Word: bhagwan
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...Singh is enjoying yet another spell under the spotlight, thanks to his new novel Burial at Sea, a fantasia on an alleged sexual escapade by Nehru. The central character, Jai Bhagwan, "is a takeoff of Nehru," says Singh. Bhagwan, like Nehru, is a Brahman from Kashmir, British-educated, brilliant, agnostic, a follower of Mohandas Gandhi, and with big dreams of modernizing his impoverished country. There's one difference: instead of going into politics, Bhagwan decides to transform India by becoming an industrialist to give his country the economy it deserves. The crux of the novel comes when the middle-aged...
...Bhagwan's Tantric tryst is a thinly veiled allusion to one of the more bizarre nooks of modern Indian history. Years after Nehru's death, one of his close aides made the sensational claim that he had had a secret affair with a Hindu godwoman. Singh says he met the godwoman late in her life, and was convinced?whatever the veracity of her story?that she at least possessed the physical charms necessary to bowl over a Prime Minister. "What she must have been in her 20s, I can only imagine," says Singh, with a hint of longing...
...journalist, Singh extensively investigated and exposed godmen, whom he regards as one manifestation of a dangerous surge of Hindu fundamentalism in India. "Religious fascism has taken roots in this soil," says Singh, a vitriolic opponent of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Is the encounter between Bhagwan, the Western-educated agnostic, and Ma Durgeshwari, the Hindu godwoman, an allegory of modern Nehruvian India being seduced by the dark forces of religious fundamentalism? Perhaps. But if Singh the political thinker sees godmen as a danger to India's secularism, Singh the novelist is too deeply attracted to their charlatanry...
...Placed next to the appalling ego circuses of Eastern gurus such as Sai Baba or Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the goings-on at Zen Center were pretty tame fare. But the real lure of Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center (Counterpoint; 385 pages) isn't the abuses and failings it chronicles, so much as the fact that they happened in the ever-elusive, and ever-alluring, world of Zen. Of all the Far Eastern spiritualities that Americans began importing as replacements for their own moribund faiths in the '60s and '70s, Zen has always...
...York is surely an irascible city, but similar classes are cropping up in much quieter places, towns like Medway, in southern Massachusetts, and Sumter, in rural South Carolina. In Chicago, Leonard Ingram, a.k.a. Bhagwan Ra Afrika, incorporates "Western, Eastern and African approaches" into anger treatments. And Thomas Nelson Publishers of Nashville puts out an Anger Workbook that reminds enraged Christians that Jesus said we should love our neighbors as ourselves...