Sai Baba’s superior in showmanship and action

Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Insan

For your amusement only: Can’t resist mentioning that a new Super-God is on the block who promises to put Sathya Sai Baba and all his works in the shade. He has apparently pushed back the boundaries of ‘spirituality’ far beyond the credible or possible. His comprehensive name, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Insan (perhaps the final ‘e’ was dropped for the sake of propriety). His upadesh – or let us call it ‘divine boast’, is as follows:-

“Some call me a saint, some call me an angel, some call me guru and some call me God, If it is a sin to serve the country and the universe, then I will keep committing this sin until my last breath.” Reportedly, he adheres to no single religion and aims to teach “ultimate spirituality.”

Mr. Insan heads Dera Sacha Sauda, a social-welfare and spiritual organization that claims to have 50 million followers! That is the same imaginary number Sathya Sai Baba started out with in the 1960s when informing Dr. John Hislop of his outreach. But Insan collected these 50 mill. more quickly, not least through a You Tube video which got 1 million hits in which he gyrates amidst huge crowds which hailed him as “the rockstar saint!. .. making Sai Baba seem even more like the drugged wooden doll on wheels that he actually was in his last years.

He has made a ‘wholesome’ movie for India’s youth to watch called ‘MSG: The Messenger in which he “takes on sabre-wielding villains, splinters a log with his fist and rides a monster-wheeled motorcycle in a high-speed chase, bursts through a wall of snow amid mountain peaks, runs across flaming landscapes and weaves through traffic on his tricked-out blue-and-yellow monster bike” See full report ‘It’s Not a Bird or a Plane, It’s a Holy Man’

Does not this sound more like it, surely? No more sitting looking at the wall in growing boredom (meditation on the name), action before words and chutzpah to the extreme, and with his snazzier outfit making Sathya Sai Baba look tame by comparison, not to mention his associate Asaram Bapu or the long lineage of false claimants to divinity and holiness on which they built their empires. So is Indian spirituality simply taking off, or taking a real beating?