‘When It Comes to Knowledge and Wisdom, There Shouldn’t be any Discrimination,’ Says Sadguru

Few journeys could look more different on paper than the one Sadguru Sri Madhusudan Sai made this month from the ragi fields of Kolar, where a farmer’s failing health was the subject of the evening, to the coastal calm of Mangaluru, where the conversation turned to artificial intelligence and a university centre not yet built. Yet both evenings, held under the same Divya Sanje banner, circled back to a single, quietly radical idea: that dignity, whether given to a farmer’s hands or a child’s future, is the truest measure of progress. Here is what unfolded in both.

In Kolar, Social Welfare Minister Sri K H Muniyappa set the tone early, describing Sadguru as someone carrying forward Sathya Sai Baba’s legacy at a scale he said he had not seen matched elsewhere. He pointed out that the poor and the orphaned were being served at Sadguru’s institutions without regard to religion or background, and made a case that stayed with the audience that supporting such institutions was, in his words, more meaningful than simply placing money in a temple hundi. He also called for these educational institutions to be established in every district of Karnataka.

Dr B N Narasimhamurthy spoke of the enduring bond between Chhattisgarh and Karnataka that Sathya Sai Baba’s legacy had created, describing Muddenahalli as a service centre with an increasingly global reach. Knowledge without skill, he observed, could not guarantee anyone employment, a gap he said Sadguru had addressed by fusing theory, practical training and a spiritual foundation into one education model.

In Mangaluru, it was Dr M Mohan Alva who brought the evening’s most personal moment, after being honoured with the Karnataka Parivarthaka Award for his four-decade contribution to education and culture in Moodubidire. Accepting the award, he recalled his own visit to Muddenahalli in unusually emotional terms. “I have personally witnessed the work happening there; it feels like a miracle,” he said, describing an unparalleled goshala, a SaiSure kitchen feeding crores of children each morning, and hospital staff whose care he had seen firsthand. In turn, he invited Sadguru to inaugurate the upcoming Alva’s Virasat cultural festival this January.

Kolar’s evening carried a quiet but significant new initiative, the Krishi-Rishi certificate, India’s first effort of its kind, in which a panel of experts visited farmers at their own homes to formally document and recognise their agricultural knowledge. Alongside it came news of a new agriculture diploma course launched at Sri Sathya Sai Krishnanikethanam in KGF, offering a two-year, English-medium programme with a built-in internship year, 100% employment assurance, and a student body drawn 80% from families below the poverty line.

Mangaluru’s announcements reached further still. Sadguru confirmed that a 50-bed free hospital will soon come up in the city, part of a larger plan to establish similar facilities across every district of Karnataka. He noted that the Mission’s educational institutions, currently present in fifteen districts, are set to expand statewide, while the SaiSure nutrition programme, already feeding one crore children daily, is being scaled toward a target of five crore children nationwide. The evening also marked the announcement of a new AI-focused higher education centre to open in Madiyala, Bantwal taluk, timed to the birth centenary of Loka Seva Vrinda founder Madiyala Narayana Bhat.

Sadguru’s words this week returned again and again to a single conviction: that no idea, however modest or ambitious, matters unless it restores dignity to the people it touches. Addressing the toll chemical farming has taken on those who feed the nation, he was unambiguous: “Improving the way crops are cultivated will also improve farmers’ health.” He acknowledged that a shift toward organic farming could only take root at scale if society itself was willing to pay a fair price for what it asks farmers to grow differently, a gap already being closed through an initiative paying close to 2,000 farmers above the government’s minimum support price for organically grown ragi.

That same insistence on dignity carried into a very different register when the conversation turned to artificial intelligence and the future of education. Rather than treating technology as something foreign to spiritual tradition, he folded the two together without hesitation: “Artificial Intelligence or any modern technology is not outside the purview of Sanatana Dharma. Our Rishis, who reached great spiritual heights, were simultaneously scientists. Mother Saraswati does not discriminate in imparting knowledge.” He extended the same principle to how such ambitions get funded, arguing that organisations doing service work deserve as legitimate a claim to CSR support as governments have to taxes, a right, he said, that “should not be denied.”

Look closely, and what seems like two unrelated evenings resolves into a single unbroken argument: that respect is not a currency to be spent selectively offered to a farmer here, a student there but a standard that either holds everywhere or means nothing at all. An AI classroom and an organic ragi field sit at opposite ends of what progress usually looks like, yet both were treated, this week, as the very same kind of investment: in people who are too often asked to make do with less. That is not a message that ends when the stage lights go down. It only continues if enough people decide to carry a piece of it forward themselves.