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

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. 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

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. ...

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

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...

My Experiments with Hindi

M y knowledge of Hindi is remarkably deficient despite my living in the northern parts of India for three whole decades. The language never appealed to me. Rather, my Hindi teachers at school, without exception, were the coarsest people I ever met in that period of my life and they created my aversion to Hindi. Someone told me later that those who took up Hindi as their academic major in Kerala were people who failed to secure admission to any other course. That is, if you’re good for nothing else, then go for Hindi. And so they end up as disgruntled people. We students became the victims of that discontent. I don’t know if this theory is correct, however. Though I studied Hindi as my third language (there was no other option) at school for six years, I couldn’t speak one good sentence in that language when I turned my back on school happily and with immense relief after the tenth grade. Of course, I could manage some simple sentences like में लड़का हू। [I am a boy.] A few line...