The Beautiful and the Damned (17 page)

That was how Chak had found his guru, whom he referred to as
‘the Master’, the word ‘master’ being pronounced with a sharp American accent. ‘You should never read spirituality, but dive into it,’ Chak explained to me in the empty canteen. ‘It took six months to work for me, but once you start fiddling with the transmission, it starts making sense. Then, as we progress in our spirituality, life becomes finer and finer. It’s like starting with crude oil, moving on to becoming kerosene, diesel and petrol, until at the most refined stage, you become aircraft fuel.’

Chak became increasingly devoted to the teachings of the Master even as things changed around him. He switched jobs, became an American citizen in 2002 and returned to India. When the 9/11 attacks happened, he was in America and disturbed enough to call the Master in India to ask him for his advice. ‘ “Governments have to do what they have to do, individuals have to follow their core values,” he told me.’

When I said that this could be interpreted to mean that the American government had to do what it had to do and that the individuals within Al Qaeda should follow their core values, Chak hastened to assure me that the Master unequivocally supported the American government. In the spiritual scheme of things, however, neither terror nor the war on terror mattered. ‘The only thing you can do is towards yourself. You can’t change the world. You can change yourself.’

I wondered how spirituality could be reconciled with a profession or with possessions like a $1.5 million house. ‘A job or a profession is a purely transactional thing,’ Chak responded. ‘If you have money, if you want a Mercedes car, the Master says, “Go ahead and buy it, but don’t fuss about it. Don’t complicate it.” ’ He explained this further with an anecdote that he told me as we strolled back to the leather armchairs in the lobby. ‘There is a pious king and a pious poor man. God keeps giving the king more and more riches. The poor man has one cow but God makes the cow die. How can this be justified? The poor man is dejected. See, the cow is all that stands between the poor man and God. The king, however, has all these possessions between him and God. He has much further to travel.’

I wasn’t quite convinced by this, so Chak told me another story to
reinforce the point. He had recently sent his two daughters on a trip to the United States. They had wanted to travel on their own, and he was supportive of the idea of their becoming independent. ‘It was one of the things where there was a difference of opinion between me and the Master. “They’re going on their own?” he said when I told him about the plan. He’s slightly conservative in these matters, you see. I thought it was fine, but then they ran into problems. First, they were stuck at the Chicago airport for twelve hours because of a missed connection. Finally, they reached my brother-in-law and his family in Oklahoma. They were sitting on the lawn there, watching fireworks for a Fourth of July celebration, when an insect bit my younger daughter. She went into seizure. She was having a severe allergic reaction and they had to call 911, and an ambulance came and took her.’ Chak paused and held up two fingers. ‘She was this much away from …’

His daughter was fine now, he reassured me. She had been put on steroids, and she had recovered. I found the story interesting, especially how this conversation about Indian spirituality had become a tour of contemporary America: Rockford, Pittsburgh, New Jersey, 9/11, the Bush government, Al Qaeda, Oklahoma and the Fourth of July. Was the spirituality emanating from these nodes the significant phenomenon, or was it the nodes themselves? Because there was some way in which I didn’t understand the point of Chak’s story, unless it was that anyone could be subject to the vicissitudes of fate. It was, to my mind, the old religious justification, stretching from the Eastern idea of karma to the Western concept of the postlapsarian individual, employed always to argue that people, especially poor people, suffered as a result of past actions, and that they always got what they deserved.

Chak had been speaking in a relaxed, even tone throughout. When he saw that I was dissatisfied, he leaned forward and gave me the point of the story, closing it like a perfectly solved problem. ‘The trip, you see, wouldn’t have been possible without money. Without money, there would have been no insect in Oklahoma, no seizure, no chance of death. So the Master was right to have his doubts about the trip. The Master was right when he said that it’s people who have the
most money who have the most trouble. The Master was right about everything.’

