Sai Baba

Sathya Sai Baba has passed away at the age of 84. The indian holy man had millions of devotees around the world and was known for his saying Love all, serve all - help ever, hurt never.

I have never been a follower of gurus, or any religious figures for that matter, but always found Baba quite fascinating.

He had a knack for making objects and holy ash, called vibuthi, appear from well, nowhere. I have seen videos where coins, ashes and watches materialize from the palm of this guru and it's no mean trick, I assure you.

At the young age of 14, after being bitten by a scorpion, Sathyanarayana Raju supposedly regained consciousness and started speaking sanskrit, a language he was not previously familiar with, to his startled parents. His father, thinking him bewitched, tried to beat him with a stick. He then proclaimed that he was the reincarnation of  Sai Baba of Shirdi, an indian saint who had died eight years earlier.

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I was on an airplane, had to be close to 30 years ago, and struck up a conversation with the tall gentleman sitting next to me in the middle seat. He had been a volleyball player at SDSU and then on the U.S. Olympic team. Now he was running an ashram and school for young children in India for Sai Baba, his spiritual mentor.

With a bit of snark, I asked him if Baba had materialized his watch for him. "Why yes," he stated, "As a matter of fact he did." He took it off and handed it to me. I had a quick look at it, it seemed normal enough. My traveling companion seemed very rational and sober and I have no cause to disbelieve him. Many people and skeptics have tried to explain his deft paranormal ability as parlor tricks and chicanery but when I started examining the specific stories they appeared very hard to debunk. He would ask people to call out the date of their birth and give them that specific minted coin.

The ability to pull money out of thin air is not a trivial affair, what a handy guy to have around if you lived in a city and needed to put money in the parking meter. I could see many instances in which his services would become invaluable.

Of course, there are the normal allegations of sexual abuse and the general nasty occurrences that happen every time that people worship leaders of any religion. Can really screw everybody's head up. Don't know if the abuses did or didn't really take place. But hey, he's only human.