Skip to main content

Holy Men and Unholy Deeds

Delhi has a lot of godmen.  The place called Bhatti Mines alone has three of them who among them share hundreds of acres of land.  They vie with one another to woo customers by organising various events which are supposed to be religious but appear more like melas.  Neither the simple human morality nor the more noble spirituality of the people has improved any bit with all these godmen and their varied entertainments if we go by the crime rates in the city.  The only thing that is changing visibly is the wealth possessed by these holy men.

Now the Art of Living (AoL) guru, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, is invading the Yamuna.  1000 acres of the riverbed and banks have been converted into a gigantic structure meant to hold some 3,000,000 devotees from about 150 countries.  The President has already withdrawn himself from the event having realised the threat it poses not only to the Yamuna and its environment but also to his own reputation.   The Prime Minister is also likely to withdraw citing security reasons.

The AoL will come up with statistics about its contributions towards the causes of the environment.  They have a lot of money which can perform miracles, the kind which even their gods won't be able to perform!  They got our soldiers to do a lot of construction work free of charge.  Getting the country's army men to do your private work is nothing short of a miracle.  In the end, the taxpayer pays for AoL's jobs too though AoL is richer than any taxpayer in India!  These are a few of the miracles being performed by India's godmen.

I'm left wondering why these godmen, whose tribe is constantly increasing in population, are not able to bring in more peace and harmony, more joy and love, to the people who flock to them like the children who followed the Pied Piper.  Why is there increasing discontent in proportion to the rising number of holy men and holier organisations?

Comments

  1. Unholy state of affairs indeed!

    ReplyDelete
  2. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer, the holy get holier. ;)
    But, I have no answer to your question. Maybe, He also doesn't have one. Spectators of it, that is all.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's a rhetorical question. I know the answer. Certain environments are conducive to the growth of certain creatures and species. This is the breeding season for godmen, sadhvis and others of the kind.

      Delete
  3. You echoed my sentiments. Let me also state that I object to any mere human being elevated to the status of a God

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hasn't god been converted into yet another commodity in the free market?

      Delete
  4. If you say, I'm fed up of these godmen! I believe, even God would have been fed up of them, like parents get irritated by errant kids! The pity is, people still don't wake up, even though they are exposed! You will still find followers of those jailed godmen around. Be it Chandraswami or Asaram.

    Sad and deplorable!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. People make material benefits by following these goddam godmen. I know people, especially women - divorcees, particularly - who have gained much by being godmen's devotees.

      Delete
  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Insecurity and Exclusivism

“ Hindu khatare mein hai.” This was one of the first slogans that accompanied the emergence of Narendra Modi on the national scene. It means Hindus are in Danger . It reveals a deep-rooted feeling of insecurity. Hindus constitute an overwhelming majority in India – 80%. All the high positions in governance, judiciary, academics, any significant place, are occupied by Hindus. Yet the slogan was born. Strange? It will be facile to argue that Modi used this slogan and its concomitant hatred of Muslims and Christians as a political weapon for winning votes. True, he was successful in that; he rose to the highest political post in the country using minority-bashing. But the hatred did not end with that achievement; rather it spread outward and became more exclusive. Muslim and European rulers of India were booted out from the country’s history books and wherever else possible like the names of roads and institutions. With vengeance. Now there is a concerted effort going on to place In...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

You Don’t Know the Sky

I asked the bird to lend me wings. I longed to fly like her. Gracefully. She tilted her head and said, “Wings won’t be of any use to you because you don’t know the sky.” And she flew away. Into the sky. For a moment, I was offended. What arrogance! Does she think she owns the sky? As I watched the bird soar effortlessly into the blue vastness, I began to see what she meant. I wanted wings, not the flight. Like wanting freedom without the responsibility that comes with it. The bird had earned her wings. Through storms, through hunger, through braving the odds. She manoeuvred her way among the missiles that flew between invisible borders erected by us humans. She witnessed the macabre dance of death that brought down cities, laid waste a whole country. Wings are about more than flights. How often have you perched on the stump of a massive tree brought down by a falling warhead and wept looking at the debris of civilisations? The language of the sky is different from tha...

Nazneen’s Fate

N azneen is the protagonist of Monica Ali’s debut novel Brick Lane (2003). Born in Bangla Desh, Nazneen is married at the age of 18 to 40-year-old Chanu Ahmed who lives in London. Fate plays a big role in Nazneen’s life. Rather, she allows fate to play a big role. What is the role of fate in our life? Let us examine the question with Nazneen as our example. Nazneen was born two months before time. Later on she will tell her daughters that she was “stillborn.” Her mother refused to seek medical help though the infant’s condition was critical. “We must not stand in the way of Fate,” the mother said. “Whatever happens, I accept it. And my child must not waste any energy fighting against Fate.” The child does survive as if Fate had a plan for her. And she becomes as much a fatalist as her mother. She too leaves everything to Fate which is not quite different from God if you’re a believer like Nazneen and her mother. When a man from another continent, who is more than double her age,...