Skip to main content

The Ashram

Paras felt sick again and rushed to the washroom retching.

Adarsh had been watching it for quite a few days now. Whenever the Holy Baba's voice rose from the lecture hall, Paras would turn pale and then the retching would begin.

Both Paras and Adarsh were inmates of the Baba's Ashram.  Their duty was to look after the accounts. Paras was disconcerted with the fraudulent accounts. Money was being siphoned off to the accounts of two women who took turns to worship the Holy Baba in the night. The women, Paras learnt, had bought palatial houses. They came nowadays to the Ashram in luxurious chauffeur-driven cars. Their houses and cars were all bought with the money donated by naive devotees.

Paras wretched again. He was in the bedroom shared by the two of them. This was new: this retching on hearing the sound of the woman's chauffeur-driven car.

"Where are you going?" Adarsh asked when Paras started packing his bag, having returned from the washroom.

"I'm quitting," he said.

"What?"

"I can't stand this anymore," he said. "I have to save myself from this gigantic fraud we're perpetrating on ourselves and others."

"But you can't quit, Paras. You've already been blacklisted. You know too much. They won't ever let you go past the gate."

Paras didn't care. He was past caring.

Slinging his bag over his back, he walked out into the lurid light of glaring LED lamps outside.

Adarsh was stunned. He knew there would soon arise a stifling sound in the woods yonder, the part of the reserved forest acquired by the Ashram recently with the help of a politician-devotee. One more grave would be dug there in the darkness of the night. He shuddered.



Indian Bloggers




Comments

  1. The charm of being under a Baba's guidance becomes more when that Baba starts speaking in English. I have seen one becoming a rockstar to appeal the younger ones.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There are many rock star Babas now. There's one Punjab-based guy who appears to his Indian bhakts in immaculate white kurta-pyjama but dons jeans and tees while abroad. He has a few thousand acres of land in various places... Swindler par excellence with top guns as devotees.

      Delete
  2. There is a Baba in the western TN whose pastime is grabbing forest lands. This holy man visits Himalayas every year with a retinue of women.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Forest lands are given to these 'holy' men by politicians. It's a nexus; both parties benefit one way or another.

      Delete
  3. It's almost aggravating to see men of seemingly normal intelligence being taken for a ride by these babas. Thousands of them. It is off their money that these babas feed off. We make them popular hence the politicians kneel before them for endorsement.

    Arghh!!!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Many people follow them for personal aggrandizement and not for anything related to spirituality. Where there is power, there lie benefits too. As simple as that.

      Delete
  4. Volumes of nefarious activities of babas and their ashrams wonderfully contained in this short story..but do we understand? There's no dearth of these flourishing babas and their miracle expecting followers:(

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's why, Amit ji, I have become fully convinced that the Babas are doing something other than religion.

      Delete
  5. Sir I just read this and understand this is India and its inhabitants

    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

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...

I’m Alive

Illustration by Copilot Designer How do you prove to anyone that you’re alive? Go and stand in front of the person and declare, “I’m Tom, Shyam or Hari”? No, that won’t work in India. Let me share my personal experience. It’s as absurd as the plight of Kafka’s protagonist in The Castle. A land surveyor is summoned for duty, only to be told that the mere fact a land surveyor was summoned does not prove he is that land surveyor though he has the appointment letter with him. I received a mail from the Life Insurance Corporation of India [LIC] that I should prove my existence in order to continue receiving my annuity on the sum I had invested with them five years ago. They’re only paying the interest on the sum I have given them. They’re not doing me any charity. Yet they want me to prove to them that I am still alive in order to continue getting the annual amount they are obligated to pay me. This is India. LIC is a government undertaking. If I don’t follow their injunction, I wil...

Independence from Dictators too

Kerala Governor Rajendra Arlekar asked the state to observe ‘Partition Horror Day’ on 14 Aug instead of celebrating the country’s Independence. His organisation, the RSS, as well as its ideological sibling the Hindu Mahasabha, had explicitly directed its members not to celebrate the Independence on 14-15 Aug 1947. From Bombay Chronicle, 9 Aug 1947 Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins gave us a graphic description of what the RSS did on 15 Aug 1947, in their classic book Freedom at Midnight . When the rest of India celebrated its new Independence, the RSS hoisted its own flag, “an orange triangle, emblazoned upon which was the symbol that, in a slightly modified form, had terrorized Europe for a decade, the swastika.” About 500 RSS men stood saluting the swastika on 15 Aug 1947 in Poona. Lapierre and Collins describe the RSS as a “para-fascist movement” whose members “saw themselves as the heirs to those ancient Aryans.” Rajendra Arlekar is an RSS man. He has been doing whate...

Hindutva’s Contradictions

The book I’m reading now is Whose Rama? [in Malayalam] by Sanskrit scholar and professor T S Syamkumar. I had mentioned this book in an earlier post . The basic premise of the book, as I understand from the initial pages, is that Hindutva is a Brahminical ideology that keeps the lower caste people outside its terrain. Non-Aryans are portrayed as monsters in ancient Hindu literature. The Shudras, the lowest caste, and the casteless others, are not even granted the status of humans.  Whose Rama? The August issue of The Caravan carries an article related to the inhuman treatment that the Brahmins of Etawah in Uttar Pradesh meted out to a Yadav “preacher” in the last week of June 2025. “Yadavs are traditionally ranked as a Shudra community,” says the article. They are not supposed to recite the holy texts. Mukut Mani Singh Yadav was reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita. That was his crime. The Brahmins of the locality got the man’s head tonsured, forced him to rub his nose at t...