Saint on earth.

For reasons I cannot fathom, Sant Tukaram has always fascinated me. As a child, I saw V Shantaram's eponymous movie. I don't remember being too impressed by it at the time. My latter-day interest in Tukaram prompted me recently to read Mahipati's Tukaram, a part of his Bhaktalilamrita. Its English rendering by Dr Justin Edwards Abbott, an American scholar who lived in India in the early twentieth century and contributed to the development of Marathi literature in his own way, retains the flavour of the original. It reminded me of the pothis my mother used to read, Shivalilamrita being one of them, particularly the eleventh chapter on Mondays. I'm not sure if what I read is historically accurate. What struck me, though, was that Tukaram as an enlightened person insisted on possessing nothing. There are repeated instances in the story I read of Tukaram inviting brahmins, mendicants and poor people to "loot" his home. This reminded me of what I had written earlier: http://tinyurl.com/c4tw8y. In researching it, I had come across informed opinion that enlightenment ought to change a person for the better. Also, there is the Simony angle to the practice of sainthood, I reckon. Mahipati's account of Tukaram qua an avatar of Namdeo explicitly states that his protagonist was almost violently opposed to the Advaita way to enlightenment. He was all for bhakti. In other words, total devotion. This was a bit bewildering in that I could not imagine a gentle soul like him opposing any idea vigorously - especially if it had the sanction of the Vedas. The other puzzling bit is that, while all along Tukaram seems to be drifting away from his wife Avali who is cross with him for giving his total devotion to Vithoba and neglecting his family, at the time of his ascent to Vaikuntha, Vishnu's heavenly abode, he sends a message to her to join him. She, however, sends back a message that she is in the fifth month of pregnancy and cannot join him. How did it happen?

What tangled webs we weave!

"Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!"

The famous lines are from Sir Walter Scott's Marmion, Canto vi. Stanza 17 http://tinyurl.com/583udf.

There is, I'm told, a seldom quoted follow-up to this famous quote. I could not find it in the poem. I found it mentioned at http://tinyurl.com/5kz7tr:

"But my – how we improve the score,
as we practice more and more."

The Dorothy Parker take-off (also attributed to "J. R. Pope") http://tinyurl.com/5n3j7h reads:

"Oh what tangled webs we weave
When first we practice to deceive.
And when we've practiced for awhile,
How we do improve our style!"

Marmion is a story of treachery and deceit, greed and lust, an almost worthy parallel to the contemporary morality tale I have been following on the Internet with mixed feelings. Not that it personally concerns me. But a dear friend, a trusting and sincere acolyte of a "spiritual teacher", is one of the unsuspecting "flies" in the tangled web that has been woven.

If one were to employ the traditional Christian ecclesiastical terminology (with trepidation, no doubt, born out of diffidence due to unfamiliarity), one of the major trespasses in the story could be termed a sin akin to 'simony', i.e., "the deliberate intention and act of selling and/or buying spiritual goods or material things so connected with the spiritual that they cannot be separated from it. Simony is a violation of the virtue of religion, and a sacrilege, because it wrongfully puts a material price on spiritual things, which can be neither bought nor sold. The term is derived from the name Simon Magus who, in The Acts of the Apostles, tried to buy the power to confirm people in the Holy Spirit." http://tinyurl.com/5kz7tr.

In the late fifties or early sixties, I used to be quite an acolyte (or 'fan') of Leslie Charteris's The Saint (aka Simon Templar, so called most likely after the Knights Templar whose chief raison d’être was the protection of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem after the first Holy Crusade of 1096). Many of his adventures I then followed harked back to the twenties. He was a burglar par excellence who robbed, like Robin Hood, the "ungodly". The Saint's targets included corrupt politicians, warmongers, Nazi scientists, vanity publishers and similar consumer ripoff artists, greedy bosses exploiting workers, con men and similar scums of the earth. He used to often charge a "ten percent collection fee" to cover expenses when he extracted large sums of money from his victims, the remainder being returned to the rightful owners, given away to charity, shared amongst his business associates. I also fondly remember his habit of peppering his conversation with such irreverent asides as "As the actress said to the bishop".

