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 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

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

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

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

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...
10 comments
Read more