God, godmen and oh yeah poverty!

When Sai Baba (of the Afro hair do fame) died, his trust was worth $10B (Forbes). Now, that is really a cool amount of money to have. Many have regarded him as God, many more have called him a fake! People no less than a former Chief Justice of India has said SSB has divinely guided him in his judgments! OHH! WHEW! Good, I didn't have any cases before a judge who looks at divine guidance rather than being guided by the law.

Being an atheist, I have the highest disregard for godmen of all kind, be it SSB or the SSRS (of Art of Living fame). But what I am more interested in, is the wealth that these institutions have at their disposal. Wikipedia says that the US chapter of AOL has $7.7M net assets. Take the other international chapters including the huge India one and you have another billion dollar enterprise. Ramdev is another case in point. That chap along with his bunch of blowing the nose followers even own a Scottish isle worth ~£2M.

The claims of such self professed Godmen about various diseases of course is another story altogether. (AOL claims that Viruses cannot survive in the oxygen rich environment produced by Sudarshan Kriya on the basis of a 40 day study on 25 patients suffering from AIDS). Ramdev claims homosexuality is a curable disease!


Ignoring the above, it begs the question, "where does that kind of money come from?" The most obvious answer is of course, "from  donations."


Given, the amount of real estate and  the kind of wealth these organizations possess and given the fact that the above mentioned 3 are also from India, that would make Indians quite a charitable bunch of people. Add to this the huge amount of money that is donated to temples, churches, mosques, gurudwaras (all of them have AC versions now, I am sure) and we have some astonishingly charitable people.


P.S. Only the Vatican is supposed to be richer than the Tirupati temple!


Then why oh why do I get to read this?
"India has 52 billionaires and more than 125,000 millionaires. According to a study by the global consulting firm Bain & Company, India's giving in 2006 totaled close to $5 billion, which translates into an estimated $7.5 billion in 2009. This is only 0.6 percent of India's GDP. By contrast, Americans gave more than $307.75 billion or around 2 percent of GDP to charity in 2009, in spite of the recession."


And this?

Buffett, Gates encourage Indian billionaires towards charity drive

In the answer to these lies the issue.

The donation givers to religious places, ashrams, self professed godmen are probably not giving money to charity. They are not concerned with the equitable distribution of wealth or upliftment of the poor. They are more concerned with the individual who they are donating to in case of the godmen/godwomen and in case of the religious institutions with the evangelism of their faith. They want their particular faith to flourish, their belief systems to be the one and only and see others adopt it for themselves. 

There is also the thought process which is firmly entrenched in this country about being able to wash off sins. So in the normal course of the day, you have no option but to commit what is seen as "sins" and since most holy texts allow for penance by visiting the respective Gods and having them washed off, by donating to a religious place you are firmly bribing your way into heaven.

Poverty will continue to be a non issue in this country as long as religion dominates. As the majority of people believe in karma and the reason for being born into this life as one is being a reflection of the way one was in the last life, they would rather pay off God for their sins in this life to make sure they do not end up as a maggot on the carcass of a dead pig in the next. 

Poverty - oh they are only paying for what they did in their last lives, they can only hope for something better in their next. Leave me alone, I need to pray and give 10 kgs of gold to a temple, I can then be born as Suresh Kalmadi in my next life!