I was reminded of The Saint because the story I have been following concerns a modern-day "Sage" (henceforth S for short). From all available indicators, he possesses business acumen of the highest order. In his career, he used it to build the business enterprise he ended up heading at the time of his retirement. In his later life, he seems to have been employing it to set himself in a lucrative "profession". Those in the know consider the spirituality business a very competitive and challenging field of endeavour worldwide. Our protagonist astutely decided to test the waters before plunging in. The late seventies or early eighties saw him serving as a translator/interpreter to an Advaita teacher with impeccable credentials and international repute who could not speak English. It was probably during his apprenticeship there, also S's golden opportunity to do in situ market research, that he might have stumbled on the ideal target audience for the new guru persona he was soon to let loose on the unsuspecting manifestation. He would formulate his teaching to appeal to the Western psyche impatiently looking for quick fixes.

According to the experts, what S cleverly did was to oversimplify the Advaita teaching into neo-Advaita or pseudo-Advaita malarkey (as detractors claim). He achieved this feat by blurring the distinction between three simultaneously existing levels of the one non-dual Reality and latching on to the absolute level ("Nothing is really happenng") as the only view. He also selectively presented absolute level concepts such as "Nobody is the doer", "Everything is a happening", "Everything happens by God's will" and so forth as the ultimate truth under the authority of such venerable sources as the Buddha and Wei Wu Wei (the Irishman Thomas Gray) rather than the guru whose mantle he claimed to wear.

By so doing, goes the argument, S offered what could be called "the lazy seeker's way to instant nirvana" with the "feel free to do anything without feeling guilt or shame" adjunct. Boys and girls, meet Kick-ass Advaita – just what you've been looking for! Canned wisdom you can store on your shelves as unconscionably high priced books, tapes, CDs, DVDs for instant referral. The daily talk at home is free but generous donations (guru dakshina) are always welcome. If you wanted to hear S at a luxury resort after paying a Western price for the priivilege, you were welcome to the annual retreat away from home.

S also gathered around him, goes the story, a coterie of cronies to help him package and market his products for a cut from the pie in the sky. He even authorised one of them, a wily Westerner, as his spiritual successor. When a few years back, there was a scandal at an annual retreat with charges of financial impropriety and serial adultery, the cronies rushed in to do instant damage control. The stigma continues to exist, though.

But, then, as the actress said to the bishop: "Who cares?"

It’s a puzzlement.

Maybe I shouldn’t be putting these thoughts down on … I almost wrote ‘paper’. But I’m perturbed. Seeing them in front of me may prompt a probable answer. There’s a practising Advita preceptor whose view of the working model of the world tallies with mine. Where I veer away from his worldview is that he postulates the ‘guru’ as the gatekeeper to Consciousness. I’ve never believed in the guru-shishya parampara. Anyway, I’m friendly with one of his most devoted shishyas (disciples). He casually said a couple of days back something that I found puzzling. He was talking about an infrequent visitor to his guru’s daily satsanga (discourse). I know the concerned person at second hand, by reputation, to be an intellectual, highly successful in business and on intimate terms with the crème de la crème. From some of her published letters to her guru, I feel she’s devoted to him. And, yet, her shortcoming in my friend’s view seems to be that she doesn’t regularly donate to the guru as some other well-to-do disciples do. From what I can see the guru in question – whose unwritten motto for his daily satsanga is “Nobody is invited. Everybody is welcome.” and who spontaneously gave a one lakh rupee donation for the Kargil war – does not need her donation. But as my friend puts it, it is a way of showing your unstinted devotion to the guru. Here’s why I found this disturbing. It reminded me of Suketu Mehta’s description – in Maximum City – of how the wielders of illegitimate power keep a tight grip on their followers. “Show respect or else” seems to be the guru mantra. “Pass the leader the lion’s share of the booty" is one of the ways of showing respect. It’s the dhandawala’s way. Or, the way their kind of business works. My question: Is everything a dhanda these days? It’s a puzzlement, as the King of Siam would have said. P.S.: On the other hand, maybe, it’s none of my business.

