Skip to main content

Yogi and Murderer




Cruelty is born in the heart.  One who can harbour cruel thoughts in the heart is no less cruel than the one who commits the actual acts of cruelty.  Baba Ramdev’s wish to kill lakhs of people if they refuse to chant ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ makes him a potential mass murderer.  His wish raises a lot of questions that we should ponder upon.

Courtesy One India
First of all, Ramdev claims to be a yogi.  A yogi is one who has mastered self-control.  It’s control over body and mind.  It’s control over one’s passions of all sorts.  A yogi towers above the rank and file by virtue of that self-control.  There is no place for hatred of any sort, let alone murderous thoughts, in the heart of a yogi.  Is Ramdev a yogi?  Does he deserve the veneration that is being lavished on him?

The man forfeited his claim to that venerable status long ago when he commercialised spirituality and Ayurveda.  His Ayurvedic products have been called into question for their quality time and again.  There are umpteen court cases against his claims regarding his products.  He may be the richest trader in the country.  But a yogi?  Hmmm.

He continues to enjoy veneration from millions of people merely because of the spurt of nationalism of a queer sort that has found popularity recently in the country.  This nationalism is actually hatred masquerading as love of nation.  This nationalism is a reactionary force born out of the frustration of a section of people who think that another section of people are the cause of their failures and frustrations. 

People of the stature of Ramdev have the duty to bring remedies for the frustration which has become a menacing social evil.  It is the duty of every leader to find solutions to social problems.  Instead Ramdev is adding fuel to the fire.  He is fishing in the troubled waters.  Far from being a yogi, he is not even a leader.  Rabble rousers are not leaders. They are potential murderers.

Yet another question that rises is whether devotion to national symbols such as Bharat Mata can be prised out of people like a boulder being ejected from its moorings in the soil.  Even a person with ordinary common sense knows that no love can be forced on anyone or forced out of anyone.  Love has to be nurtured.  Make Bharat Mata a meaningful symbol for the people, a symbol to which they can relate at some level, if it is to be venerated.  But is it veneration of any symbol that people like Ramdev really want? 


Comments

  1. Pranju chakrapaniJune 15, 2017 at 7:41 PM

    How way is highway,sir! A highway to hell!

    Irony is that there was a time when I used to practice pranayama early in the morning through his channel. That was a time when he was anti medicine and anti advertisement and anti western clothes. Now he is pro medicine, look at his advertisements and also there was a news on swadeshi jeans. His way is highway, sir!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 15, 2017 at 8:07 PM

      The irony has gone beyond the poles. The real tragedy is the refusal of people to see light, to open their eyes. Villains become heroes only because the followers refuse to see the truth.

      Delete
  2. Murthy K v v sJune 16, 2017 at 11:25 PM

    He also spoils the name of Patanjali.And Pranayama was twisted with his own interpretations.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 18, 2017 at 9:14 AM

      His own interpretation would have been acceptable if his heart was pure. When it comes to anything related to spirituality, the purity of the heart is the ultimate touchstone.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...
121 comments
Read more

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
44 comments
Read more

Romance in Utopia

Book Review Title: My Haven Author: Ruchi Chandra Verma Pages: 161 T his little novel is a surfeit of sugar and honey. All the characters that matter are young employees of an IT firm in Bengaluru. One of them, Pihu, 23 years and all too sweet and soft, falls in love with her senior colleague, Aditya. The love is sweetly reciprocated too. The colleagues are all happy, furthermore. No jealousy, no rivalry, nothing that disturbs the utopian equilibrium that the author has created in the novel. What would love be like in a utopia? First of all, there would be no fear or insecurity. No fear of betrayal, jealousy, heartbreak… Emotional security is an essential part of any utopia. There would be complete trust between partners, without the need for games or power struggles. Every relationship would be built on deep understanding, where partners complement each other perfectly. Miscommunication and misunderstanding would be rare or non-existent, as people would have heightened emo...
9 comments
Read more

Tanishq and the Patriots

Patriots are a queer lot. You don’t know what all things can make them pick up the gun. Only one thing is certain apparently: the gun for anything. When the neighbouring country behaves like a hoard of bandicoots digging into our national borders, we will naturally take up the gun. But nowadays we choose to redraw certain lines on the map and then proclaim that not an inch of land has been lost. On the other hand, when a jewellery company brings out an ad promoting harmony between the majority and the minority populations, our patriots take up the gun. And shoot down the ad. Those who promote communal harmony are traitors in India today. The sacred duty of the genuine Indian patriot is to hate certain communities, rape their women, plunder their land, deny them education and other fundamental rights and basic requirements. Tanishq withdrew the ad that sought to promote communal harmony. The patriot’s gun won. Aapka Bharat Mahan. In the novel Black Hole which I’m writing there is...
61 comments
Read more

A Lesson from Little Prince

I joined the #WriteAPageADay challenge of Blogchatter , as I mentioned earlier in another post. I haven’t succeeded in writing a page every day, though. But as long as you manage to write a minimum of 10,000 words in the month of Feb, Blogchatter is contented. I woke up this morning feeling rather vacant in the head, which happens sometimes. Whenever that happens to me but I do want to get on with what I should, I fall back on a book that has inspired me. One such book is Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince . I have wished time and again to meet Little Prince in person as the narrator of his story did. We might have interesting conversations like the ones that exist in the novel. If a sheep eats shrubs, will he also eat flowers? That is one of the questions raised by Little Prince [LP]. “A sheep eats whatever he meets,” the narrator answers. “Even flowers that have thorns?” LP is interested in the rose he has on his tiny planet. When he is told that the sheep will eat f...
8 comments
Read more