Sunday, January 7, 2001		Article

Guru Power
By Manohar Malgonkar

IT is comforting to see that, in the era of dot com and internet and space stations, guru-dom is not only alive and well, but flourishing as never before. The word itself, guru, long a part of mainstream English, is making inroads into other European and Asian languages. In Sanskrit, guru, means ‘teacher’, and just that. But in English guru has always meant’ a spiritual teacher’ and it is in this connotation that the word has gained world-wide currency, and now means different things to different people: god-man, fortune-teller, faith-healer, master of mumbo-jumbo.

But no matter what the word guru means, guru-dom has become a boom industry. Gurus from India have stormed the preserves of the affluent society, and established outposts and colonies. They have attracted hordes of followers, and, as final proof of their prowess, spawned imitators, so that today there are American gurus, Japanese gurus, and, as will be seen, at least one Russian guru, or, to be precise, guru-mayi.

The spectacular spread of the guru cult is a recent phenomenon. Before India gained independence, our gurus were confined to India and even here they were not easy to find, because it was part of their mystique that they should lead secret lives, in ashrams tucked away in dark jungles.

This aspect of the reclusiveness of gurus is highlighted in W. Somerset Maugham’s novel ‘The Razor’s Edge’, published in the nineteen-forties. Its hero, Larry Darrell, is a well-educated American who had undergone the horrors of trench warfare in the first world war. He craved for mental peace and believed that only an Indian guru would tell him how to achieve it. So he travels all the way to India — by ship, in those days. His quest ultimately ended in an ashram in the snow-bound Himalayas.

How things have changed in the past 50 years. Gone is the reclusive guru who treasured his privacy; the new guru is a publicity-hungry tubthumper and barnstormer who takes ads in Time and Newsweek to drum up business and buys TV time; and at least one, Mahesh Yogi, owns a TV channel.A touch of the button, and His Holiness himself bobs up on the TV screen, totally bald but a fringe of white hair and luxuriant white beard framing the lower half of his face, explaining deep philosophy in simple language, ostensibly devised for an audience with the mental ages of children. He was the pioneer, the guru who achieved the break-through, for did he not have Mia Farrow and the Beatles as disciples?

Maharshi Mahesh Yogi. Maharshi, or maha-rishi, means great rishi, the guru of gurus, and the title is well-deserved. He it was who by his own example, liberated his tribe from its self-imposed taboos, of seclusion and a life of deprivation. In effect he said to them. O.K., a guru — the genuine article — just has to be Indian-born. But then his karma-bhumi, work-place, is in the affluent west. It is there that he achieves his full flowering and, in the process acquires fame and fortune. Look at me!

Wise counsel. It is the given condition of rich nations that they contain a broad spectrum of offbeat liberalism, and it is in the subculture that gurus flourish. Allen Ginsberg who was himself an acknowledged icon in this field had testified to the importance of gurus in non-conformist circles. In a poem he wrote only a few days before he died, in 1997, title Death & Fame Ginsberg stipulates that all he asks for in death is that he should be given an elaborate funeral for which he, as it were, has drawn up a guest-list. In the first circle of his invitees are his numerous relatives. "Stepbrothers and sisters and grandchildren," but, right behind them are "Vajracharya’s ghost and Satchidananda Swami Shivananda."

Swami who?

That’s just it. The Gurus Ginsberg himself venerated may not be known in their own land. But in their adopted land, and certainly in Ginsberg’s circle, they had become household names.

Initially, of course, our gurus found followers from among the unfocused young men and women of pop culture. But all that has changed. Today’s gurus are a part of mainstream life and find their devotees from among ordinarily men and women — lawyers, doctors, teachers, business-people; even journalist who are said to be hard-nosed and uninfluenceable.

Such as Sally Kempton, a freelance journalist who contributed articles to glossy magazines such as Esquire and New York, and highbrow newspapers like New York’s ‘Village Voice’. She was the daughter of Murray Kempton, whose daily column in Newsday was all but required reading for America’s literary elite; and Sally herself was following in her father’s footsteps and had become known for her ‘acerbic’ style. Sally Kempton’s adoption of a guru and her subsequent conversion to the cult is somehow symbolic of the tenacity and hypnotic influence of guru power.

Remember the trouble Maugham’s Larry Darrell had to go through to find a guru? Well, Sally Kempton found hers right next door, as it were, and what is more to the point, at a time when she was not even looking for one. She was merely doing her job — reporting. She had gone to a town called Pasadena, in California, to write about a guru who had established himself there and had acquired a following, or again, as she herself put it, about "what those creeps were saying."

So, in Pasadena, Sally watched ‘listlessly’ as the Guru, Muktananda, took questions from his congregation. Sally who had gone there to see "what the creeps were saying", was so impressed by whatever they were saying, that she decided to stay on and, a few weeks later, herself became a disciple of the Guru. After a brief term as an acolyte, she was given a diksha, which admitted her into the order. She took on a new name, Gurumayi Durgananda, and began to wear saffron saris.

Unfortunately, Guru Muktananda died soon after, and a bitter and unseemly dispute ensued between his son, Nityananda, and daughter, Chidvilasananda, as to which of them was their father’s true heir. But through it all, the order itself prospered, its mainly American rank and file supporting the claim of the daughter. It has gone on expanding as more and more people join it, and moved into its own, elegant premises in the Catskill mountains which are said to resemble a resort hotel for millionaires.

So the gurus march on, unstoppable, making converts even among men of science. As clinching proof, there is the case of Vasily Tsibliyev, a high-profile Russian astronaut who is a member of the space station, Mir. It seems that, even as Mir itself is hurtling through the skies, its crew members are allowed to make periodic phone calls to their friends and families on earth. What they have to do is to make a request to their Mission Control to connect them to the right number.

Well, in 1997, while Vasily Tsibliyev was a part of Mir’s crew, he suspected that some of the gadgets on board were not functioning as well as they should. So he requested Mission Control that he should be connected to the number of a lady called Globa, who is a practicing fortune-teller in Moscow. It seems that the astronaut had known Globa before and she had warned him that "he was in for trouble." And right enough, there had been a fire on board which nearly forced the crew to abandon ship.

Globa who took the call on her kitchen phone, was reassuring. Yes, she foresaw more ‘complications’ on board Mir, but they would not be serious, and "nothing as bad as that fire."

"Thank God!" the astronaut exclaimed.