The King Who Gave It All Away: An Onam to Remember
A festival like Onam has a way of turning a room full of strangers into one big family within minutes. One welcome song is all it takes, voices rise together, feet start tapping, and suddenly everyone is part of the same old story: a beloved king returning home to see how his people are doing. This year’s celebration leaned fully into that spirit, moving from soulful music to thundering drums to a story so old it still manages to feel new every single time it’s told. By the end of the evening, the takeaway wasn’t just nostalgia for a festival well celebrated, it was a question worth carrying home: what would it mean to give everything, the way that king once did?
The Spirit of Onam: Songs, Drums, and the Story Behind It All
Onam is Kerala’s homecoming story. Every year, the land welcomes back its legendary king, Mahabali, believed to return from the netherworld to check on the people he once ruled so fairly that his reign is still remembered as a golden age. The celebration captured that spirit beautifully, opening with a welcome song inviting Maveli into the gathering, followed by a folk tradition song rooted in Kerala’s soil, and a devotional number in praise of Swamy Ayyappa, each carrying its own texture, from playful welcome to deep devotion. The energy peaked with a thandamelam performance, a traditional percussion display so intense that, as one speaker later joked, it felt like the ground itself was vibrating.
Behind all the music sits Onam’s ancient source, the tale of Vamana and King Mahabali from the Bhagavatam. Mahabali, a king so generous he had conquered the three worlds, is approached by Vamana, a humble dwarf-form of Lord Vishnu, asking only for three paces of land. Mahabali laughs and offers more, but Vamana needs just three steps, the earth with one, the heavens with the next, and for the third, Mahabali offers his own head, having nothing left to give but himself. It’s the story of surrender not as loss, but as a doorway to something greater, a theme that would return again and again through the evening.
B N Narasimha Murthy's Address
Dr B N Narasimha Murthy, Chief Mentor, Sri Sathya Sai Loka Seva Gurukulam Group of Institutions, opened the speeches with the tone of someone reflecting on years of quiet, steady growth. He traced the spiritual community’s journey over the past decade and a half, from modest beginnings to a movement now reaching eleven district headquarters, each with its own wave of devotion and celebration and spoke of the eagerness people carry to be present, even for a brief hour, in their guide’s company.
He also spoke warmly of the community’s charitable work, a centre educating thousands of boys entirely free of cost, alongside a separate residential campus for girls receiving the same free education and care. What struck him most, he said, wasn’t the scale of it but something simpler: the light visible on the students’ faces.
Sadguru Sri Madhusudan Sai's Wisdom on Onam
The evening’s most personal talk came from Sadguru Sri Madhusudan Sai, who spoke about what surrender actually feels like in a human life including his own. He recalled the early years of his path, when success, friendships, and a promising career all seemed to unravel at once, admitting it wasn’t easy and that doubt came before understanding did.
He offered a memorable image for how the divine draws people close before asking anything of them, comparing it to the simple trick of offering children sweets so they’ll come near, with anything deeper asked only afterward. Reflecting on his own journey from anonymity into public life, he said of his path in Karnataka, simply, “I have not chosen, Karnataka has chosen me”, a quiet acknowledgment that some journeys are less about ambition and more about being called.
He closed on a note of hope, announcing plans to start a school in Kerala and appealing to young people from the state to return home and give back to the next generation, tying the night’s themes of surrender directly to something practical and ongoing.
A Story Worth Carrying Home
By the time the final blessings were given, the evening had moved through celebration, storytelling, and reflection, the drumbeats of the thandamelam still echoing somewhere in memory alongside quieter truths about letting go. That, in many ways, is what makes Onam more than a festival of feasts and flowers: a yearly invitation to remember a king who gave up everything, and to ask, even briefly, what we ourselves might be holding onto a little too tightly.