Gods and Godmen of India (17 page)
“Where does he get all this energy from?” I asked Noronha as he drove me back home. “Not from what he eats,” he replied. “All he takes is a spoonful or two of cream mixed with mashed rice twice a day. No bread, no meat or vegetables; no tea, coffee or milk. He seerns to be able to do with very little food and sleep. He is up most of the day and night and only takes an occasional cat nap. The rest of the time he is talking or reading.” That is probably what gives UG the aura of godliness; he has spiritual energy of demonic proportions.
7/1/90
I
have always been fascinated by occult phenomena. So far whatever I have been exposed to has left me baffled but totally unconvinced. My first exposure was within a few months of my joining college in England. I met a Maharashtrian couple (I think they were a doctor and Mrs Shastri) who claimed to be able to communicate with spirits. He showed me a photograph of himself and his wife with another lady standing behind them. The lady, he said, was his first wife who had died some years before the photograph was taken. The photographer’s attestation bearing a date certified that he had taken the photograph of only Dr and the second Mrs Shastri but when he developed it, the first Mrs Shastri had mysteriously appeared on the negative. The Shastris took me to many seances. At each of them a medium went into a trance and delivered messages from dead people. The one thing that baffled me was the way the voice of the medium suddenly changed as he or she went into a trance. The messages were usually a lot of gibberish but the ventriloquism was most impressive.
Last year my security guard, Sita Ram, a UP Jat, gave me some tapes of
pravachans
(sermons) by a man he held in great reverence. Sita Ram belongs to a class of Indians who are firmly convinced that all the development in science ranging from faster-than-sound aircraft, rocketry, hydrogen bombs
et al,
were known to our Hindu ancestors. His guru’s pronouncements confirmed his convictions. I heard the tapes; they were in high-falutin Hindi which I could barely comprehend. I dismissed them as an aberration. I did not then realize how large a following this guruji had. Now I know. Hence this introduction.
Brahmachari Krishna Datta (47) is from village Khurrampur Salemabad not far from Muradnagar in Meerut district. His father is a poor weaver. Datta apparently never went to school. According to his mother, he started talking in strange tongues from the time he was two years old. The parents regarded him as a wastrel and often chastised him. At the age of 15 he ran away from home and settled down with a distant relative in village Barnawa. He was taken more seriously. Then in 1961 a branch of the Arya Samaj in Delhi brought him to the capital. Since then he has been delivering
pravachans
in many parts of the city to large audiences. The pattern is the same. He lies down on a charpoy and goes into a trance. His head turns violently from one side to the other as he speaks. In the hour or so he talks, his voice changes two or three times. He may not have received any formal education, but he quotes Sanskrit scriptures extensively, and is fully conversant with Hindu mythology. He claims the knowledge from an earlier rishi incarnation which comes back to him only when he is in a trance. Even the sceptic would concede he is a master ventriloquist.
What he says warms the hearts of his audience: Naramtak, son of Ravan, and Ghatotkach, son of Bhima, had machines that took them to the moon. Also television. Lord Krishna endowed the blind Dhritarashtra with inner vision and he could see the battle between the Kauravas and Pandavas as clearly as the current serial on Doordarshan. He has his own interpretation of the Mahabharat and the Ramayan. He says that wicked pundits were employed to malign characters in the two epics. Every Vedic mantra has 24 kinds of sciences hidden in them. Lord Krishna acquired his knowledge by repeating these mantras. Kumbhkaran did not sleep for six months. Like other members of Ravan’s family he was a highly learned man trained in the science of weaponry and nuclear warfare by Maharishi Bharadwaj, the greatest scientist of all times. He built a large laboratory in the Himalayas where he researched for six months of the year. And so on.
Amongst Krishna Datta’s followers are doctors, lawyers, and professors. Who am I to question their convictions?
27/11/88
M
ore than 30 years ago while living in a village south of Paris I met an 18-year-old German girl working as an
au pair
with the lady of the house. She was a tall, strapping Nordic type who like most Germans was very hard working. She was also a devout Catholic. I often drove her to church for mass and brought her back home. Being an agnostic I needled her about accepting Christian dogma without questioning some of its assumptions. She held her ground and remained impervious to my arguments.
