A sceptic in miracle town of 'Sathya' Sai Baba

More than 20 years ago, Ananth Raman’s son survived a drowning accident at a pool. “Unlike me, my mother was a Sathya Sai Baba believer, and insisted that I take my son for Swami’s darshan at the ashram,” recalls Raman, now in his seventies. “The next day, when my son saw Sathya Sai Baba in the main hall, he tugged at my hand and said, ‘Dad, that man, with the Afro hairdo, he’s the guy who pulled me out of the pool yesterday.’”
In no time, Raman was a convert. I take a close look at him, as we walk by the same hall where it all happened, in Prasanthi Nilayam, Sathya Sai’s ashram in Anantapur district in Andhra Pradesh. Raman is lean and takes long strides, mostly in silence, as if he is working out a complex maths problem. He is a professor at Harvard Business School and appears to be the sort who would challenge even the obvious. “There were other things, too.” He holds out his right hand to show a rather chunky gold ring with an embedded green stone. “Baba produced it, in front of my eyes.”

I am not impressed. I let him understand that I am a disbeliever when it comes to Sathya Sai, and an agnostic in general. I don’t even call him ‘Baba’ because the term is rather endearing, and I have my doubts about his vibhuti-conjuring stunts and gold jewellery popping out of his mouth.

The ash did it

Raman soon introduces me to Dr PL Rani, professor of English at the trust’s Anantapur college for women. Rani takes me to three large basements in the ashram where at least 400 girls from this college sit on the floor and wrap tamarind rice in packets of dried leaves and newspapers. They do it as part of the Gram Seva, where the ashram’s trust distributes food packets to 150 villages in the district during Navratri.

Bhaskara Rao, 63, who oversees the cooking, tells me he was 18 when his mother fell ill and “needed a miracle”. “We came here and Baba cured my mother. He told my father that I should do an MA and I would get a bank job. I did.” Wouldn’t he have landed up with a bank job if he tried hard enough, I ask. “No. I wouldn’t have thought of it.” Rani, who stands nearby, says Sathya Sai decided her vocation for her, too. Rani was a physics graduate when Sathya Sai asked her to do an MA in English, which she did. But didn’t she want to follow her own dream? “Swami’s dream is our dream. We don’t question his word,” she says matter-of-factly.
Rani, too, believes that, many years ago, her mother’s grave illness was cured by Sathya Sai’s vibhuti. I think of the online videos, where critics dismissed the man’s claims as sleight of hand, insisting that he merely crushed with his fingers the tablets of ash hidden in his sleeves or napkins.

I look around the basement and wonder whether everyone in this town has a miracle story of their own, all centred on their faith in one man. If you were to believe everyone’s miracle stories in Puttaparathi, each of them would have lost family members, and more, if it weren’t for him. But miracles apart, it is a fact that most of them do owe a lot to the free facilities offered by Sathya Sai’s institutions which provide, among other things — education, water, hospitals, and of course, plenty of faith to hold on to.

Cured of Facebook
Mumbai resident Vidya Jayakumar, 17, who is packing food nearby, says she doesn’t need a miracle to be a devotee, it “just makes sense” to her. Jayakumar says she “sees a difference between teenagers who are a part of this movement and those who are not”. She explains, “We know our limits, they don’t.You know how Mumbai is, it isn’t the real thing.” What’s the ‘real thing’, I ask.

“This is real, helping people out. I am on Facebook, too, but I know my limits. A few months ago, I was getting addicted to it, and asked Swami to take care of it…” I raise my eyebrows. She smiles at my scepticism. Jayakumar admits she asks herself only one question before doing anything in life — will Baba approve of this? I ask her whether ‘Baba’ doesn’t trust her to do the right thing. “Well, it does feel like being watched through a videocam. But I don’t want him to be a part of my sins.”

Jayakumar stays in the college hostel, and leads a strict regimented life that prioritises prayers, study, food and sleep but not mobile phones. When she feels low, she writes down Sathya Sai’s teachings on chits of paper and reads them in the morning. “My day always gets better, then.” I tell her that could be because she subconsciously works towards them. “What you call coincidences are miracles in spirituality,” she smiles, and adds that her friends also think she’s odd. I tell her I don’t think she’s odd. I just don’t understand abandoning oneself so completely to one person’s will. How does she handle the ‘guilt’ of getting attracted to a boy, for instance? “I confess to Swami and distract myself. I feel like reading the Twilight series, though…”

The next day, I visit a village which benefit from the Gram Seva. The food packets are considered to be Sathya Sai’s prasadam here. I approach Anwar Basha’s home as he gratefully takes the food packet and a dhoti. The 66-year-old tailor says he became a believer in Sathya Sai since 1982, when he saw Baba’s vibhuti cure a five-year-old boy who hadn’t uttered a word till then. I don’t have the heart to question his beliefs.

That night, Raman agrees that people may be exaggerating Sathya Sai’s prowess. “But even if he was only 30 per cent of what you see, isn’t it still worth it?” I give him my politest smile, and hope that my face is expressionless otherwise. Disbelievers, I gather, have nowhere to look in this miracle town.

g_kareena@dnaindia.net