Chak’s certainty in his spiritual world view was of a piece with the certainties in his life. He had been with the semiconductor company for years, and unless something dramatic happened, he didn’t anticipate changing jobs. His $1.5-million house was around the corner, and he was looking forward to being closer to work when he finally moved in. ‘The company has an open, mature culture that I like very much. That’s another area where I have a disconnect with the Master. He thinks I like the office too much and his attitude is, “You don’t yet get it.” ’ Chak sighed and leaned back. ‘He’s right, you know,’ he said. ‘This is not everything.’

When Chak socialized with colleagues, it was at events organized by the company, either on campus or at a hotel. People didn’t visit each other at home, nor did they socialize on their own initiative. ‘People don’t do much of the Western thing here, go and get a drink in a nearby pub,’ Chak said, sounding slightly regretful. ‘Everyone commutes in from a different area. As for the weekends, those are completely taken up with my meditation. See, instead of friends, what you get from the satsang is brotherhood. The difference between friendship and brotherhood is like the difference between religion and spirituality. Friendship is a social thing, and it’s exclusive because you choose your friends. You don’t choose your relatives and similarly in the brotherhood of spirituality, you accept everyone. There is no formality, it’s inclusive, you don’t judge them, and you do things for them. If you can.’

On weekends, apart from meditating, Chak sometimes travelled to give meditation ‘sittings’ for newcomers. He had graduated to being an ‘abhyasi’ – literally meaning a practitioner, but Chak translated it as ‘preceptor’, bringing a little hierarchy into the more neutral Sanskrit word. ‘I will take a train to a small place in northern Karnataka where I don’t know anyone but where someone wants a sitting. I don’t even know the language, so we communicate with gestures.’

‘What kind of people?’ I asked.

‘All kinds of people. Teachers, workers,’ he said a little vaguely.

‘What if the people tell you about problems they have?’

‘They sometimes do,’ he said. ‘You listen. You help if you can.’

‘Are there other people in your company who belong to the brotherhood?’

‘Yes, there are some.’

‘Do you talk about spirituality at work?’

‘If it happens naturally in the course of the conversation. I don’t bring it up of myself. There was a woman from Admin who found out I did this. I arranged for her and her husband to come for a session. Now they’re part of the brotherhood too.’ Chak looked around at the lobby and smiled. ‘It’s like the movie
Men in Black
. From the outside, the place looks very normal, just an IT firm.’ He started chuckling. ‘In secret, we do other things. We’re all members of the brotherhood here.’

Chak’s brotherhood was, in itself, relatively benign. It was no doubt self-involved – navel-gazing, unwilling to look too deep into questions of justice and inequality, but it was clear that its circle was limited. It was one of the many cults in modern India claiming a separation from both low context and high context while depending on the structure and economy of the low context. But there were other gurus who were far more global and powerful than the Master.

Just outside of Bangalore was the Art of Living Foundation, run by a man called Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. He had been a disciple of the sixties guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who had attracted the Beatles, among others (until that relationship went sour and resulted in the song ‘Sexy Sadie’), but Shankar was a corporate guru, perfectly attuned to the millennium and therefore possessing no hint of the counterculture. He was equally popular among Bangalore’s engineers and among Manhattan socialites, a man who gave lectures to the poor to be happy with their fate, presumably because this kept them closer to God. He was also, in spite of his combination of New Age mumbo-jumbo and management speak, close to militant right-wing Hindu groups that have less interest in spirituality and more
interest in violence against minorities, especially Muslims. These right-wing brotherhoods include the Bajrang Dal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), and the oldest and most notorious of them all, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), whose origins go back to colonial times, when it modelled itself on Mussolini’s Blackshirts and the Nazis. It was the RSS that sent an assassin who killed Gandhi in 1948, for which it was banned by the government for one year. The fortunes of the RSS improved vastly from the late eighties, when the organization and its allied groups saw their political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) becoming increasingly popular among the Indian upper classes and running a national government from 1998 to 2004.

