Skip to main content

Prophet of Love


Top post on IndiBlogger.in, the community for Indian Bloggers


Book Review

Book                : Prophet of Love
Author             : Farrukh Dhondy
Publisher         : Harper Collins India, 2013
Pages               : 314
Price                : Rs 299

Religion is an interesting subject of study and it can be studied from many different perspectives such as psychology, sociology, spirituality and literature.   For the vast majority of people none of these perspectives matters apparently.  For the vast majority, religion is an illusion or a placebo that provides the much needed solace during times of turbulence and anguish.  There is a minority who seek and discover genuine spiritual meaning with the help of religion.  There is another group of people who make religion the source of their livelihood.

Farrukh Dhondy’s novel is about the last group primarily.  Mr Bhavnani and Ms Shanti are the typical commercial agents of religion.  They know how to sell religion.  They make wealth out of it, and nothing less than fabulous wealth.  The protagonist of the novel is Bhagwan Saket and he is not trying to make wealth.  He is superficial both emotionally and intellectually.  He has read much and was even a teacher of philosophy for some time in a college.  But his knowledge remains untouched by the profundity that only life’s experiences can provide.  He has no experience of love; he had been separated from his mother as an infant.  He lived in a monastery in the Himalayas till the age of 7.  Later he obtained education with the help of scholarships.  He never dreamt of becoming a godman. Mr Bhavnani and Ms Shanti catapult Rahul the loafer into Saket the godman.  Saket possesses a charm and an eloquence which can draw a lot of wealthy Westerners as disciples.  Saket eventually becomes the wealthiest godman in India owning a fleet of luxury cars gifted by his devotees.

There is enough hint in the novel that Bhagwan Saket is modelled on Bhagwan Rajneesh who later became Osho.  Saket’s empire is also situated in “a quiet suburb of Poona.” 

Dhondy succeeds in portraying vividly the dark underbelly of a godman’s empire.  Godmen like Bhagwan Saket found cults which become “the religion of the lost children.”  The words “lost” and “children” are significant.  In the case of Bhagwan Saket, the people who flock to him are those who lost their moorings in their original culture and religion, mostly because they seldom cared to discover their roots.  They are also quite childish in their yearnings for love and attention.

There is another godman in the novel who is put to death by his commercial managers when he is no more able to deliver lectures and thus rake in the moolah.  The followers of that godman are mostly widows and old men who are not wanted by their children.  Religion is the refuge of the lost people, people who fail to discover themselves clearly.

Prophet of Love is a suspense thriller at one level.  At another, it throws ample light on the world of certain godmen and other similar frauds.  The world that Dhondy throws open to the readers is so bizarre that it may seem incredible and improbable in many places.  That is a drawback of the novel. 

The novel arouses the reader’s curiosity right from page one and sustains it to the end.  How far the reader will be satisfied will depend on his/her religious inclinations, intellectual proclivity and literary tastes.  Those who are not familiar with the world of religious fraudsters but are interested in a ringside view will find the book highly rewarding.  



 Acknowledgement: Thanks to Harper Collins India for sending me a free copy of the book in association with the Book Review Project of Indiblogger.
Labels:

Comments

  1. NjkinnySeptember 26, 2013 at 11:09 PM

    Wow..Brilliantly reviewed...I will surely read the book now.. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 27, 2013 at 7:46 AM

      All the best. I'm sure you'll find it a provocative book. I had visited Osho's ashram in Poona in the early 80s. I could revisit it now through this book!

      Delete
  2. desi TravelerSeptember 26, 2013 at 11:57 PM

    Interesting and timely considering the once again a godmen has been proven to be fraud in real life...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 27, 2013 at 7:47 AM

      Most godmen are after wealth and opulence. There are exceptions. Dhondy presents a godman whose interest is not in wealth and opulence which he gets as mere byproducts.

      Delete
  3. UnknownOctober 8, 2013 at 1:53 PM

    Seriously, one day you will make me broke with the reviews of all these books :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 8, 2013 at 9:57 PM

      I only wish for more time to read more books, Pankti.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts
12 comments
Read more

Queen of Religion

She looked like Queen Victoria in the latter’s youth but with a snow-white head. She was slim, fair and graceful. She always smiled but the smile had no life. Someone on the campus described it as a “plastic smile.” She was charming by physical appearance. Soon all of us on the Sawan school campus would realise how deceptive appearances were. Queen took over the administration of Sawan school on behalf of her religious cult RSSB [Radha Soami Satsang Beas]. A lot was said about RSSB in the previous post. Its godman Gurinder Singh Dhillon is now 70 years old. I don’t know whether age has mellowed his lust for land and wealth. Even at the age of 64, he was embroiled in a financial scam that led to the fall of two colossal business enterprises, Fortis Healthcare and Religare finance. That was just a couple of years after he had succeeded in making Sawan school vanish without a trace from Delhi which he did for the sake of adding the school’s twenty-odd acres of land to his existing hun
16 comments
Read more

Machiavelli the Reverend

Let us go today , you and I, through certain miasmic streets. Nothing will be quite clear along our way because this journey is through some delusions and illusions. You will meet people wearing holy robes and talking about morality and virtues. Some of them will claim to be god’s men and some will make taller claims. Some of them are just amorphous. Invisible. But omnipotent. You can feel their power around you. On you. Oppressing you. Stifling you. Reverend Machiavelli is one such oppressive power. You will meet Franz Kafka somewhere along the way. Joseph K’s ghost will pass by. Remember Joseph K who was arrested one fine morning for a crime that nobody knew anything about? Neither Joseph nor the men who arrest him know why Joseph K is arrested. The power that keeps Joseph K under arrest is invisible. He cannot get answers to his valid questions from the visible agents of that power. He cannot explain himself to that power. Finally, he is taken to a quarry outside the town wher
19 comments
Read more

Levin the good shepherd

AI-generated image The lost sheep and its redeemer form a pet motif in Christianity. Jesus portrayed himself as a good shepherd many times. He said that the good shepherd will leave his 99 sheep in order to bring the lost sheep back to the fold. When he finds the lost sheep, the shepherd is happier about that one sheep than about the 99, Jesus claimed. He was speaking metaphorically. The lost sheep is the sinner in Jesus’ parable. Sin is a departure from the ‘right’ way. Angels raise a toast in heaven whenever a sinner returns to the ‘right’ path [Luke 15:10]. A lot of Catholic priests I know carry some sort of a Redeemer complex in their souls. They love the sinner so much that they cannot rest until they make the angels of God run for their cups of joy. I have also been fortunate to have one such priest-friend whom I shall call Levin in this post. He has befriended me right from the year 1976 when I was a blundering adolescent and he was just one year older than me. He possesse
8 comments
Read more

Nakulan the Outcast

Nakulan was one of the many tenants of Hevendrea . A professor in the botany department of the North Eastern Hill University, he was a very lovable person. Some sense of inferiority complex that came from his caste status made him scoff the very idea of his lovability. He lived with his wife and three children in one of Heavendrea’s many cottages. When he wanted to have a drink, he would walk over to my hut. We sipped our whiskies and discussed Shillong’s intriguing politics or something of the sort while my cassette player crooned gently in the background. Nakulan was more than ten years my senior by age. He taught a subject which had never aroused my interest at any stage of my life. It made no difference to me whether a leaf was pinnately compound or palmately compound. You don’t need to know about anther and stigma in order to understand a flower. My friend Levin would have ascribed my lack of interest in Nakulan’s subject to my egomania. I always thought that Nakulan lived
15 comments
Read more