Sai publicity

'GIVE HELP WITHOUT PUBLICITY'

Under this heading in Sanathana Sarathi October 2003, p. 295), Sathya Sai Baba said in a discourse after an earlier speaker had spoken extensively about the achievements of the Sai hospital: "I always advise the doctors not to publicise what we do in the hospital. There are several wonderful things that are happening." Whereupon he goes on at great length about supposedly marvellous achievements of the hospital in two individual cases!

This yet again shows the complete discrepancy between SSB's word and deed within the space of two sentences. He knew too that this went out through huge loudspeakers set all around the ashram, and that it would be printed and air-mailed to tens of thousands, posted on various of his official websites and also sent out repeatedly on his own world-wide radio! What a pathetic parody of true spirituality! His wily chutzpah, evident to the level-headed, does not penetrate the thick cocoons of blind faith in which so many devotees imagine themselves protected from untruth.

SSB also found the opportunity to slip in a disclaimer about boys sharing his bedroom, as he has previously stated they did and as is common knowledge, also known to many of us through contacts with several of those. "These boys from the hospital sleep on the ground floor while I stay on the first floor. They discuss hospital related matters. I keep telling them, 'Do not speak about them anywhere outside' ". Yet he had just sat uncomplainingly through one of these boy's extensive accounts of the achievements of the hospital! This is sheer duplicity which also illustrates SSB's strong desire to have publicity trumpeted loud and far and repeatedly about the hospitals.

In the same discourse he waxed large about having personally allowed the use of an injection costing Rs. 80,000.- to save a patient's life. He said, "Any amount should be spent to save the life of the patient. I shall bear the expenses..." Can anyone credit it, he will pay out of his own pocket? He who has no pocket! Besides, this use of huge sums for single injections is as a direct affront to the millions of poor in India who can't even afford simple medicines or treatments. His super-expensive and over-opulent hospital buildings are pretty much of the same ilk.

He also said: "One patient from Nepal had his heart on his right side! Our doctors have shifted it back to the correct location. I told the doctors that no one needed to be informed about this. People may accuse us of praising ourselves." But it is he who praises himself and informs about it as publicly as he can! Can hypocrisy get more transparent?

He also said, "Thousands of students have received education in our university totally free of cost. But we have never publicised the fact." Thereby he brazenly publicised the fact! And it is NOT true that he has not publicised this before.

For example, in 1993 (Sathya Sai Speaks Vol. 26, p 267) he said in public "Nowhere in the world can you see the kind of work that is being carried on here. Is Free Education offered elsewhere outside India on the lines offered here?" (The answer happens to be a resounding 'yes', in many nations).

In 1997 SSB boasted, "From My earliest years I have been concerned about providing three primary requisites for our people: Free education, free medical aid and free basic amenities like drinking water." (Sathya Sai Speaks Vol 30, p. 247) Is this perhaps not self-publicity too?

In Sanathana Sarathi September, 2001, p. 264, we read: "... the level of free health care and education can be maintained." - "...I have never asked anyone for help. My hand is always above (giving) and never below (receiving) (prolonged loud applause)"

What does he mean, one wonders... for he gets donations for which he has assured us that he signs every cheque personally? He has asked for donations to his hospitals and the local water project in public and these requests have been published in Sanathana Sarathi too! Meanwhile, many others around the world providing free services never solicit for donations but receive them in plenty.

More 'omniscient ignorance' and bombast: SSB also pretends to be able to do the impossible, making the most unfulfillable promises (so as to get cheers from his audience?), as in his discourse 11/8/2001:
"Unfortunately today in this country there are many fatherless and motherless children in great distress. My resolve is to help such children by providing them proper amenities by way of houses, education etc., and mould them into ideal citizens (cheers). I have spoken about this to the local District Collector. He has agreed to help and has allocated some land for this purpose. The construction has to be commenced shortly. There is nothing hidden in My actions. My nature is not to amass riches but to help all the extent possible. Bring to My notice any such deserving orphan or fatherless child. If the mother is alive, I shall arrange to allocate one lakh rupees in her name to be kept in fixed deposit for the upbringing of the children until they are able to support themselves."

