My impression of Sai Baba
Nonbelief or unbelief or disbelief is not something I arrived after a series of critical and rational maneuvers. Let’s just say that I was born that way and have stayed that way. I treat life as great fiction. It is much more enthralling that way. And you don’t have to believe in it.
As I watch from some distance what the Indian media describes as a feeling of national bereavement over Sri Satya Sai Baba’s death, I am reminded of an incident from my childhood that involved him.
You should know that my extended family abounds in passionate and zealous followers of Sai Baba, at least one of whom believes she should be the rightful successor to him. The only problem is that she is not that much younger than him. Having grown up surrounded by believers, who hedge their bets just in case one faith investment has a better ROI (return on investment) than another, there was not much incentive in my own nonbelief, unbelief or disbelief. In retrospect, my having managed the absence of belief so well is as much a tribute to me as it is to those believers who never once even subtly tried to influence me.
My childhood memory of Sai Baba dates back to 1971 or 1972 in Rajkot where we had shifted after my father’s death. Sai Baba had been invited to the famous Rajkumar College, once meant exclusively for princes belonging to an assortment of principalities and kingdoms of Saurashtra. Peter Rogerson, an Englishman, was the principal of the college in those days. Since one of my uncles and first cousins were both teachers at the school we were among the special invitees, which meant we could stand right behind Sai Baba. What unfolded next is what I remember. I do not vouch for the veracity of all the details but this is the closest approximation of what I think I saw.
Sai Baba was invited to inaugurate a new wing of the school and was handed a ceremonial key to open a lock. I don’t think the college administration realized that Sai Baba needed no key to open any lock. He merely had to stare at the lock and it snapped open with a small pile of ash on it. At an age where everything in life was a miracle and incomprehensible for me this trick of Sai Baba was no big deal.
A short while later Sai Baba picked something out of thin air. It turned out to be a gold ring with a picture of Sai Baba and Rogerson together embedded on it. I was told later that the two had never met before the day Sai Baba came for the inauguration. The finale of the event came when one of the students won a huge silver trophy for excellence in sports. As Sai Baba was giving away the trophy, he thought the boy needed some more. So he just plucked a chunky gold medal out of nowhere. A bit superfluous considering the boy was most likely a princeling who already had enough gold in his father’s treasury.
Now that he is no more and a galaxy of Indians of consequence has told us that the nation has been orphaned by his passing, the focus has shifted to the reputedly 400 billion rupee (about $9 billion) empire left behind by Sai Baba. Come to think of it the 400 billion rupee enterprise is not that different from that gold ring or gold medal he conjured up out of nothing at the Rajkumar College. They call it materialization, as in materializing something apparently out of nowhere.
