Online edition of India's National
Newspaper
Sunday, Nov 10, 2002
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Reality - spiritual and virtual
ON a recent holiday in
Bangalore, I made two trips out of the city that captured, within a
span of 48 hours, a simple truth about the Indian reality.
Late one night I set out on a
four-hour drive with my mother to Puttaparthi in Andhra Pradesh. We
arrived after 2 a.m. in a remarkably well-lit and orderly town.
Buildings gleamed white against the streetlights; the sidewalks,
patrolled by volunteers even at that hour, seemed freshly scrubbed. Puttaparthi, once a humble Andhra village like so many others, had
become a boomtown as the birthplace and headquarters of the
spiritual leader Sathya Sai Baba.
My mother had been a devotee
for 18 years, attending prayer meetings of Sai Baba followers around
the world and singing devotional bhajans. I was a sceptic
myself, but joined her amongst the early-morning gathering of
thousands, all waiting patiently for a glimpse of the great man. Sai
Baba emerged in his long ochre robe and made a stately progress
through the throng. He paused here and there to accept a petition
from a believer, or to materialise vibhuti (sacred ash) from
his palm into the cupped hands of a worshipper. We were privileged
to be invited through an ornate door into a small room for a private
audience. There we were joined by two other groups that had been
similarly favoured: an Indian family of three, and half-a-dozen
Iranian pilgrims, wearing green scarves that proclaimed their
Islamic faith. They looked up at him with folded hands, their
adoration glistening in their eyes.
"Would you like something from
me," Sai Baba asked me.
"Peace of mind for my mother,"
I replied.
"Yes, yes," he said somewhat
impatiently, "but would you like a gift from me?"
"Whatever you give me is for
my mother," I replied. He waved his hand in the air and opened his
palm. In it nestled a gold ring with nine embedded stones, a
navratan. He slipped it on my finger, remarking, "See how well
it fits. Even a goldsmith would have needed to measure your finger."
He shook some vibhuti into my mother's grateful hands before
taking the Indian family into an inner chamber for what devotees
called an "interview".
While they were gone, my
mother expressed disappointment about the meagre quantity of the ash
she had received. But soon it was our turn for a private interview,
and no sooner were we alone with Baba than he materialised a little
silver urn for her, overflowing with vibhuti. "It was as if
he had heard what I wanted," my mother breathed.
I was not blinded by faith,
but the encounter was indeed astonishing at several levels. In our
private talk, Sai Baba uttered insights about my family and myself
that he could not possibly have known. He has a habit, disconcerting
at first, of turning his palm quizzically outward and staring off
into the distance, as if silently interrogating an unseen,
all-knowing source. Sometimes he scribbles in the air with a finger
as if dashing off a note to a celestial messenger. And then he says
things which are sometimes banal, sometimes profound, and sometimes
both (if only because so much of what he says has become worn out by
repetition and frequent quotation, including in signs on the streets
outside). His manifesting gifts from thin air is startling; he
"transformed" a metal ring worn by one of the Iranians to a gold
one, then returned his original to him as well.
But a skilled magician can do
that, and it would be wrong to see Sai Baba as a conjurer. He has
channelled the hopes and energies of his followers into constructive
directions, both spiritual and philanthropic.
Everything at his complex is
staffed by volunteers who rotate through Puttaparthi at well-organised
two-week intervals; while we were there, the volunteers were all
from Madhya Pradesh, and it was to be Orissa's turn next. Many left
distinguished positions behind to serve. ("I once asked a man
washing a window where he was from," mused a visitor, "and he said
he was the Chief Justice of Sikkim.") The free hospital in
Puttaparthi, which I visited, is one of the best in India; many
reputed doctors volunteer their services to him. Sai Baba has built
schools and colleges, and is currently undertaking a project to
bring irrigation to a number of parched southern districts.
The next day I drove from
Bangalore in a different direction, to the campus of Infosys,
India's leading computer technology firm. It, too, wore the clean
and scrubbed look I had seen at Puttaparthi. But there were no
temples here, no pavilions thronged with devotees. Instead, escorted
by the company's affable CEO, Nandan Nilekani, I saw the world's
leading software museum, a state-of-the-art teleconference centre,
classrooms with sophisticated video equipment, and a work
environment that could not be bettered in any developed country.
Infosys is a world leader in information technology services,
providing consulting, systems integration and applications
development services to some of the biggest firms in the world.
Infosys's 13,000 staff (known in the company's argot as "Infoscions"),
work in over 30 offices around the world. In Bangalore they sit
amidst lush landscaped greenery dotted with pools, recharge
themselves at an ultramodern gym ("the best in Asia," Nandan said
lightly), display their creativity at a company art gallery and
enjoy a choice of nine food courts for their lunchtime snacks. I
marvelled at the sophistication and affluence visible in every
square inch of the campus. "We wanted to prove," Nandan explained,
"that this could be done in India."
Sai Baba and Infosys are both
faces of 21st Century India. One produces rings out of the ether and
urges people to be better human beings; the other deals in a
different form of virtual reality, and helps human beings to better
themselves. One runs free hospitals and schools; the other seeks to
bring the benefits of technology to a country still mired in
millennial poverty. In the 1950s, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru
declared dams and factories to be "the new temples of modern India."
What he failed to recognise was that the old temples continued to
maintain their hold on the Indian imagination. The software
programmes of the new information technology companies dotting
Bangalore's "Silicon Plateau" may be the new mantras of
India, but they supplement, rather than supplant, the old mantras.
Programming and prayers are both part of the contemporary Indian
reality.
Sai Baba and Infosys are, in
fact, emblematic of an India that somehow manages to live in several
centuries at once. On our way out of Puttaparthi, my mother and I
had a brief word with a devotee who was lining up to buy a packet of
vibhuti to take home with him. "What do you do," I asked.
"I am," he replied proudly, a
cellphone glinting in his shirt pocket, ``a project manager at
Infosys."
Shashi Tharoor, Under
Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, is the
author, most recently, of the novel Riot (Viking Penguin).
His new book with M.F. Husain, Kerala: God's Own Country, has
just been published by Books Today, an imprint of India
Today. Visit him at
www.shashitharoor.com
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