A couple of years ago Yogi Ramdeo Baba was flown into Japan as the guest of honor of ‘Namaste India’, the annual Festival of India in Japan. It draws hordes of Indiaphiles, not as many young people as I would like you to believe, who cannot have enough of their Bollywood movies, curries and recently Yoga too. Yoga is Japan’s newfound religion after it was shunned in the 90s because Japan’s neo-religious cult ‘Aum Shinrikyou’ used Yoga classrooms for attracting and converting people to this cult that is now banned for

executing terrorist attacks on Tokyo Subway in 1995. A few years later, the acceptance of Yoga among Americans and Hollywood celebrities helped in removing that stigma. This new Yoga that was rerouted through America as a mind-body-health fad without any shades of a religion, spirituality or even meditation, has since picked up very fast in Japan and is here to stay.

However I could not make any sense of this move on the part of festival to rope in Ramdeo Baba as the Brand Ambassador. If the organizers seriously wanted to popularize India, Yoga and themselves any further then the obvious choice should have been Shilpa Shetty. Her star appeal alone would have drawn many new and younger crowds to the event. And Shilpa with her inimitable dress sense posing as a Yogi would instantly convert all of the remaining Japanese skeptics of Yoga. With all due respect one must admit that the spectacle of even a hundred Ramdeo Babas contorting themselves into unthinkable positions cannot achieve the same effect. Shilpa and my wife were classmates in college, and I was hopeful that with some luck I could make a closer scrutiny of Yoga.

But I was more disappointed in this casting fiasco of how we choose our Brand Ambassadors for marketing and selling Brand India. This self-appointed Patanjali is apparently defeating the purpose itself. So planning to keep a very respectful and safe distance from this flying fakir and to give the festival a complete miss, I legged it. Instead I enrolled in an amateur golf contest to kill the day and the disappointment. Now that is also not as exciting as it sounds. These open contests for amateurs are affairs of countryside yogic penance where geriatric women golfers prowl the fairways and manage to beat the hell out of hackers like me who are young enough to be their grandsons.

Ramdeo Baba has made a successful career out of selling a cocktail of Yoga, Ayurveda and also Religion to the gullible masses, though it is unclear how the third element could be mixed with the first two. As if that was not enough, Baba is now the latest addition to India’s moralists who police everyone and everything that is not even remotely related with any faith or religion. Those two things are not one and the same and I will elaborate my views further in a separate story on reclaiming faith from the clutches of Religion and Religious Men.

The godmen should be restricted to performing the religious rites, management of places of worship and graveyards. They should stay away from commenting on anything related to the matters of morality, sciences, biology, sex, society and politics unless asked to. We do not need only secular institutions but also need secular yoga, secular philosophy, secular spirituality and secular faith, which would be a very personal matter and of personal choice. The religion and church mix with other aspects of human life like oil and water. The meditation or spiritual experience is also a realm of empirical psychology and has nothing to do with any goddamned religion.

These self-appointed Gurus and moral police are poor role models and it is high time we send them packing into the wilderness of jungles infested with Maoists and other terrorists where even the police fear to tread. I have a hunch that their amazing yogic and moral powers will prove to be too much for the insurgents to match and will make them flee the jungles, throw away the arms and lead a normal life. Now that would be powerful.