India is always a land of spiritual practices; everyone has their own way to attain salvation. In the recent past, the modern God-men turned it into scams. For some spirituality is just business. Most of them attained celebrity status and spirituality became a power game. They started creating their own set of cults. Nowadays people are going to god men-women, not for salvation but to seek miracles. This traps even the literate. Self-proclaimed godmen or women get richer by possessing material wealth by leading luxurious lives. India has produced many spiritual leaders; some of them are working for real social causes by guiding their followers to lead life efficiently and effectively.
People should realise, God and godmen or women use people’s innocence and exploit them in some or the other way. These days’ people find ways to be happy and find solutions to their problems and when they hear from others about their problems solved with the help of some Babaji or gurus, people blindly start following such people. Most of the Gurus these days are good communicators.
Politicians and many influential people follow these people for their own benefit and this in turn convinces common men that these gurus will be able to help us become successful too if we follow them. Politicians want votes and film personalities to want promotions. Gurus want wealth and acknowledgement to remain number one in the business.
A true spiritual guide should be one who will ask people to leave materialistic happiness and not one who aspires to a big lavish ashram, cars and crowd and money in his account, it is very necessary to separate good from bad and equally necessary to understand the wants and needs. ‘God-men’ and ‘God-women’ are the people who claim themselves as either the reincarnation of god or god him/her. It is not uncommon for the sprawling network of godmen, gurus and swamis in the Hindu-majority country of more than a billion people to commit sexual crimes.
Strangely, millions of Indians seem to be in the thrall of these smooth-talking “godmen” who have built vast empires preying on their gullibility. The scope for abuse of trust is enormous. Often, even the family of the alleged victim prefers the guru’s version to that of a blood relative. Devotees are beholden to these holy men by becoming part of the faithful. We Indians are great believers in miracles and feel that somebody can get us out of our miseries. This is the prime reason we fall for these godmen.
Starting out as small-time preachers from villages and towns in the country’s rural hinterland, these so-called holy men cultivate a relationship with poor locals and over time, they acquire cult status commanding a huge following (and sometimes even political connections) to camouflage their nefarious activities. People everywhere in India are prone to mystics. Many fall prey to the saffron robes these godmen wear believing they are true saviours, and afterwards blind faith takes over.
Despite the scandals and the fall from grace, there is no dearth of self-styled godmen operating in the country, and faith in the unreasonable and irrational remains firm. Who doesn’t know that wherever there is lust for money there will surely be (a) sexual depravity and (b) crime of diverse kinds? It is simply impossible that the sort and scale of crime that some perpetrate can be done with assured impunity even in the underworld. Are we to tolerate a situation in which the mask of godliness becomes a cover-up for unspeakable depravity?
What should worry us, besides the above, is the readiness of the masses to embrace slavery. The denizens of the dens of ‘godmanity’ – a perversion of divinity – are voluntary slaves. Why, in an age that has deified freedom, do millions of human beings freely embrace slavery in the name of spirituality? A society that renounces the duty to propagate a scientific temper and rational outlook abandons people, willy-nilly, to wolves in sheep’s clothing. Mistaking spirituality for psychological dependence, they become like creepers that need something to climb on. They fall short of discernment.
