Exposing India's fake holy men
March 24th 2010 11:09
Sanal Edamaruku
Pandit Surender Sharma is a tantric guru in India, a holy man with a large following, many of whom have heard of him through his claims that he can kill a man through mystic powers.
Sanal Edamaruku is a rationalist who heard of Sharma’s claim and decided to put it to the test. When the pair appeared together on an Indian television talk show recently, Edamaruku invited Sharma to kill him.
The guru agreed.
It was a popular show, but now word spread quickly and suddenly millions were watching the holy man chanting mantras at, and sprinkling water on, his victim. He also ruffled his hair a lot.
Edamaruku was taking time to die, so the television network cancelled scheduled programming to ensure the nation's viewing of this exceptional demonstration of the power of the human mind would not be interrupted.
On and on it went, until Edamaruku pretty much spread his hands at network executives and gave them a look which said, "Throw this charlatan out of here."
Mr Edamaruku knows a lot about charlatans. He is the chief executive of the Rationalist Centre of India, and dedicates his life to exposing the fakes which, he says, obstruct the true messages and paths of Indian enlightenment.
Just this month he has had one guru arrested over prostitution, another caught in a sex-tape scandal, a third kidnapping a female follower and a fourth allegedly causing a stampede that killed 63 people.
In a country the size of India, where education is still for many as scarce a commodity as food, fraudsters find easy pickings by speaking to the hopes of the gullible. Sanal Edamaruku, who is 55 and a part-time journalist and publisher as well as protector of the innocent, says his immediate goal is to stop fraudulent babas and gurus.
"I want people to make their own decisions. They should not be guided by ignorance, but by knowledge," he says.
His organisation traces its origins to the 1930s. The Indian Rationalist Association was founded under that name in Madras in 1949 with the encouragement of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell.
timesonline.co.uk; image: rationalistinternational.net
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