For this self-proclaimed 'omniscient God', he should know a whole lot better! He is surrounded by luxury and the well-to-do, who he has cultivated with gifts of cheap false 'diamond rings' etc. for decades. But he is evidently in blissful ignorance of the constantly prevailing conditions of massive poverty, malnutrition and hunger in India, as the following words of his make crystal clear: "I came across a tragic incident in a newspaper. It was about an uneducated and helpless mother and her three children. They were in such a pathetic state of poverty that the mother had to starve herself in order to feed her children. As their situation worsened, she took to the extreme step of committing suicide after poisoning her children. It's a shame on the Bharatiyas! Can we Bharatiyas be so stone-hearted and cruel as to allow such a painful event to take place?"

Considering the number of orphans in India, can SSB's boast be other than straight hypocrisy? In 2002, the World Bank estimated that India is facing an accelerating threat from HIV which greatly impacts the social fabric, especially though the unprecedented number of orphans being left with little or no adult protection. (See http://www1.worldbank.org/sp/safetynets/OVCWorkshop_5-03/Handout_India.pdf).

Sathya Sai does not know the basic facts about his own country. Yet he entertains and blesses all his nation's corrupt and nest-feathering politicians as soon as they pop up at his ashrams. According to UN statistics, there are 20 million child labourers in sweatshops and mines who get no education. Indian government extrapolations of this 1981 data place the current number of child labourers at between seventeen and twenty million (Human Rights Watch 1996, 122). This extrapolation seems highly unlikely as "The Official National Sample Survey of 1983 [of India] reports 17.4 million child labourers, while a study . . . sponsored by the Labour Ministry, concluded that the child-labour force was 44 million" (Weiner 1991, 20-21). UNICEF "cites figures ranging from seventy-five to ninety million child laborers under the age of fourteen" (Human Rights Watch 1996, 122). A universal difficulty in obtaining accurate data may be that individuals fail to report child labour participation during surveys, for fear of persecution. (see http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Library/9175/inquiry1.htm) UN statistics shows that there are 4 million suffering HIV/AIDS in India, of which 170,000 are children! (See http://www.unicef.org/sowc03/tables/table8.html). Further, 400,000 children and women in India are subjected to commercial sexual exploitation (see http://www.unicef.org/newsline/01pr97.htm)

Though SSB in his bullet- and bomb-proof limousine and in his commando-defended private apartments may be unaware of the extent of it, the world in general knows that India is still full of the homeless, of slum cities, beggars of every kind and the land where the degradation of human beings exceeds all limits. Most 'Bharitayas' (i.e. Indians) are inured to it, on the pavements they daily step across limbless mendicants deformed horribly in childhood into broken-legged 'spidermen' and head-narrowed 'rat-headed children' and other pitiful shapes and forms - for the purposes of begging. Many who give some pittance to them do so because it supposedly engenders good karma for themselves! Is the problem that no one is left around him with the guts to bring anything untoward to the attention of the imperious, conceited Sathya Sai?

Is the Good SSB blazons around true service? While Sathya Sai Baba urges people to do good things, and is the willing figurehead of numerous good works (actually financed and carried out by others than himself), his inordinate self-publicity and outright boasting is in direct contradiction to his claims that true service is only that which is done with completely selfless motives and without fanfares. Yet he has cawed enormously for years, as in the following quotations from his infamous Christmas Discourse in 2000:

"Is there any government that is giving free medical care? People don't even think about the sanctity behind it. Most of the educated have become so low and mean minded. Is there anyone who is doing even one thousandth of this work ? No, no. It is only Sathya Sai Baba, who is doing this selflessly, always for the welfare of others."

Is he so ignorant as not even to know about the welfare states of Europe where free medical care is guaranteed to entire populations on an egalitarian basis as part of national insurance? His hospitals give free treatment, but to whom? Besides, it is all paid for by all of those of us who have donated sizeable sums to the Central Trust and persons who work there voluntarily or for a low wage. If the hospitals were free for all, there would be a free for all in poor India, where the statistics prove the vast gap between need and medical care available. Yet his hospitals never have a crowd milling at their gates and seem to be half-empty buildings to visitors. One can but wonder why! Actual admission criteria are a guarded secret and names of patients are not released. What proportion of them are privileged Sai devotees or people of influence in India?

