An Adventure in Eggs

We were in trouble. It was a beautiful day in May and Bipin and I were in Budapest, Hungary. In 10 minutes we were to attempt Guinness record for raw egg catching in front of thousands of kids. The guidelines for the record were quite simple. Two people stand 16 feet apart and one person throws raw eggs at the other person who tries to catch as many of the eggs in a minute without breaking them. The current record was 71 eggs and Bipin and I had done more than that in practice in New York, so we thought it would be “over-easy”. But our confidence was “cracked” when, just before going on stage to make our attempt, we did a trial run. Bipin was throwing the eggs as normal but, for some reason, when I tried to catch the eggs, they exploded in my hands, and I was being “shelled” by raw eggs!
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We tried using different batches of eggs, but the results were the same. For some reason, Hungarian eggs are not as strong as American eggs and, in front of national TV and a few thousand kids, I was about to get egg on my face, literally! I remembered that my mentor, Sri Chinmoy, taught me that through meditation it is possible to surmount any problem. After a brief meditation, an idea popped into my head. I ran over to Parimal (one of my Hungarian friends) and asked if he could find us a couple of hundred organic eggs in a hurry! I hoped that organic eggs might have stronger shells.

With these eggs though, Bipin and I had the horrible feeling that we were “poached”. We climbed up on stage and took our positions. Looking out at the enormous parking lot in front of us, we could see the expectant look on the kids’ faces—thousands of ‘em.