HOLY COWS AND SACRED ONES

I first saw him in an unlikely place. It was the summer of 2003, and I was standing in a line for one of the big roller coasters at the Six Flags amusement park in New Jersey. Right behind me, there was a man with a flowing beard and a long white robe standing and marveling with childlike enchantment at the snaking and whizzing roller coaster on top. I was amused, but even in 2003, I was not entirely sure what Sri Sri Ravi Shankar looked like. I did suspect it was him because I had probably seen his photo somwehere, and two of my friends has attended his art of living ccourse and had strongly recommended it to me. Their most important rationale was that "there is nothing spiritual about it"; it was a logical and 'scientific' technique of meditation. I never ended up attending one of those courses, but now I wish I had (or perhaps I still will) out of sheer curiosity.

Three years later, the massive following around Ravi Shankar is exceedingly looking like a cult and seems jarring to me, something like that around Satya Sai Baba. I have read some of his writings. While there is nothing particularly dogmatic about them, I also could not see anything exceptional in them; no fresh point of view, no new insight. I have already written about his article on terrorism, in which some lines are outright ludicrous. But today, I see hundreds of thousands of people following him, hanging on endearingly to his words, and preaching his philosophy around the world. But even after having read some of the articles about and by him, and after one Nobel prize nomination later, I still don't understand what exactly his philosophy is; that leads me to think that his philosophy is not so much being taught, as it is being parroted. His deep-breathing technique may have its merits, but that hardly explains his mass appeal.

But what I worry about the most is his followers' consistent insistence of the innocent quality of his teachings, the 'non-spiritual' nature of his discourses. They say that in fact, he is against organised religion, his sayings don't have a religious flavour. But religion is first and foremost about blind faith; the rituals and dogmatic sounding customs that most people's definition of religion necessarily contain come much later. If you are convinced that someone's discourses don't have an iota of dogma in them, and if you are stuborn to the point of unwavering belief in this fact, then you are actually being dogmatic, and there's not much difference between you and someone who strictly adheres to well-defined religious customs taught by a preacher. Both these attitudes are the same, because at their root, they are the product of blind faith.

There have been sinister examples of cults in history that have not been imbibed with any one religious philosophy or tradition. The members of those cults were lured into them precisely because the non-religious sounding tenets of the cult appealed to them. Jim Jones's cult is an archetypal and chilling example. The charismatic preacher preached essentially what was racial equality, compassion, and love, attributes that should not necessarily subscribe to a particular religion. But the line between religious dogma and religious dogma masquerading as 'objective' and logical beliefs is thin, and Jones's followers certainly did not recognize it. The distinction between being in love with an idea and being in love with the person who came up with it was quickly forgotten. The result? Jonestown, Guyana, and the largest collective mass suicide in history, grotesque proof of how one man can convert well-reasoned and sane people into faith imbibed zombies. Convert them to such an extent that, when the moment of reckoning arrives, mothers willingly inject cyanide into their babies' mouths.

I am in no way comparing Ravi Shankar to Jim Jones, and I hope that I never have to compare anyone to Jim Jones. But I wish to emphasize that just because someone preaches universal compassion, equality, and peace, does not mean he is incapable of forming a cult around him. Religious faith is akin to romantic love, and just as in romantic love, it does not always take rational justification to subscribe to it; in fact, since most of us have some rationality in us, rationality may be the perfect bait to lure someone across the line of faith. For a moment, let's assume that Ravi Shankar's words bear weight in terms of policy or political action. That still is no reason to worship him with the kind of enraputured soul-filling ideology that you see and hear.

When I hear about one lakh people singing and dancing together, their emotions essentially orchestrated by a single man on a stage, I see no reason to not believe that what I am seeing may be the collective exaltation of a cult. If people think that Ravi Shankar is someone exceptional because he preaches in a non-spiritual manner, then it may be part of a delusion that they are unaware of. Perhaps Ravi Shankar has excellent PR skills, perhaps he is unusually articulate, perhaps he is the Dale Carnegie of India, but all that is no reason to worhip him and put your complete faith in him, as many of his devotees do. After all, as I often reiterate, compassion, equality, and respect and love are qualities that are independent in their merit and do not need to be true because they are enunciated by someone in particular. The same thing can be said for all the social service efforts that his foundation is engaged in; admirable efforts in themselves, and it's not necessary to attach any kind of aura to the person spearheading them. If Shankar iterates values in a way such that the common man understands them better, we certainly appreciate him for doing that, but it should have nothing to do with worshipping him, dancing to his tune in the millions (pun intended) or calling him 'Sri Sri' for that matter.