Swami Vivekananda                           

The following anecdote about Swami Vivekananda is as narrated by K. Sundarama Iyer in his reminiscences.

The Swami having had some rest, I took him in the evening to the house of Prof. Rangacharya, who was then professor of chemistry in the Trivandrum College... Not finding him at home, we drove to the Trivandrum Club. There I introduced the Swami to various gentlemen present, and to Prof. Rangacharya when he came in later on, ... and others among whom I distinctly remember a late Brahmin Dewan Peshkar and my friend Narayana Menon...

Mr. Narayana Menon had, while leaving the Club earlier in the evening, saluted the Brahmin Dewan Peshkar and the latter had returned it in the time-honoured fashion in which Brahmins who maintain old forms of etiquette return the salute of Shudras, i.e., by raising the left hand a little higher than the right. Many members of the Club had come and gone, and at last five of us were left, the Swami, the Dewan Peshkar, his brother, Prof. Rangacharya, and myself. As we were dispersing, the Dewan Peshkar made his obeisance to the Swami which the latter returned in the manner usual with Hindu monks by simply uttering the name of Narayana. This roused the Peshkar's ire, for he wanted the Swami's obeisance, too, in the fashion in which he had made his own. The Swami then turned on him and said, "If you could exercise your customary form of etiquette in returning Narayana Menon's greeting, why should you resent my own adoption of the Sannyasin's customary mode of acknowledging your obeisance to me?" This reply had the desired effect, and next day the gentleman's brother came to us and conveyed some kind of apology for the awkward incident of the night previous.

- Reminiscences of  K. Sundarama Iyer (Time period: December 1892)

The Swami and the mirror

Miss Waldo had wide experience in teachers. She had sat at the feet of many during her long pursuit of truth, but sooner or later they had all fallen short in some way. Now the fear was in her heart that this new Hindu Swami might prove wanting. She was always watching for a sign of weakness. It came. She and the Swami were together in a New York drawing-room. The New York Swami Vivekananda knew was very different from the New York of today. The streets then were lined with monotonous blocks of brown stone houses, one so completely like very other that a visiting artist of note once asked: "How do you know when you are at home? You could as well be in the house next door."

Each of these narrow, but deep houses held on the first floor a long narrow drawing-room, with high folding-doors at one end, two large windows at the other, and between them a mirror reaching from floor to ceiling. This mirror seemed to fascinate the Swami. He stood before it again and again, gazing at himself intently. In between he walked up and down the room, lost in thought. Miss Waldo's eyes followed him anxiously. "Now the bubble is going to burst", she thought. "He is full of personal vanity." Suddenly he turned to her and said: "Ellen, it is the strangest thing, I cannot remember how I look. I look and look at myself in the glass, but the moment I ' turn away I forget completely what I look like."

Sister Devamata (Prabuddha Bharata, April & May 1932)