud at first; with practitioners gaining proficiency, chanting can be just moving the lips, and in the ultimate desirable goal, chanting should be done silently, without even moving the lips. Depending on the goals in the life of the practitioners, there may be goals such as health or success at work/projects or in relationships assigned to the mantras, which means that the positive energy emitted through chanting can be channeled to achieve goals. Such goals can be realized by making certain promises to be assigned to the chanting of the mantra.

His technique was fraught with grave dangers. Bhaiya used to tell us that if someone manages to remove negativity from him, all that negative force bounces back on him, the originator of the process. We were horrified by this fact: the kind of negativity he must have on himself thanks to all the beneficiaries of it. Of course, at his supreme level of spirituality, he was quite capable of ditching such forces with ease. Yet another fact remained. The negative forces impacted his physical body. For a couple of years, he was dealing with a persistent problem in his left leg up to the thigh, constant swelling and pain. He said that this was due to all the forces that he had been receiving in himself. Perhaps, this integral part of his method partially explained why his physical body ceased to exist so suddenly.

Vijay Kumar Deutale was also aware of this probability. On several occasions he told us that his divine guru, somewhere in the Himalayas, sent him errands, what to do or whom to enlighten next. Coming to us, he said, was a divine message and this was perhaps one of the last errands he had left. As evidenced by events that happened some years after our initiation, Bhaiya began to gradually reduce his divine/counseling practices, stopping them almost completely after his voluntary retirement and his stints in various earthly jobs. On many occasions too, he used to warn us that he might suddenly disappear at any time and therefore we or all people enlightened by him should try to utilize the knowledge of him fully and quickly.

Yes, we were in awe of his immense knowledge of almost anything. Without any formal restrictions on music, I used to tell my wife Ragini about the deepest and most intricate things in music: in all its forms, from the purest classical to the most modern, theories or practice or whatever. She also wrote devotional lyrics to be tuned and sung. Unfortunately, like most normal human beings, we had not been able to benefit fully from his knowledge: in many respects we could not follow his path devoutly and in many practical works we could not proceed as he wished. However, only his physical self is gone, we still hope to continue gaining the knowledge and wisdom of his ethereal self.

On the night of June 13, 2020, she felt unwell with severe stomach pain and informed her closest associate, a doctor based in Nagpur. As per the doctor’s instructions, a neighbor admitted him to a Mumbai hospital. Doctors there reportedly found a hole in his intestines and a septic tank that was spreading throughout his body, affecting every organ. He had to receive respiratory assistance a day later. He passed away on June 16, 2020. No clinical theory can explain his passing. He left the physical form of him by divine commands.

And we found out about this four months later, through the same mutual friend who introduced him to us in 2003. It is now believed that he gave instructions not to inform anyone except a certain family of his death. This was probably due to the fact that he felt the misery of those close to him during the prolonged confinement, and he never wanted to distress or depress them further for as long as possible.

Vijay Kumar Deutale, Bhaiya, had been a down to earth person, never resorting to the luxuries of life and always lived like a common man. He never lived off the divine progress from it or made money from it; he traveled to everyone’s house whenever they asked him to, taking the local trains or the city buses. And he had always been averse to publicity, and he asked us to never create any kind of publicity about his activities and powers. This directive from the spiritual guru put me in an existential dilemma: to tell people about him or not. He wanted to tell his story, desperately. Perhaps, in my meditation one morning, after a very long rest, there was an abstract communication with his soul that seemed to allow me to reach my goal. People, perhaps a limited number of them, should know him and be inspired by his life. He is a celebrity in the field of spiritualism, a silent crusader, and I am privileged to be able to tell people about him.