Raleigh Sai Center

Girija Yegnanarayanan grew up in Madurai in southern India, one of eleven children under a single roof, in a family so close that no one made a decision without five relatives and their spouses signing off first. She would go on to earn a PhD, help build early speech-recognition technology, and spend three decades on artificial intelligence for healthcare — earning patents and a Fellow title — and running AI at a Wall Street bank before Swami guided a shift out of left field! But the thread she keeps returning to isn't any of that. It's the steady, almost stubborn way Swami kept showing up in her life — usually just after she'd insisted He wouldn't.

A Childhood of Devotion and Loss

Girija was born in Coimbatore and raised by her maternal aunt and uncle while her parents worked through hard years of their own. Her family was deeply religious - but devoted to Murugan, not Sai Baba. At the mere age of five, she was reciting the Kanda Sashti Kavasam (a scriptural homage to Murugan). Her father, an Ayyappa devotee who made the pilgrimage to Sabarimala each year, woke the children before dawn each morning to chant.

Ironically, Swami's name was often spoken in the house, but not with reverence! Girija's hair was thick and frizzy, and when it dried loose her father would tease that she looked like "that Puttaparthi Baba".

Loss came early and often. A beloved uncle, an intelligence officer, died in an accident in Delhi when she was around twelve. Within a year, her foster father — who had gone to investigate that death — died in a plane crash. Girija stopped grieving out loud and poured herself into achievement instead: top ranks in her state board exams, the violin, athletics. The ache underneath all of it would surface at the worst possible moment — and become the doorway to everything else.

The Book that Started the Journey

That moment came in engineering college. Girija had her heart set on mechanical engineering — the prestige branch — and was certain she'd get in. She didn't; she was placed in electronics (in those days, less reputed). The disappointment cracked something open, and every buried grief came flooding back with it. For months she stopped going to class. She sat at home and cried, gripped by questions she couldn't answer: Who am I? What is any of this for? We all die anyway. Relatives whispered that she was possessed.

A friend finally coaxed her, unwilling and unconvinced, to a puja next door. It happened to be for Shirdi Sai Baba. Someone there handed her the book *Sai Baba Man of Miracles* — and asked for it back quickly, please, if she was going to read it at all. Girija, a voracious reader, took it home.

She finished it and still had no answers. But something had shifted. "This is God in man's form," she remembers thinking, "and no matter what, He's the one who's going to help me." She returned the book, and the next morning — for the first time in months — she went back to college.

The Mystery Photograph

Back in class, Girija bought the last copy of a control-theory textbook. A classmate named Anjali Singh borrowed it (still in a sealed plastic wrap) for a semester, then returned it. When Girija finally opened the book for her own coursework, a small black-and-white photograph slipped out: Swami, with the words Love is God.

Certain Anjali had left it behind, Girija tried to give it back. Anjali refused — she didn't even know who Sai Baba was, she'd never seen the picture, it wasn't hers. Girija had never opened the book before lending it; Anjali swore she'd put nothing inside. The two of them stood there arguing over a photograph neither would claim. A close friend eventually told her gently to stop asking questions and simply keep it. She still has it.

Coming to America, with Baba

In 1981, against her parents' wishes and on a loan arranged by a school friend's family, Girija did something quite out of the ordinary for a single Indian woman at the time: she left for graduate school in the United States, alone, knowing no one.

Philadelphia was hard. She shared a studio, and stretched a single can of green beans across a week. She cried herself to sleep. Baba, she says, became "my teacher, my realtor, my airline steward, my pilot" — the one she reached for at every turn.

Then one night, walking home, she was mugged. The assailant tried to drag her with him, but she broke free and fled home, with the man in pursuit. She made it home, but her roommate instilled fear that he might come back to attack her.

Shaken and certain she was in danger, she prayed and fell asleep. Swami came in a dream: she was at the bottom of a staircase, and at the top of the staircase was a huge, menacing figure - like a rakshasha (demon)! Suddenly, Swami appeared, looking small next to the other figure, caught him by the throat, lifted him aside, and beckoned her up the stairs. She woke calm. "I knew He was telling me He would protect me." From there, she says, things began to fall into place.

Shut Doors Allow New Openings

Looking back, Girija sees a pattern of being redirected — "whacked on the head," as she puts it — every time she gripped a plan too tightly. Mechanical engineering was taken from her; electronics led her to a doctoral advisor researching how to model human hearing on a computer. That obscure work became her way into artificial intelligence.

She prayed hard for a job at IBM or Bell Labs. Instead she landed at a small startup founded by inventor Ray Kurzweil, where her thesis on modeling the ear turned out to be exactly what a speech-recognition system needed. At a big-name lab she might have spent years on menial tasks; at the startup she grew. "Swami saved me from myself," she says of the wishes He quietly declined to grant.

Around this time she met Girish — a fellow student and gifted singer whose aunt, it turned out, had lived across the street from her family in Chennai. They married despite fierce opposition from his parents, who objected to everything from her complexion to the fact that she was a year older. Girija sat down and wrote her in-laws a humble, disarming letter, asking them to name whatever they wanted her to change that was in her control to change. Her father-in-law was won over! In time her mother-in-law would say Girija had become more of a daughter to her than her own.

God is Love and God is One

As a young mother, Girija argued in a study circle that no one could really claim "God is love" — it was, she insisted, a baseless thing to say. Days later she came downstairs to find a single book waiting on her kitchen table, pulled somehow from a shelf too high for anyone in the house to reach. Its title was *My Beloved*. She wept on the drive to work. "I'm so sorry I doubted you," she told Him.

Not long after, Girija sang a Murugan bhajan at a gathering and spent the drive home quietly scolding herself — as a Sai devotee, shouldn't she be singing His songs? The next morning, her three-year-old son Prashant climbed onto the couch and told her, matter-of-factly, about a dream. Murugan had been sitting right there, he said, pointing to the middle cushion — and then, suddenly, Murugan had turned into Sai Baba, and back again to Murugan. Girija had been agonizing over a line she'd drawn between two forms of God — and her small son, who knew nothing of any of it, had just quietly erased it.

Walking Away at the Top

The hardest test of that trust came late. Girija had become head of artificial intelligence for the wealth-management division of Morgan Stanley, building the firm's first chatbot; within six months her name had been put forward for managing director. Then her son and his wife, both medical residents, learned they were expecting their first child and asked her to help care for the baby.

Her gut answered before she'd even finished asking Swami what to do: resign. Everyone told her she was making a terrible mistake — she was at the top of her career, she could afford three nannies, she was throwing it all away. She stepped down in February 2019 anyway. A year later, COVID arrived. Both parents were living at the hospital; daycares were shut; there was no one else. She was there for her grandson. "Other people may see it as a loss," she says. "But if you listen to Him, you won't feel what they feel. He's guiding you."

"Live Always in That Presence"

For years, a small magnet has held the same words to Girija's refrigerator — a line the Balvikas children once made from one of Swami's letters: Know that I am always in you, prompting you and guiding you. Live always in that constant presence. She reads it every morning.

Asked what she'd tell other parents and seekers, she doesn't reach for anything grand. Live in His will. Listen. See good, do good, be good — and follow, even when the reason isn't clear yet. With her own children, she was careful never to lecture; she tried instead to be the example, forever checking herself: Am I actually doing the right thing? Am I living in Swami's will?

"If we get that conviction — that Swami is in us, guiding us — that's more than enough," she says. "He will guide you. You just have to listen."