Many, many other people are doing much more than one thousandth of the work Sai Baba does, who does not work in the normal meaning of the word. How much could he personally do, even if he actually worked a 14-hour day? And what kind of 'work' is it? Holdings talks, giving doubtful blessing and accepting adulation from others most of the day. Or is he exhausting himself with heavy work on astral planes, perhaps? He personally could not possibly do even one-thousandth of what 'His' various institutions are reported to undertake under his compromised name. That 99% plus of the work is done by followers and 100% of the money comes from them, he always ignores in his self-glorifying 'discourses' (i.e his Sai personality-boosting public relations exercises). There is the huge Imran Khan cancer hospital which provides free medical service in Pakistan, and the Swami Rama foundation's free hospital. There are a vast number of other people making sacrifices for the poor and needy, not only in India, but all around the globe. Many governments provide national health services with largely free medical care, while his devotees run a government that ignores the poor totally... it won't even provide toilet or water facilities for millions, while these politicians live in super luxury, even greater than SSB lives in! There are also thousands of schools providing free education in the world, and innumerable voluntary social and educational projects around the world.

"Sathya Sai Baba is rendering selfless service to humanity because he is selfless from top to toe. Are people with brains not able to understand even such a thing ? Why do people publicise? Such bad publicity is done for the sake of money alone."

This was a veiled reference to those who many have accused him of various sexual abuses. But it is still a bare-faced lie that they received or receive money for this, and he knows it!

No one who has Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed or other great humble figures of history as a model could accept Sathya Sai Baba's continual self-praise and inordinate and wholly unreasonable boasting about various of 'his' achievements. This increasing self-righteousness about his charitable work (as if it were not shared in by anyone who carries out these works in practice or contributes financially with their savings) In this he reminds of the potlach chiefs of the Kwakiutl tribe of British Colombia who gave away everything they had to their neighbouring tribes for the prestige it gave and they boasted endlessly so as to shame their adversaries.

Public works done with full publicity: All publicity about the service works of the various SB organisations or institutions is specifically formulated so as to try to enhance his name and fame. The hospital in Puttaparthi has been publicized for all it is worth in every video allowed by the Sai authorities for years. One is left without a shred of doubt as to who is the benefactor, for huge God-sized portraits of SB are seen everywhere and the commentaries drip with condensed sugar water when mentioning him. (The US owner of Hard Rock Café, Isaac Tigrett - whose donation made it all possible, is now not mentioned officially. Doubtless due to the intense jealousy he has described from Indian Sai officials when he was put in charge of hospital planning by SSB, Tigrett's name has even been completely removed from the reprinted discourses in the Sathya Sai Speaks series, though his name was included when they were published in Sanathana Sarathi).

If there should be no publicity, why do so many officially blessed and widely advertised Sai videos contain long sequences of SSB feeding the poor, marrying off poor people, giving away hand-driven tricycles to the handicapped and sewing machines to women. (The video 'Song of Service' is one example and another such is 'SSB as in a mirror'). These are sold world-wide and, from the central leadership, efforts are urged from devotees to bring such public works to the attention of broadcasters and the media.
In 2001, the Sai Central Trust took a double page spread in a Bangalore newspaper to promote the SSSS Hospital there. (The hospital was not even mentioned editorially, however). SB's teaching that service (seva) is of no spiritual value if it seeks the limelight just does not fit with such publicity. For example, In Sathya Sai Speaks Vol. 28, p. 341, SSB says one should not do service to impress. In Vol. 1 he deplores "the egoism and poisons the Seva of even veterans in the field, who go about extolling themselves as founders and promoters" (p.97) Does he not extol himself as a founder and promoter? In Jnana Vahini, SSB criticises "self-aggrandisement; when self holds sway over the heart, no deed worthy to be styled Service can emanate." (p.34). So what about SSB's self-aggrandisement?

No, Sathya Sai Baba's self-trumpeting glory is not credible, it is incredible! It can only arouse further suspicion of him among right-thinking people.