greatest day in his life, he said, "the day I had my first darshan of Thakur [Ramakrishna] in February 1882." According to other traditional accounts, Mahendranath related that he may have met Ramakrishna for the first time when he was four years old and became separated from his mother while visiting the Dakshineswar Kali Temple. He began crying, and a blissful and youthful man came up and consoled him. He believed it to be Ramakrishna, who was then a priest at the Kali temple. Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita M had the habit of maintaining a personal diary since the age of thirteen. M met Sri Ramakrishna in 1882 and, attracted by the latter's teachings, started to maintain a stenographic record of Sri Ramakrishna's conversations and actions in his diary, which finally took the form of a book Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita. Initially when M began writing the diaries, he had no plans of publication. Regarding his methodology M wrote, In each of his Kathamrita entries, M records the date, time and place of the conversation. The title Kathamrita, literally "nectarine words" was inspired by verse 10.31.9 from the Vaishnava text, the Bhagavata Purana. Both Sri Ramakrishna's wife, Holy Mother Sarada Devi, and Swami Vivekananda later testified to Mahendranath's faithfulness to Sri Ramakrishna's words. The first four volumes were published in 1902, 1904, 1908 and 1910 respectively and the fifth volume in 1932, delayed because of M's health problems. The Kathamrita contains the conversations of Sri Ramakrishna from 19/26 February 1882 to 24 April 1886, during M's visits. The Kathamrita is regarded as a Bengali classic and revered among the followers as a sacred scripture. Famous translations of Kathamrita include works by Swami Nikhilananda(1942), and Dharma Pal Gupta. Teacher to Paramahansa Yogananda Paramahansa Yogananda, a 20th-century philosopher and a yogi, was a student of Mahendranath Gupta. Mahendranath moved to 50 Amherst Street in Calcutta, where he ran a small boys' high school. It was also formerly Paramahansa Yogananda's family home—a site especially poignant to Yogananda because it was the site of his mother's death. In his Autobiography of a Yogi, Yogananda dedicated an entire chapter to describing his friendship with Mahendranath, whom he referred to as "Master Mahasaya," which was along spiritual rather than academic lines. Yogananda described Mahendranath as having a "silky white beard and large lustrous eyes" and described his personality thus: "His role in the world was humble,