Report: few Westerners stay in or even visit Sai ashrams

Another of the many confidential ex-devotee contacts of mine has a friend still living in Whitefield who sometimes looks in on the ashram there. This person reports that there are not many Western people who want to be involved with Sai Baba anymore. ”He is a prisoner in his own ‘ashram’, kept is kept well and truly behind iron bars, all be it they are fancy ones.” My contact also thinks that the Indian govt. has a hand in everything going on there nowadays, having turned Puttaparthi into a tourist venue for all Indians – religious or not – makes no difference to them. That they brought in hoards of lower class Indians had the effect of getting rid of most of the Westerners, who were not wanted there anyway and who seldom get any attention nowadays even in the ‘drive-past darshans’. The entire Sai Baba thing seems over for most Westerners. Recent photos and videos one can see on various Sai Baba websites hardly ever show a white face!

One can certainly see that Prashanthi Nilayam has become a tourist attraction much like a pseudo-spiritual Disney world… huge white elephant constructions like the huge statues of Gods and holy men in that particular bad taste known as kitsch and not least now the vast Indoor Stadium, so far apparently built for one visit by the omnipresent Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, otherwise not used for anything much. This is what the money is used for… promotion of Sathya Sai’s magnificence and a tourist trap… one which can lead to much worse entrapment than that!