Sai Mahabhakta Late Shri Balasaheb Bhate alias Purushottam Sakharam and Late Shri Nanasaheb Chandorkar were college friends. Shri Balasaheb Bhate was a skeptic. He first came to Shirdi in 1894.Bala Saheb Bhate was a free thinker, a free smoker, a veritable charvaka, whose creed may be thus summed up, “Eat, drink and be merry to day, for tomorrow we die.” His friend
Shri.Kashinath Kanderao Gadre used to remark jocularly: “yatra yatra Bhate tatra tatra Dhumaha” at his chronic smoking habit as Gadre himself was a non-smoker. Bhate became Mamlatdar and was a very efficient officer much liked type of man. He was a mamlatdar at Kopergaon for five years, from 1904 to 1909. He used to say that Baba was just a mad fakir and scoffed at those who visited Shirdi often.
Once some of his friends suggested that he should rather go and see Baba before forming his opinion of him. So he accompanied them to Shirdi and stayed there for five days. On the fifth day Sai Baba covered him with a gerua or kashaya (ochre) robe. From that day Bhate was a changed man. He did not care for earnings or work, and his only wish was to be at Shirdi and serve Baba till the last moment of his life. Sai Baba made Dixit write application for leave for one year and, pursuaded Bhate to tha sign it. The District Collector granted him leave for one year. But at the end of the year he still continued to be ‘mad after his guru’. He was granted a compassionate pension of about Rs. 30/- p.m. as one afflicted with ‘religious melancholia’. When his friends asked him the reason for his transformation he told them that the change came in him suddenly when Baba put the gerua on him. “By that”, he said “my original frame of mind was removed and, in its place, quite a new frame of mind was put in. After that, attending to worldly duties – especially official duties became unthinkable”. He then lived at Shirdi, attending to his daily austerities, like Upanishad-reading in the presence of Sai Baba and so on. Occasionally Sai Baba offered useful comments on that reading. Bhate’s wife and family came to Shirdi and lived with him.
The transformation of Bhate reminds us the effect of Sri Ramakrishna’s touch on Sri Vivekananda, the effect of the death-experience on Sri Ramana in his sixteenth year and the effect of the guru’s touch on the boy Tajuddin who later became famous as Hazarat Tajuddin Baba of Nagpur. Such perfect bhakthi and his incapacity to attend to the merely bread-winning official duties shows that he experienced certain higher form of samadhi and that some of his higher chakras, to put it in yogic terminology, must have been awakened. It is obvious that here, in Bhate, is one of those very few that deserved something which Baba yearned to bestow on his devotees.