A few years later she married a German Catholic. He was in some kind of business; she had qualified as a lawyer. They had three daughters. Every time I went to Europe or the United States I made it a point to spend a day or two with them in Wuppertal. I never saw them to church. On Sunday mornings we went for long walks in the woods and ended up at some
beerhavs.
No member of the family seemed over-exercised about matters of faith.
We kept in touch through letters and the telephone. Till last year we had no problem of communication. Then suddenly the contents of her letters began to change. She wrote about her interest in Suf ism and Indian mysticism. She sent me a book on yoga and meditation. And was disappointed when I did not respond. She accused me of having a closed mind.
Last month she arrived in India. I was barely able to recognize her. She had cropped her hair, and looked like a Buddhist nun. She, along with three other German ladies, was going to spend a fortnight in an ashram near Haldwani (UP). Surely I must know about it? I did not. Nor did any of my Indian friends. They tossed in names of gurus, swamis and ashrams that litter the banks of the holy Ganga but no one had heard of the Herakhan Vishwa Mahadham on the Gautama Ganga at the foot of the Kumaon Mount Kailash. My German lady friend referred to her guru as ‘Babaji’. When we went to a bookstore dealing with esoteric literature to buy
Teachings of Babaji,
she greeted the storekeeper with
“Om Namaha Shivaya."
Back home I read the foreword to the booklet. It mentioned the advent of the Baba in the following words:
“He has no known parents or family; he appeared as a youth of 18, or so, yet he displayed great wisdom and power – divine powers – from the start. The Herakhan villagers saw him as an old man with a long, white beard; as a young man with a long beard; as a beautiful young man with no beard. Two men spoke to him at the same time; one saw an old man with a beard, the other saw a young man with no beard. He was seen in different places at the same time. He knew the scriptures, yet there is no evidence of his having been ‘educated’. He ate almost nothing for months on end, yet his energy was boundless. In September 1970, he walked to the top of Mount Kailash, seated himself, in a yogi fashion, at the small temple there, and sat for 45 days without leaving his seat, meditating much of the time, talking occasionally, and starting to teach the message he has brought to the world.”
Most of the booklet consists of forecasts made by Babaji from July 1979 to February 1983. None of these made much sense to me. What distressed me more than my ‘closed mind’ was the realization that a person whom I had known as a friend for over three decades now spoke a language I could not comprehend. There was a total breakdown of communication.
After spending
navratri
at Herakhan, the German ladies will proceed to Puttaparthi to have
darshan
of Shri Sathya Sai Baba. Their minds are not closed: they are willing to try out other ashrams and teachers; they are out hunting for an Indian guru who will put then on the right path of nirvana.
I had to weather two other assaults on my agnostic fortress. One was delivered by a sallow-complexioned, intense-looking young man who delivered a copy of the
Bhagwad Gita
and a pamphlet entitled
Scientific Study and Culture
written by his guru, Manohar Shree Krishna Harakare addressed affectionately by his disciples as Kakaji or Yogi Manohar. He has his ashram at Paoni near Nagpur. Manohar has a degree in education and was for some time a deputy collector. All that changed after he met a yogi in Bihar. He settled in Paoni, did nine years of penance under Gyaneshwar Maharaji till he reached
nirvikalp samadhi awastha.
Today his Vedic Viswa has 126 branches spread all over the country where his books (he has written 26 on subjects as varied as yoga,
sadhana
and classical music) are studied and discussed. Yogi Manohar is a
grihasthi
(householder) with a wife and five children. All I can say about him is that although his English is lucid and his interpretation of the
Gita
takes note of modern scientific developments, I remained impregnable in my disbelief.
The second assault came from distant Pondicherry and was delivered through an anguished letter by a lady signing herself as Meenakshi Devi. She is American-born; her husband a Canadian, son of an Indian father and an Irish mother. He is known as Swami Gitananda. They have lived in Pondicherry for 20 years running an ashram and a journal,
Yoga Life.
