Sai Name & Fame

This year the prominent journals Science and Nature have received the Prince of Asturias Foundation award Compare the quality, outreach and depth of research and understanding in these journals with that exhibited by Sathya Sai Baba’s monthly journal ‘Sanathana Sarathi‘, which is packed full of his handed-down superstitions, endlessly repetitive religious mythology in Sai Baba’s self-promoting and strongly moralising rants (i.e. he calls them ‘discourses’!). Sai Baba’s fantastic claims and predictions (http://home.no.net/abacusa/SaiBaba.htm) are as much an international laughing-stock as in any other fundamentalist cultist teaching (see here). What an enormous difference in lucidity, factuality, usefulness, openness, intelligence, testability and critical thinking between this and almost any international science or cultural journal!

While I was a follower and before I became aware of the huge deceits being practiced by Sai Baba and his inner circle, both the editor of Sanathana Sarathi – V.K. Narasimhan – and I were aware of the low quality of the discourses. The numerous problems posed by Sai Baba’s teachings, his self-contradictory words, factual inaccuracy and major blunders, caused Narasimhan to keep asking me to interpret some to reconcile them with one another. I therefore wrote numerous articles there – mea culpa.

Now, the Asturias awards promote a very different standard of achievement to that of Sai Baba’s uneducated preaching ‘teaching’, as the following indicates well enough, I submit:-
Conferred annually since 1981 the awards are intended to acknowledge scientific, technical, cultural, social and humanitarian work carried out internationally by individuals, groups or organisations in the following eight categories: communication and humanities, social sciences, arts, letters, scientific and technical research, international cooperation, concord and sports – has never been given to Sathya Sai Baba or any of his followers. Instead it has gone to writers such as Álvaro Mutis, Francisco Umbral, Mario Vargas Llosa, Camilo José Cela, Günter Grass, Doris Lessing, Arthur Miller or Claudio Magris; politicians such as Václav Havel, Jacques Delors, Adolfo Suárez, Mijail Gorbachov, Nelson Mandela, Isaac Rabin, H.M. King Hussein of Jordan or Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva; institutions such as the United Nation´s High Commission for Refugees, Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Movement), Médicos Sin Fronteras (Doctors without Borders) and Medicus Mundi, the Sephardic Community, the American Foundation for Aids Research (founded and led by Elizabeth Taylor) and CNN; scientists such as Stephen Hawking, the Atapuerca Research Team, Santiago Grisolía, Guido Münch, Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier, the human world´s leading research teams in the field of the human genome, the fathers of Internet or Jane Goodall; historians such as John Elliott or Julio Caro Baroja, intellectuals such as Julián Marías, Indro Montanelli, George Steiner, Umberto Eco, Hans M. Enzensberger or Jürgen Habermas; artists such as Antoni Tàpies, Óscar Niemeyer, Joaquín Rodrigo, Vittorio Gassmann, Barbara Hendricks, Woody Allen and Miquel Barceló.

Sathya Sai Baba has never won any international award we can discover. Nonetheless, it was made known that his ‘holy’ name was actually submitted by the Vajpayee Indian Government for the Nobel Peace Prize (such wishful and politically naive thinking!). For Sathya Sai Baba supports the vastly increasing militarism and nuclear arsenal of the Indian Government through patronising the designer of atomic weapons (Dr. Bhagavantam, deceased) and hobnobbing in friendly fashion in public with the designer of the latest nuclear delivery missiles – President Kalam.  Despite this, some inconsequential relative of Alfred Nobel (who thus bears the same surname) has pronounced that Sai Baba ought to get the Nobel Prize, which suggestion followers trumpeted to the firmament repeatedly. A pathetic attempt to draw attention to their self-proclaimed God Incarnate, who – despite all the billions of dollars in hand – has not made one inch of progress in getting international recognition from any serious institutions. UNESCO has – as is well known – washed its hands of him and has since it posted its advisory on him never accepted invitations to partake in his self-glorifying ‘conferences on education’.

The human values and moral standing of anyone who is seriously considered for the Nobel peace Prize must be impeccable. However, Sathya Sai Baba has been more widely accused of sexual abuses in public than any comparable figure, but the Indian Government, being led by devotees of Sai Baba, has successfully quashed all court petitions against him – so far! Moreover, he was present to the murder of six of his devotees within his private apartment in June, 1993 and the case has never been cleared up, no court proceedings and politically quashed CBI investigations! The Nobel Committee has been fully apprised of these facts and – even were it to regard Sathya Sai Baba as having done anything to forward peace in the world other than to preach – the unresolved murders and uninvestigated sexual abuses would sink his candidature in advance. Then there was his warm appreciation of Dictator Idi Ami… just the ticket for a Nobel Peace Prize winner?