Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Swimming through swami troubles

There is a temple in Austin called Barsana Dham and it's a very beautiful temple. More like an ashram plus a north Indian temple. This temple holds a very special place in our family because this is pretty much the first place Ravi and I went to by ourselves, so I guess our first date, we got married here, we celebrated Maya's first b'rthday by sponsoring the lunch at the temple and then Anjali's first b'day by doing the same. So even though I'm not super religious this temple has always been a part of our major milestones.

If you were wondering where this is going, patience my child. Most of the people living in the ashram are westerners who found solace/escape/answers in the Hindu religion particulary the flavor and interpretation being practiced by the Swamiji who founded this temple. They are all extremely sweet people who honestly believe in this swamiji enough to leave their normal lives and live here. Over the years we have come to know a lot of the people living at the ashram.


The ashram holds a mela every year which is a blast irrespective of your religious beliefs. They have elephants and what not. This year I decided to invite some friends over to the mela so I sent out an email to about 20-30 friends(mostly parents of the 5 year old set) one month before the mela. The day before the mela this appears in the paper.


I sent an email out to all of my guests letting them know about the 'situation'. We did end up going to the mela but talking to Swamiji's devotees was very hard. They seemed in complete denial that allegations could be true at all. I feel indifferent to swamiji's fate but feel very sad for all the people who have completely dedicated their lives to him.



4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Perhaps you should also feel very sad for all the girls that he hurt and the families that has touched.

Gaurav said...

this is quite sad, i guess it's a case of the dark side where he was doing good to others religiously but at the same time had an evil side that negatively effected some lives. overall, the person deserves to be punished if he did in fact abuse those children.

Anonymous said...

Yes, it's sad all around. What's worse is that there are many adults there that know this is happening and don't think it is wrong. There are others that know it is happening, think it is wrong, and do nothing. I don't know which is worse. I just hope more people have the courage that these girls did to come forth and contact the Hays County Police department to offer testimony.

Anonymous said...

You can read more about the dark side of barsana dham at this blog:
mylifeinacult.wordpress.com

I hope more people learn the truth about spiritual organizations with ulterior motives before supporting them.

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