Gods and Godmen of India (10 page)
I had passing acquaintance with the Brahmachari. I met him when he had recently installed himself in Delhi as a teacher of
Hatha
Yoga and was eager to cultivate people in high positions. A senior official of the Ministry of Education (he was seeking a grant from the ministry for his ashram) brought him to my apartment. He instructed me on the appropriate
asanas
for imaginary ailments from which I have always suffered. I was very taken by his unusually handsome appearance: tall, ramrod straight with the cleanest-clearest eyes I had ever seen. His gossamer thin dhoti worn on the coldest day of the year could not fail to impress anyone of his physical fitness: he was the living example of what he taught and practised. He had more charisma than any other yogi, sadhu or swamy I had ever met.
Thereafter I met him on a few other occasions. He sent me the manuscript of his book on
Yogasanas
for corrections. I spent a New Year’s morning in his ashram to interview him and his patients for an article for
The New York Times.
By then he had become a prosperous and powerful man. His four telephones rang all the time: ministers of cabinet and other VIPs rang up to wish him a Happy New Year. There were a bevy of bosomy young ladies to receive the calls. A large foreign-made limousine was parked in the driveway, a herd of imported black Jersey cows grazed on the lawn and he had his own plane in a hangar in Palam. I was reminded of Akbar Allahabadi’s biting satire:
Poochha ke shughal kya hai?
Kahney lagey Guruji
Bas Ram nam japna,
Cheylon ka maal apna.
(When I asked what do you do? Came the Guruji’s reply “Nothing but taking the name of the Lord and the disciples’ property.")
To be fair to Dhirendra Brahmachari, he did not exploit his
chelas
– only people who exploited him to forward their own interests. However, it was clear as daylight that he had his feet in two different boats, the spiritual and the material, and would inevitably come to grief:
Yeh masjid hai yeh maikhana, taajjub is per aata hai
Janabe-e-Shaikh ka naqsh-e-kadam yoon bhi hai aur yoon bhi
(Here is the mosque and there the tavern; What amazes me is to see
The imprints of the holy man’s feet going from the one to the other.)
I believe it is the ambivalence in Dhirendra Brahmachari’s character, the desire to get the best of both worlds, that roused the peoples’ ire and jealousy. They rejoiced when he was taken off television and chortled with pleasure when they read of the seizure of his gun factory. “Envy, among other ingredients, has a mixture of love and justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good fortune,” wrote Hazlitt. Most of us felt that Dhirendra Brahmachari’s fortune was undeserved.
Has Dhirendra Brahmachari any friends left? Perhaps a few fence-sitters who fear that he may stage a comeback. I hope by now he must have learnt that a face-flatterer and backbiter are one and the same person. We are a nation of fence-sitters, face-flatters and backbiters.
I
have always had a soft spot for Dhirendra Brahmachari because I have never taken his yogic pretensions or
brahmacharya
seriously. I envy his looks, his physical well-being, his being immaculately turned out in diaphanous kurta-dhoti which he wears come snow or sunshine. If he had stuck to yoga, I would have had nothing to say against him. Instead he began to cultivate people in power, in turn became powerful, and let power go to his head. For many years he held Mrs Gandhi and her family in a hypnotic spell. And as always happens in our country most of her Cabinet colleagues fawned on him till the spell was broken by her fall from power. For years he hogged yoga programmes on Doordarshan. Far from leading a simple life we associate with yogis, he went into the business of acquiring wealth. For the short period Mrs Gandhi was out of power, several cases including one of adultery, were lodged against him. No sooner did Mrs Gandhi get back into the saddle than Dhirendra Brahmachari was back in business and on Doordarshan. His stock declined during Rajiv Gandhi’s regime but no one had the guts to deprive him of the hegemony over his Vishwayatan Yogashram in the heart of New Delhi. Although the Ashram is entirely financed by the government, there are innumerable instances on record when employees drawing salaries from the government have been employed to work in the gun factory or the film studio. Several enquiries instituted have gone against Swamiji. Justice B.N. Kirpal of the Delhi High Court has passed strictures against him. And now a large part of his staff have gone on hunger strike because they have not received their salaries for over nine months.