Red versus black.

My mother, a god-fearing and simple person, used to tell me never to harm the black ants. I used to watch them fascinated as they marched in a disciplined and civilized queue to collect and carry away the stray crystals that had dropped on the kitchen floor as she measured out the sugar for the tea she had put to boil. As for the red ants, she had no such reservations. They would devour anything: sugar, fish and meat bones… you name it. They would also bite you if you displeased or disturbed them in some way. In my mother’s book, the black ants were Brahmins while the red ants belonged to a much lower social order. They were the scavengers, useful but villainous. These days, it has come to my attention that the rules of yore do not apply to the ant universe. No more do the black denizens stick to the white-collar chores and the red to the other sort. The difference has blurred, nay disappeared. I’m aware that the ant world I’d witnessed in the good ol’ days was on the third floor of 233 Khetwadi Main Road, figuratively and literally another world, I guess, for all practical purposes. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/07/morgue.html. I sometimes wonder if there are several parallel ant universes (or, alternative realities) like what sci-fi writers write http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_universe_(fiction) and quantum cosmologists theorise about. http://www.manyuniverses.com/indexH.htm. Stuff like: “There is no one reality. Each of us lives in a separate universe. That's not speaking metaphorically. This is the hypothesis of the stark nature of reality suggested by recent developments in quantum physics. Reality in a dynamic universe is non-objective. Consciousness is the only reality.” Sounds trés Advaita, no? Enough already. Coming back to the ants of this world here and now, being a very fair-minded guy, I decided to give the black ants another chance. This morning, I left a strip of rind from a slice of ham on a piece of a paper on the kitchen platform. Lo and behold! A few minutes later, the truth of my earlier observation was reiterated by a long line of very agitated black – yes, black and not red – ants. What is the world coming to, boys and girls?

LATEST FLASH! Recently, Ujwal forgot to take her daily Revital Ginseng-Vitamin-Mineral capsule and her Calcium tablet. They remained open overnight in a plastic receptacle on a lowtable in the living room. The next morning, I found them infested by a horde of miniscule black ants. Either the medicine was sugar-coated or the ants belonged (shudder! shudder!!) to a Mutant Ninja specie. Will they take over the earth? Who knows?

Role model.

Believe it or not (sorry, Ripley), my role model once upon a time happened to be an actor. I somehow instinctively started to admire him. He was a theatre and film actor and a Communist. He used to visit the Red Flag Hall on the first floor of 233 Khetwadi Main Road off and on. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/07/morgue.html. This morning, I happened to notice an excerpt from his autobiography translated into Marathi in a Sunday supplement. He writes in this segment (‘My first turn in prison’) about his early days in the Hindi film industry. In it, he mentions about how he used to be escorted from the Arthur Road Jail back in 1949 in order to fulfill his commitment to act in K Asif’s Hulchul. He had been arrested for participating in a morcha or protest march that had a rather bang-up climax in Parel. He recalls how his fellow inmates used to ask him to bring back signed photographs of Dilip Kumar and Nargis, bidis, specific brands of cigarettes, tea powder and so on. K Asif who had arranged for his daily trip to the Rooptara Studio used to obligingly instruct one of his assistants to do the shopping. Our first-time jailbird also recalls how Sahir Ludhianavi, a poet and fellow traveller under police surveillance, who dropped on the sets because he heard he was shooting for Hulchul, beat a hasty retreat when he saw our man dressed as a policeman (his role as jailor required it). He also writes about a totally self-absorbed Raj Kapoor dropping in one morning and talking only about himself and the film he was then shooting, Barsaat, without ever bothering to enquire about his friend’s predicament. What I admire about our guy is that he describes the incidence without any rancour or accusation – as a mere witness in the true Advaita sense. Every time I watched him on the screen I got that certain feeling about him that here was one human being who was sincere, simple, honest, forthright, humble and decent to the core. Even that biggest liar in the whole wide world – the movie camera – could not hide the truth about Balraj Sahani.