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pretence of humility, becoming 'Bhagwari' - which he translated as
'Blessed One'. Every Hindu knows the title also means, basically,
'God'.
There's nothing like an ideologue whose time has come. After
1970, the bhagwan's staggeringly eclectic hodgepodge of faiths and
philosophies, with its spiritual hedonism and utter lack of rules or
moral base, took off like a presidential candidate who senses victory.
People - Americans, mostly - realise how attached they are to
material comforts when they arrive in India to renounce
materialism. In a country where many comforts do not exist to
begin with, the awful realities of renunciation hit home. To rich
kids who have tuned in, turned on, and dropped out on their parent's
largesse, the average middle-class Indian lives in conditions of abject
deprivation. Discovering that this deprivation is what many gurus
in fact called materialism - and that what they termed renunciation
means hundred-day fasts, forty-eight-hour meditations, sleeping on
stone floors - is simply too much for these credit-card ascetics.
The bhagwan had often made himself unpopular by criticising
Mahatma Gandhi as a charlatan, a mob-pleaser, an idiot, a Luddite,
and far worse things - a sure way to get yourself attention in India.
As far back as 1969, he had shown he was no enemy of capitalism.
Speaking in July of that year at Jabalpur, he said:
Socialism is the ultimate result of capitalism. It is a very natural
process. There is no need to go through any revolution. In fact,
capitalism itself is a revolution that brings about socialism.
Capitalism has shown, for the first time in the world, how to
create wealth. I believe that in India socialism in inevitable, but
fifty, sixty, or seventy years hence. India should apply all its best
efforts to first creating wealth. The poverty in this country is so
chronic, it has lasted for so long, that unless this country develops
a capitalist system for the next fifty or one hundred years, this
country will remain poor forever. Capitalism would make it
possible to distribute wealth. At present, in the name of socialism,
what we have for distribution is only poverty.
He evidently understood as little about economics as he did about
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