Bangalore, for all its talk of cosmopolitanism and modernity, was part of that loop of right-wing Hinduism. The BJP had emerged as the largest party in the state of Karnataka (of which Bangalore was the capital) in the 2004 state elections. By the time I was there, it would form an unwieldy government in coalition with other parties, and in another year, in 2008, it would win the elections in Karnataka to form a government on its own. There were other Hindu formations in this software city, as evident in the red tilaks smeared on the foreheads of some auto-rickshaw drivers, but my brush with right-wing Hinduism happened, in a particularly Bangalore way, because of the Internet.

At the beginning of my stay in the city, I had got in touch with many people about engineers they might know. One of them, an acquaintance in Delhi, posted a request about this on an online discussion group. He had told me, in passing, that it was a ‘libertarian’ discussion group, but this was a detail I didn’t give much attention to except to note, in passing, the sheer absurdity of being a libertarian in India. I had forgotten about this posting when, some weeks later, I received an email from a man called Kartik. He had an engineering degree and although he had never worked as an engineer, he would be happy to meet me. ‘I have seen enough of s/w engineers and would be willing to supply dope about them,’ he wrote in the email.

When I called him, he sounded neither very interesting nor particularly coherent. Yet he seemed so eager to talk that I asked him if
he would come and see me at Koshy’s, a restaurant in central Bangalore, where I was meeting Akshay, my photographer room-mate. Kartik showed up soon after I got there, looking hesitant as he made his way towards our table. He was dark and stocky, his face gleaming with sweat, and I began to lose interest in him as he talked. He was alternately opinionated and nervous, making random statements that seemed to have no point to them. When I asked him to clarify a comment he had made, he would run his palm through his hair and say, ‘I will have to think about that. I am not good at expressing my thoughts.’

I put my notebook away and ordered dinner, asking Kartik to join us. I didn’t like him, but I felt bad for him. He seemed lonely, a little confused, and I made it clear that dinner was on me. But even though he didn’t want to leave, he refused to eat. He ordered a coffee and sipped at it while continuing to make rambling comments. There were things about him that didn’t quite add up, I thought. He had grown up in Bangalore, but he had never been to Koshy’s. He looked around at the other customers uneasily, a middle-class gathering of men and women, some of them poets and journalists, whose conversation rang in an easy, animated tone, interrupted by their banter with the uniformed waiters. Then there was the fact that Kartik was in many ways a member of the elite. He was a Brahmin, someone who had done engineering at an IIT and studied management at an IIM, both elite institutions. Yet there was no polish on him, and he didn’t have a job. When I asked him why, he mumbled, ‘I am still looking for the right thing.’

He grew slightly animated when I asked him about the online group through which he had been put in touch with me. ‘What does it mean to be libertarian?’ I asked.

‘We believe in free-market economics, the kind that has made America so successful,’ he said.

I had assumed that civil liberties would be no part of this Indian-style libertarianism, and I was right. Kartik began to talk about a column he had read in the
Financial Times
in which, he claimed, the writer had commented harshly on the unproductive, welfare-seeking mentality of black people in America.

‘Is that right?’ Akshay asked me. ‘You live in America.’

I said I didn’t agree, but Kartik grew increasingly vehement that the
Financial Times
columnist was right. He began to speak disparagingly of black people, although he admitted he had never met any. He also spoke dismissively of what he said was my tolerance, comparing it to the similar attitude of his parents.

‘What’s wrong with your parents?’ I said. ‘They sound like decent people to me.’

‘They’re old-fashioned,’ he said. Then he added, ‘My father is an atheist.’

‘And your mother?’ I asked.

‘She’s religious,’ he said. ‘But she’s just like my father. They’re too easy-going when it comes to other kinds of people.’

‘Do you mean people from other religions?’ I said.

He refused to answer and instead stared at me, sweaty and nervous, playing with his empty coffee cup.

‘So what about your religious beliefs?’ I said.

‘I believe in Hindutva,’ he said, using the name coined by right-wing organizations to mean an assertive Hindu identity.

‘Do you belong to any organization?’ I asked.

A sudden change galvanized the man in front of me. He sat erect and puffed out his chest. Then he gave me a fascist salute, right arm swivelling to meet his chest, palm pointing down. ‘I belong to the RSS,’ he said.