Swamiji has no love for pressmen. “All of you have been bought over. You write after you have been well-plied with liquor and chicken meat. I know everyone of you,” he roared over his phone to Ramesh Sharma of
Public Asia
when Sharma tried to probe into the affairs of the ashram. Not to be outdone, the reporter shouted back, “I also know frauds (
Dhongis
) and imposters (
pakhandis
) like you who hunger after pretty girls and wine.”
“Do you know me?” asked Swamiji.
“No, I don’t.”
“Why then did you describe me as an imposter?”
“Do you know me?” asked Sharma in return.
“No, I don’t.”
“And why did you call me a wine-bibber and chicken-eater?”
I do not know how the dialogue ended. But I can make a shrewd guess how Swami Dhirendra Brahmachari will end. The besetting sin of men who dabble in religion – Yoga is a kind of religion – is
hubris.
He should look up the meaning of the word in a dictionary.
31/3/1990
S
ome twenty years ago I was commissioned by
The New York Times
to write an article on the claims made by practitioners of yoga. I decided to start off by interviewing Dhirendra Brahmachari. I had met him soon after he had migrated from Bihar to Delhi and was eager to know people. My friend Prem Kirpal, then joint secretary, ministry of education, brought him to my home. It was winter and bitterly cold. Brahmachari was draped in a thin muslin dhoti which others would wear in summer. He was a tall, handsome man with jet black hair curling down to his beard, clear sparkling eyes and an athletic figure.
He asked me what my problem was. I told him of my chronic indigestion.
“Jis se poochho, pet main gas
(anyone you ask complains of gas).
DHU bharmein gas hee gas hain
(all Delhi is full of gas)/’ he pronounced.
He made me lie flat on my back on the ground. He took out a tape – put one end on my nipple and measured the distance to the big toe on the same side. He did the same from the other nipple to the other toe. They were not of equal length. “Gas,” he pronounced for the umpteenth time. Then prescribed what yoga
asanas
I should do and what kind of food and drink I should avoid.
He came a second time. By now he had become Indira Gandhi’s yoga teacher and had begun to wield enormous clout in official circles. He had written a book on yoga which was translated into English and edited by Mehra Masani. He wanted me to have a second look at it. It was with this background that I picked on him for my article on yoga. I was given an appointment at his ashram facing the Gole Dak Khana in the heart of New Delhi.
We were constantly disturbed by his buxom secretaries bustling in and out to say some minister or the other wanted to speak to him. This was followed by a long conversation on the phone in Hindi. At long last swamiji put down the phones and instructed his secretaries not to disturb us for a few minutes. He brushed back his long hair and asked me to begin.
“What kind of illnesses can you treat by yoga?” I began.
“Sab kism kee
(all kinds),” he replied. “Once I know what is wrong, I can prescribe its cure.” That gave me the opening I was waiting for. “What is your method of diagnosis?”
He went over the nipple-toe diagnostic method. With an innocent expression on my face I asked, “Do you apply the same method with women patients?”
“No,” he replied and explained, “You see our ladies are reluctant to bare their bosoms before strangers. Besides that, women’s bosoms are of different shapes and sizes. Some have very big bosoms; others very small. Some are taut and firm; others droop. So in the case of female patients I measure the distance between the
naabhee
(navel) to the toes.”
The discourse on female bosoms gave me the opening for my article. I went round his laboratory and clinics. Besides a few old weighing machines, a couple of microscopes and blood pressure gauges there was nothing more to justify the place being allowed to style itself as a modern treatment centre.
My article appeared in
The New York Times.
One of swamiji’s disciples in New York rang him up and told him about it. Swamiji was pleased to hear he had been highlighted in America’s leading newspaper but was a little uneasy about the graphic details of women’s bosoms. He told Sanjay Gandhi who was a mutual friend. After expressing happiness over the publicity he had got, he added,
“Suna hai us mein kuchh chote bhee lagaae hai
(I hear he has also made fun of me).”
