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  The President has already withdrawn himself from the event having realised the threat it poses not only to the Yamuna and its environment but also to his own reputation.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?

Labels:

Comments

  1. magiceyeMarch 10, 2016 at 7:52 AM

    Unholy state of affairs indeed!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sunshine-struckMarch 10, 2016 at 11:55 AM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 10, 2016 at 1:26 PM

      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. UnknownMarch 10, 2016 at 2:56 PM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 10, 2016 at 6:45 PM

      Hasn't god been converted into yet another commodity in the free market?

      Delete
  4. RakeshMarch 12, 2016 at 6:26 PM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 12, 2016 at 6:32 PM

      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. Ankita VermaMay 26, 2016 at 8:14 AM

    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
47 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...
14 comments
Read more