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Message: 1
   Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 23:27:27 +1000
   From: "Pittard, Barry" <bpittard@beachaccess.com.au>
Subject: Shashi Taroor's article

TAROOR'S ARTICLE:  SO VERY CLEAN AND SCRUBBED
 
By Barry Pittard.  Tuesday, December 10.
 
A friend suggests to me that the real chap to go for is Keith Bradsher, of the New York Times, whose article of December 1, 2000 extolled sathya sai baba (you know - the old but still highly-sexed fellow with the lairy hair transplant at Puttaparthi), rather than Shashi Taroor, writer of another article favorable to the Buggervan in the International Herald Tribune of December 3. 
 
However, I say, go for them both until they and their newspapers apologise to the countless victims and retract.  If I were a lawfirm representing any of sai baba's victims, I would be telling the New York Times and International Herald Tribune that they had better, for their own sake, get their lawyers talking to me, and fast.
 
In fact, Taroor's article is quite insidious.  The point is not whether the sai devotee of the piece is Taroor's mother.  Her son may indeed be the accolyte, but his enthusiasm for the mystic,  emblematic collocation of the Ancient India (sai baba, the holy man) and the modern (Infosys, the high-tech corporation) has infectious capabilities.
 
In what follows, I quote Taroor's words, and, by way of slightly oblique commentary on them, imagine myself as a trusting reader of his IHT article.  I muse away in a manner that will prime me for cancelling the rest of my life and dragging my family off to India to see the so-called Godman.
 
A private audience with the ocher-robed guru was astonishing at several levels. Sai Baba uttered insights about my family and myself that he could not possibly have known.
 
How wonderful.  I am astonished, too.  This Mr Baba is clearly a man of God or His Prophet or somesuch.  He is just what our family needs.  We can cancel our intended camping holiday in the woods and go off to India.  Mind you, I hear that people on the Internet are saying nasty things about him - but hey man look at the horrible things people said about Jesus!  If it is God's will, this Sai Baba will notice us, or in some way get us on the right track.  I just know it;  I FEEL it!
 
Most startling, he materializes gifts from thin air - in my case a gold ring with nine embedded stones. He slipped it on my finger, remarking, "See how well it fits. Even a goldsmith would have needed to measure your finger."
 
Gosh, gee wiz!  Startling alright!  Just like the loaves and fishes manifested out of nothing.  My God, the miracles of Jesus are being repeated even in our own time, in an Age of Disbelief!  The fact that
the ring fitted Mr Taroor's finger shows that Sathya Sai Baba - or God through him - is all-knowing of our slightest dimensions!  He has counted even the number of hairs of our head, and knows the sizes of our fingers!  Wow!  But it's not a gold ring I want - just a divine golden smile from him.  I FEEL somehow that he will do it.  Of course, Mildred and the girls will like something in the jewellery line, and want to show it to all the women at the Church when we get back.
 
But a skilled magician can do that, and it would be wrong to see Sai Baba as a conjurer. He has channeled the hopes and energies of his followers into constructive directions, both spiritual and
philanthropic.
 
See, not taking a thing for himself.  I hope he takes those impressionable young sons of mine and gets their energies going in some constructive directions.  Hey, maybe Mildred and I can enrol them at his
one of his colleges and his university.  He will put them into ship shape.  If Sathya Sai Baba can inspire so many of his followers, including no doubt hardened journalists like Mr Taroor, then he can do it for my family and me!  And gosh, we must see if we can get some of our friends to come along to with us too, and their children.  Yes, they are looking for a boarding school for their children. Perfect.  And
we'll make sure Mr Baba gets a BIG donation from us all - we'll cancel World Vision and the Salvation Army.  I shall send all our friends copies of Mr Taroor's article.  In  fact, I think I'll email it to all my Rotarian friends.  It feels kind of like I am distributing a modern day Scripture.  God, it feels good!
 
The next day I drove from Bangalore in a different direction, to the campus of Infosys, India's leading computer technology company. It, too, wore the clean and scrubbed look I had seen at Puttaparthi. But there were no temples here, no pavilions thronged with devotees ... I marveled at the sophistication and affluence visible in every square inch of the campus.
 
Clean and scrubbed - now we could do with a bit of that in our town. What a pride these people who live in Puttaparthi must take in their wonderful town, just like the pride shown in the magnificent Infosys campus.

Sai Baba and Infosys are both facets 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.
 
That's it  -  Mr Taroor speaks like a visionary.  With inspiration, he has seen that Sathya Sai Baba, the embodiment of the Timeless and the Ancientmost, is at one with the spirit and gift of Time and Progress. To pilgrimages on aeroplanes.  Temples and spinning wheels; silicon and infrastructure.  As Mr Taroor so brilliantly says, Sai Baba and Infosys are emblematic of an India that somehow manages to live in several centuries at once.
 
No doubt of it  -  Sathya Sai Baba and Infosys are the answer to India's problems of being so unclean and unscrubbed, and millenially poor (well, after the British came, anyway).  That's what we need.  Cleanliness and scrubbedness are next to Godliness.  And now with Mr Bill Gates (with his heart bursting with lovingkindness like the heart of a Princess Di and a Mother Teresa) so generously putting hundreds of millions of dollars into raising up India, it should not be very long before Mr Baba and Mr Gates get together and clean up real good! 
 
Look how clean and scrubbed our wonderful young men and women who work for Infosys and Microsoft, and IBM and Wipro.  And look at that wonderful picture I saw of Sathya Sai Baba in the New York Times – so very clean and very scrubbed.

TOPIC: Hard Language and Cyber Risks

There is a danger, which merits consideration by both Sai devotee and former devotee discussants. It is the threat posed by angered, techno-savvy individuals - from whatever side - of perpetrating cyber damage. Two sides can play at this reckless game, and antagonistic voices fuel the actions.

Two cautionary examples:

- Although the full story is very much sadder, a sincere loving young person active on one of our pro/anti Sai divides was devastated by cyber attacks on their website, which proved to be by someone from the other side.

- There is the case of a young person (from one of the sides) who, clearly conscience-stricken by cyber damage they had inflicted in a rush of anger, voluntarily confessed and profoundly apologised for what they had done (the person was forgiven). We do well to quickly heed such warning signs.

The millions of Sai devotees provide an infinitely greater cyber skills base than the former devotee population can command. Especially, then, former devotees who use provocative language may unwittingly unleash something of this vast potential for cyber-active hotheads and nutters.

If antagonistic language is adopted as one of the norms of discourse, we can, before long, expect shocking consequences. Once a cyber attack occurs, ongoing retaliation, or cyber warfare, may be hard to stop.

For a start, let us ask ALL activists (both pro and con Sai Baba), notably including co-ordinators and club moderators, to themselves model and encourage up and down their networks cool-headed restraint and responsibility, in both language and action.

I trust that this note can go up on both pro Sai AND Expose websites.

Moonshine99999

 http://www.quicktopic.com/8/H/qYarJBpGLW7G6/m1849