I certainly did make fun of him because I never took his pretensions of asceticism or
brahmacharya
seriously. He was no more an ascetic than Kubera, amassing wealth by every means possible – government grants, real estate, private air taxis, film studios, a gun factory and lots more. He was no more a
brahmachari
than a Mughal emperor. He was cited a correspondent in a divorce case filed by the husband of one of the women working with him. And if M.O. Mathai is to be believed he replaced the stenographer-secretary in the affections of Nehru’s daughter. He became the Rasputin to the Tsarévitch of India – Indira Gandhi.
Despite what I came to know about him, I had a sneaking affection for the old rogue. One is compelled to admire a man who with little learning could take the mightiest of the land for a ride.
20/7/1994
T
oday (November 23,1985) Shri Sathya Sai Baba celebrates his 60th birthday. It is estimated that upwards of six lakh devotees will assemble at Prashanti Nilayam Ashram at Puttaparthi to pay him homage over a fortnight of celebrations. Millions of other followers spread over the globe will likewise come together for congregational worship. Not being a believer the phenomenon of godmen continues to baffle me. Like mortals they age, fall sick, and die but are nevertheless regarded by their followers as immortal. I am dismayed by the fact that Sai Baba’s worshippers include highly literate men (amongst them Chief Justice Bhagwati and Nani Palkhivala), scientists and doctor. I have questioned a few of them and referred them to the experiences of a young American devotee recorded in his book
Lord of the Air.
It is far from flattering to the Baba. They dismissed it with scorn. The latest publication deifying him comes from the pen of a man who is soon to lay claim to divinity for himself. He writes: “Bhagwan Sri Sathya Sai Baba is no yogi or saint. He is the incarnation of God. He is Lord Krishna. He is Lord Shiva. He is Lord Jesus Christ. In short, He is everything.”
Fifty years old Rawalpindi-born Bhim Sain Goel with a doctorate in History of Education and twenty years in research is currently a Senior Officer with the National Council for Educational Research and Training. He intends to resign his job and take up Spiritual Ministry under the title Sidheshwar Baba and likely to become head of one of the five dozen centres for “the propagation of Dharma and righteousness", to be established by Sai Baba. How Dr B.S. Goel, the son of
bania
cloth merchant trod the pilgrim’s path to semi-godhood is spelt out in his spiritual autobiography published last month entitled
Third Eye & Kundalini.
Briefly it is the story of a sensitive indrawn boy given to hallucinations and dreams accentuated by assiduous practice of
Hatha
Yoga. Many years later the suicide of an office colleague sent him into the mood of ‘fearful depression’ from which he was rescued by Sathya Sai Baba appearing in person by his bedside and asking him to meditate with his attention focussed between his two eyebrows. For Goel the pilgrimage already begun had reached the point of no return. The serpent lying dormant close to his anus had begun its upward crawl along his spine to his skull unfolding vision after vision of God’s many manifestations with Sathya Sai Baba as the central point of focus.
The Third Eye
is a most readable account of the experiences of a person seeking salvation by way of rousing his
Kundalini.
If you accept the author’s premises that all humans are caught in the cycle of birth, death and rebirth and the ultimate of human endeavour should be to opt out of this vicious circle by merging your identity with God, you will merrily to along with all that Guru Goel has to say. If you do not (as I don’t) you can still enjoy the lucid way the author describes his own ascent up the ladder to godhood. I went through its 300 pages as if I were reading a book of fiction. At times I was tempted to try and rouse my ail-too sluggish
Kundalini.
Dr Goei assures me that this sometimes happens without the grace of a Guru but the experience is “extremely short-lived and abortive.” I couldn’t care how short-lived or abortive it is provided what Goel says happened to him in his forties happens to men in their seventies. “The person feels a great erection in his sex organ. The sexual desire becomes uncontrollable.”