The weekend after Godman Paramahamsa Nithyananda was caught on camera–reaching for actress Ranjitha even as he was preaching the Bhagvad Gita–my friends in the Bay Area couldn’t stop cackling. 

At a party last Saturday, an old friend walked up to me, a puzzled look on her face. “Do you know to whom this belongs?” she asked, pointing to a beaded chain curled snugly in her palm. Seconds later her face crumbled into raucous laughter. According to her, the chain had fallen off during her private dalliance with none other than the Swamiji himself the previous week. My wild gang of friends had presently found something and someone to make fun of and so the jokes sputtered and sparkled late into the night until it was decided that someone among us would get his or her hands on the original video and hold a party to discuss the lurid details.  Along with the puns and jabs came dissections of the creativity of tweets on the subject and, naturally, more serious discussions on matters of religion and faith.

“I’m sorry, I’m a skeptic,” said one man, a self-realized agnostic. “I really cannot believe that another human being can take me to whoever is up there.” Then there were those like my husband who do believe in the tenets of Hinduism but prefer to visit temples to admire temple architecture and socialize with temple staff and visitors.  The recent agony and ecstasy of yet another saffron-attired guru only served to cement his cynicism over godmen.

“Every Godman gets into some trouble or other. And that’s why I’d rather not trust anyone wearing orange!” he claimed. He had just found scientific evidence to prove his theory that most swamijis (other than the one that his parents owed loyalty to, of course) would rather choose frequent flier miles on Earth over a gnarly one-way trek on foot to the gates of Heaven.

Hours after the news broke, my son and daughter  (who pray to their favorite elephant-headed Ganesha twice a year at the end of their respective semesters) chimed in with profound theories constructed on years of study and contemplation.

“Mom, and this is why I say what I say,” my newly minted 16-year-old son turned philosopher observed. “I don’t trust guys who say they’re vehicles to god.”  My son’s current god is Vladimir Nabokov whose book, Lolita, has transported him, unfortunately, to bad karmic places where good boys don’t go.

My daughter’s reaction to the Swami files was tepid because, when you’re turning twenty in a few weeks, you know everything about life and nothing, absolutely nothing, has the power to shock anymore. “Cool!” she said perfunctorily and then proceeded to tell me why composer A. R. Rahman and tuft-sporting singer Hariharan were her gods of choice, at least for now.

I wonder if my husband and my kids are wiser for their skepticism. I don’t have a spiritual guru of my own but if someone introduces me to theirs, I’ve been happy to meet them, listen to their lectures and find out what they have to say. I’m always in awe of people who have the power to mesmerize a million others and, in the process, feed the poor, build hospitals, raise money for disaster relief and, in little ways, make the world a better place.  From what I can see, Swami Nithyananda has, through his many centers, conducted eye-camps, medical camps, staved off the hunger of many poor people and educated countless children who, otherwise, may not have seen the inside of a school. And that’s why, whenever I see another saffron-robed Indian Godman fall from his gold-plated perch, my heart goes out to him and to all the million disciples scattered around the world. The devotees must feel betrayed; a part of them must hate to come to terms with that worm of doubt now crawling through their hearts.

One of my friends is a follower of the fallen Swami Nithyananda. A relative of mine is also a follower, one who wears a Nithyananda bangle to show her allegiance to him. She is still a staunch supporter of her guru and believes, of course, that the tape making the rounds is the work of some scheming conman whose technical expertise is in splicing images on video. I’m sorry to see these hapless devotees suffer the ignominy of wagging tongues and tagging twitterers. The Internet has turned into a loud, garish lounge for gossip: scandal today is feasted upon, judged, and archived for instant recall.

On another, lighter note, however, when I watched the video of Nithyananda, several questions kept burrowing into me. The man sported a Calvin Klein-lookalike underwear instead of a meager, tattered loincloth. He was lounging in bed watching television. Do modern Swamijis watch television? And why do they need pedestal fans? Do they feel heat? Weren’t they beyond day-to-day cares? Didn’t they live the life of mendicants, eating thin porridge, sleeping on cold stone floors, sporting slippers made of wood, fanning themselves with fans made of coconut fibre? Instead the holy man in this video had a pedestal fan, a vast bed with a headboard doubling up as a shelf on which a number of things were kept within reach, an air purifier (I found out later that the lying camera was attached to it), creams, medications and what have you. And you must listen to his take on celibacy here. If this man had really given up the worldly life, the first thing to go should have been fancy underwear, don’t you think? 

Recalling those Brooke Shields advertisements of the eighties, what came between him and his Calvin Klein should, really, have been “nothing.” Instead, what purportedly came–pun never ever intended, my faithful readers–between him and his Calvin was a shapely woman named Ranjitha. No wonder my female friends are breathless as events unfold in a scandal involving the next famous Indian man of god. Little wonder they’re screaming in anticipation: “Yes! Oh Yes! We want more!”