Skip to main content

Babas and their Babes




Those who are familiar with Babas (godmen, sadhus, and whatever names they are known by) won’t be surprised by what followed the arrest of that Ram Rahim fellow.  We know that most of these men (and women too these days) clad in religious robes are sheer criminals.  Religion is merely a mask for them, a façade put up to hide the hideousness behind.

There are thousands of people in India like this Ram Rahim chap.  Most of them are not known beyond their limited circles.  Some are rich and powerful enough to have made their presence felt beyond their circles and even beyond the national borders.  Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB], for example.  Like this Ram Rahim fellow, Gurinder Singh of RSSB enjoys fabulous following and high category security too.  This security is a big joke for me personally.

This guy Gurinder Singh is greedy for land while most of his counterparts are greedy for women and food and petty conquests like the old kings of little kingdoms.  RSSB arguably owns more area of the earth than any other dera.  I was a victim of its latest land acquisition.  The school where I was working was bought by them with its fifteen acres of campus just a year after Narendra Modi came to power in Delhi.  The school, hostels, and all other buildings on the campus were razed to ground and the whole thing today stands as wasteland except three times a year when Gurinder will lecture to his bhakts whose vehicles will be parked in the parking lot which was a school until two years ago.  RSSB was reported earlier to have conquered about hundred acres of forest lands in the Delhi-Haryana border.  Nobody is concerned about such things.

When the staff of the school complained to the AAP education minister about the imminent destruction of the school in 2015, the minister said, “We are helpless.  If we support you, we’ll get a few hundred votes.  The Baba’s devotees number to five lakh.”  The votes matter more than any principle.  Moreover, AAP’s premier, Arvind Kejriwal had already received some favours from Sitaram Jindal who had sold the school to Gurinder Singh and Jindal is a bhakt of the godman.  So we knew we were fighting a futile war.  The school died, we lost our jobs and I migrated to Kerala where godmen won’t fool the people easily.

Oh, I was saying that Gurinder’s security is a joke.  I digressed after that.  That’s how I am.  Sorry.  Gurinder visited the school when the deal was being settled.  It was rumoured that he bought the campus for ₹900 crore.  We were curious to see this wealthy ascetic and so were happy to know that he was visiting us.  But when the time came, we – the staff and students – were all asked to stay in the auditorium and never come out until we were told.  The ascetic came with a few police vehicle in front and behind.  Even the MPs who came to the school for various functions never had such security.  I wondered what kind of an ascetic this was.  One small boy escaped the attention of teachers and moved out.  He was chased back by the security police.  When asked by a teacher why he had gone out the boy said that he had to visit the washroom.  Baba must have gifted him constipation. We were let out of the auditorium only after the Baba left the campus with all the police vehicles in front and behind his vehicle.

After my school was converted into a parking lot I came to know that Gurinder has a different face when he visits his foreign ‘ashrams.’  He flies the business class and has the class’s due entertainments.  All his followers I met while I worked in the school during the two years after their takeover were villainous to the core.  They knew how to distort simple truths into circuitous lies. They assaulted rebellious teachers on the roads.  They fabricated false cases against some teachers. One charge was attempt to rape.  In order to fabricate that charge they sent some ancient (very old, I mean) women to the house of a staff member and created a ruckus.  What followed was hilarious comedy seen from the distance of today but acute tragedy for that family at that time.

I could go on and on.  My experience with one godman is fit for a novel (which I am writing).  You can imagine what the other godmen would be like.  I leave it to you to judge.  But I know that bhakti makes people blind to truths. 

PS. My latest short story collection, The Nomad Learns Morality, is dedicated to RSSB, especially one woman of that cult. 

Comments

  1. No doubt, India has become the breeding ground for many spurious babas who have been exploiting people and are becoming a curse to the society. The people who flock to them are either gullible or as criminally inclined as the babas.

    At the same time there are genuine spiritual masters who are interested in spreading spiritual knowledge and uplifting the society. Being non controversial they may not get as much media space as these spicy babas.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Present day Godmen (of all religions) are anything but spiritual. Why do they need acres and acres of land and other property to spread messages of Love and brotherhood?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Love and brotherhood have nothing to do with spirituality these days. Fake kingdom, that's what spirituality is today.

      Delete
  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Very well written

    http://www.thewordlyconfusion.com/

    ReplyDelete
  5. I so damn agree to everything you penned. Whom to trust is the big question? I am loosing faith in humanity now...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's the Baba's people who sucked my trust in humanity. Today religious people are deadlier than politicians.

      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

The Veiled Women

One of the controversies that has been raging in Kerala for quite some time now is about a girl student’s decision to wear the hijab to school. The school run by Christian nuns did not appreciate the girl’s choice of religious identity over the school uniform and punished her by making her stand outside the classroom. The matter was taken up immediately by a fundamentalist Muslim organisation (SDPI) which created the usual sound and fury on the campus as well as outside. Kerala is a liberal state in which Hindus (55%), Muslims (27%), and Christians (18%) have been living in fair though superficial harmony even after Modi’s BJP with its cantankerous exclusivism assumed power in Delhi. Maybe, Modi created much insecurity feeling among the Muslims in Kerala too resulting in some reactionary moves like the hijab mentioned above. The school could have handled it diplomatically given the general nature of Muslims which is not quite amenable to sense and sensibility. From the time I shi...

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...

You Don’t Know the Sky

I asked the bird to lend me wings. I longed to fly like her. Gracefully. She tilted her head and said, “Wings won’t be of any use to you because you don’t know the sky.” And she flew away. Into the sky. For a moment, I was offended. What arrogance! Does she think she owns the sky? As I watched the bird soar effortlessly into the blue vastness, I began to see what she meant. I wanted wings, not the flight. Like wanting freedom without the responsibility that comes with it. The bird had earned her wings. Through storms, through hunger, through braving the odds. She manoeuvred her way among the missiles that flew between invisible borders erected by us humans. She witnessed the macabre dance of death that brought down cities, laid waste a whole country. Wings are about more than flights. How often have you perched on the stump of a massive tree brought down by a falling warhead and wept looking at the debris of civilisations? The language of the sky is different from tha...

Nazneen’s Fate

N azneen is the protagonist of Monica Ali’s debut novel Brick Lane (2003). Born in Bangla Desh, Nazneen is married at the age of 18 to 40-year-old Chanu Ahmed who lives in London. Fate plays a big role in Nazneen’s life. Rather, she allows fate to play a big role. What is the role of fate in our life? Let us examine the question with Nazneen as our example. Nazneen was born two months before time. Later on she will tell her daughters that she was “stillborn.” Her mother refused to seek medical help though the infant’s condition was critical. “We must not stand in the way of Fate,” the mother said. “Whatever happens, I accept it. And my child must not waste any energy fighting against Fate.” The child does survive as if Fate had a plan for her. And she becomes as much a fatalist as her mother. She too leaves everything to Fate which is not quite different from God if you’re a believer like Nazneen and her mother. When a man from another continent, who is more than double her age,...