Their ashram which was once a jungle is today a flourishing centre of learning, art, music and dance. More than that it has become valuable real estate worth many crores and cynosure in the eyes of their neighbours who know that all they have to do is to have the couple expelled or murdered to enrich themselves. They’ve tried both. They have opposed their application for Indian citizenship – to which he as a commonwealth-born son of an Indian father is entitled to as a right – and then sent an armed mob into the ashram. They broke Swami Gitananda’s arm and left him for dead. So far the Madras High Court has stood by them. But with envious neighbours, a supine administration and a corrupt police they fight against heavy odds.
I may have no religion myself but I am willing to take up cudgels on behalf of anyone whose right to propagate his faith is denied to him. All said and done there is not all that differences between believers and agnostics. Truly did Robert Browning speak:
All we have gained by our unbelief
Is a life of doubt diversified by faith
For one of faith diversified by doubt;
We called the chessboard white – we call it black.
25/4/87
I
ndia has been in the Godman business longer and continues to produce more of them than any other country of the world. Their pattern of business has not changed over the years: first they establish themselves in India, and having done so, extend their activities to foreign market. Some, like Sathya Sai Baba, Swami Muktanand and Dadaji do better at home than they do abroad. Others like Acharya Rajneesh, Yogi Bhajan and Balayogeshwar do better abroad than at home. But none can match the following acquired by foreign Godman like Bung Soekarno, founder of the Subodist movement (Rajneesh has borrowed a practice or two from the Subod) and not one has acquired the influence or the affluence of Reverend Sung Myung Moon. The Moonies claim a membership of three million. They run four daily newspapers in the United States and Latin America; they organize annual World Media Conferences and Unity of Sciences Conferences where they bring together hundreds of mediamen, scientists and academicians from all over the globe to meet in luxurious hotels. Their budget for such non-religious assemblages runs into millions of dollars per year. They never try to preach their own gospel; on the contrary they encourage the study of all religions. Currently they have 150 young men and women including dozen Indians going around different countries to study Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism. As a matter of fact all of Moonies’ activities are directed to crusade: to fight communism which it regards as mankind’s enemy number one.
The founder and fountain-head of these activities is the self proclaimed, and acknowledged by his following, as the new Messiah Reverend Sun Myung Moon of South Korea. The Moonies not only accept his messianic role but regard him as the second Christ and give away all they have in the hallowed tradition of the Indian
guru-chela
relationship – their
tan
(
body
)
, man
(mind) and
dhan
(worldly wealth).
Revd Moon, who is currently appealing against conviction for offences relating to false returns of taxable income, is a very wealthy man. His chief source of wealth is from export of Ginseng tea which is ascribed aphrodisiacal qualities. Nevertheless his church not only chooses partners for marriage but demands that they give an undertaking not to have sex for the first three years and places high priority on celibacy. After three years of abstinence the couple are encouraged to have large families. Reverend and Mrs Moon have 13 children.
Revd Moon also owns a machine-tool factory in South Korea which produces essential parts of guns and tanks. Apparently he does not believe in turning the other cheek when the striker happens to be a communist.
The Messiah has made his home in the United States. His number two man is a fellow Korean, Col Bo Hee Pak, a sort of St Peter to Jesus Christ and his likely successor. The two men share a passionate hatred for communism as an emotional attachment for the country of their domicile. They are more American in their loyalties than President Reagan or Uncle Sam.
Whatever other gifts God in His infinite wisdom granted His new Messiah Moon, He did not grant him the gift of speech. Revd Moon is a very poor orator. This gift he passed on to Col Bo Hee Pak. To hear him orate is an experience. He has cultivated all the mannerism and modalities of voice used by American preachers of the Gospel who hog every TV channel every Sunday across the length and breadth of USA and Canada. You may not agree with anything he says but once he starts speaking you stay glued to your chair till the end. I provoked him by asking him that since he talked so much about God, he might tell us what God is like. There was nothing very original in the first part of his reply. God is good, almighty, omnipresent, eternal, unchanging, unique. Since these assertions did not answer my question the Colonel devoted the second part of his answer to expounding why he believed God exists and chastised the increasingly sceptical attitude that God is either dead or helpless. His argument went somewhat as follows:
