Disclaimer – This piece can be a huge dampener for anyone who came looking for a cue of what would happen on the popular American fantasy drama series with the same name. Honestly, I have never gone beyond the first episode of GOT, but I can guarantee that this is not it.
This is a fantasia like no other.
It’s been three years that I first heard of him. A movie called MSG was nearing its release and a colleague showed me a video of him, wearing an otherworldly attire, singing an incoherent song, and thousands of people jumping up and down in celebration. I cracked a joke or two about his hairiness and how I need to take music lessons from him. I had clearly underestimated him. It was a few weeks later that I visited a mall in Chandigarh and found trucks full of people arriving and sitting on the roads to catch a glimpse of their guru on the silver screen. I remember the feeling of discomfort setting in, seeing so many people coming in groups, displaying their solidarity and support for a man of his calibre. But, I couldn’t deny the fact that, and as Harnidh Kaur recently pointed out in her article, perhaps he was giving the castaways an inclusiveness which they had never before felt or experienced. Where the governments failed, he prevailed.
For most of us, Mr. MSG has barged into our secluded lives without invitation. And there is nothing we could do about it. He is omnipresent; wherever you go and whichever medium you log on to, you will find skeletons from his closet bouncing around. But, we suffer from a rare kind of amnesia, therefore never quite learning our lessons. It is imperative that we remember what happens when we set someone on a pedestal, be it a baba/bhai/baby/papaji/ma ji, and the repercussions it can have on the people who want no part of it.
He didn’t get there alone, he couldn’t have. It takes a formula for a dimwitted megalomaniac like him to become Gurmeet Almighty that he, over the years, became. His story could have ended in 2002. But, it takes people as hungry for power as him to give him that safe space to grow. He found plenty of them. They kept scratching each other’s backs, till finally the dimwit was behind bars (but not before raping young girls for years, confiscating land illegally to make a parallel state, butchering those who showed some spine), thirty eight people were six feet under and many more left thirsting for that last bit of moral nectar from their ‘pitaji’ (the godfather) that would charge their hypnotized souls. Our leaders for their personal gains helped him become the Don Carleone of the lot which always needs a physical manifestation of God, no matter how narcissistic and farcical. And while the political parties (two devious snakes mainly) came and went, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Insan became a multi-billion dollar industry in himself, all the while making people an offer they couldn’t refuse.
It isn’t only the downtrodden or segregated who are his followers; I know of people who are privileged and educated who have sung praises of him. And the only explanation for that is our habit of subservience, of behaving like the colonized, of bowing down before anybody who sits on a throne, believing their unoriginal and often uninspiring words to be celestial sermons, never once questioning their affluent lifestyle. After all, since when did gurus need commandos and Z + security or a fleet of cars. Since when did falling at people’s dirty feet absolve us of our sins or help us evolve into better beings. Why is the remote control of our lives always in somebody else’s hands?