What does it tell about us, the way we have been reacting to this scandal as a society?
The coverage and the reactions have in general been very negative, assuming the worst about Nithyanada, that he is a liar, a cheat and a con man. To be sure the handling of the media furor by Nithyananda was very ineffective and immature. He disappeared from public view after a few interviews to the media. He was eventually arrested for not appearing in the court.
The video itself while it is far from conclusive about Nithyanada having sex, showed sufficient intimacy to make people squirm. To many the scenes in the video of a few minutes were proof enough of his culpability. A man in saffron is sannyasi and he should NOT have any sex.
Once Nithyananda's character has been maligned with the video, all sort of charges were filed against him, such as, he stole land for his ashram, people mysteriously died in his ashram, his ashram was built on agricultural land, he smuggled gold from overseas, he sat on a tiger skin, a deer skin which was an outlawed substance, he gave money to the LTTE, he had sex with both men and women, he outraged religious sentiments and lately he stole kerosene meant for poor people etc etc... The litany of charges in the "trial by media" are not exhaustively mentioned here, they are just the ones off the top of my head!!
The rapidity of the initial accusations and the constant stream of charges against him hints at certain individual or a group of individuals highly motivated to bring Nithyananda down, or at least take his organization down completely. Who these people are, is anybody's guess but there are sure signs of orchestrations and machinations here.
The substandard media, never once to miss a chance on sensational "news" pounced on this with all the zeal they are capable of. The unsuspecting people watching this media circus are being subjected to a bombardment of unfiltered gossip, rumors and innuendo about the Swami.
After 53 days of custody and rigorous questioning by the CID, they were not able to find any victims who will testify against the swami on the rape charges or other crimes. Most of other accusations that were thrown around had not amounted to much as well. They remain rumors and gossip in the media and not any prosecutable offense.
If not all if any of the above charges are true, it should have been easy to convict the Swami. So far no luck with the governmental authorities, yet they made sure to curtail his civil liberties when they gave his conditional bail. Do not preach or teach, surrender your passport etc. Do not preach or teach? what has that got to do with anything?
There are striking parallels to this episode unfolding now in 2010 to something that happened as many years ago.
In the middle-east, A man called Jesus was brutally beaten up, spat upon, insulted, dragged through the streets and humiliated by all the people and finally crucified in between two convicts who suffered the same fate. What was his crime? Was he just a focal point of all the negativity, hatred, anger and frustration people already had in their hearts? All of the ugliness people had inside but couldn't express without inhibitions were unleashed. Because it was ok to do so, he was a "bad" guy! A saintly man was slaughtered in a barbaric manner.
Flash forward to now, Nithyananda has been vilified ad infinitum from all quarters for offenses mostly imaginary. Is he now the focal point of our collective negativity? After close to 7 years of intense public work and about 600 youtube videos of all that Nithyanada has spoken about, it has finally come to one video. We as a society have chosen to dwell on this one video relentlessly and we chose to ignore any of the content in his other 600 videos. Is this what we are? Cynical beings that already "know" nobody is any good and are just waiting for one little "proof" for what they already know to be true??!
At the heart of the issue seems to be our hang ups about holy men having sex. Nithyanada has admitted to have experimented with tantra techniques privately with consenting adults, who had signed voluntarily a non-disclosure agreement. Is he wrong to have experimented at all? or should he have been more open about it?
