John Hanc: One last question — when talking to some of the runners at your Thanksgiving Day Half-Marathon, I found that many of them have been coming to your races for a long time and enjoy running here although they are not your spiritual students. Some of them have never even met you, but they were saying how well organised your races are and how nice the people are. The thing that some of them find surprising is that nobody tries to recruit them to become a follower of yours.

Sri Chinmoy: We are not proselytising or propagating our spiritual views. Ours is not a religion — far from it. Ours is only a way of life. We have an inner school and from this inner school we are trying to offer some blessings to the people who believe in the inner life. But we are not asking any runner to follow our path. We are only trying to provide opportunities for them to bring to the fore their own good qualities.