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Mig Alley

North Korea – China border

March 1952

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You are probably wondering why the story has suddenly moved to the Korean peninsula.

Listen, this blog is mine and I can take the story anywhere I please, capisce? Just bear with me and you’ll see the connection at some point in the future.

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When the Korean War began in 1950, the North Koreans didn’t have an air force worth its name. Their bosom pals, the Chinese, did but they could not have done much to help since they themselves had a pitiful air force consisting of hand-me-down Yak1s, Mig-2s&3s and assorted other World War II planes that the Soviets had been about to mothball.

Besides, China was itself a paraplegic in 1950, decimated and sucked dry by decades of brutal Japanese occupation.

As to the other communist nation that could have helped, Stalin’s Russia, it was still reeling from the devastation of the Second World War and just beginning to gather its shit together, ill-prepared to provide the North Koreans with any significant support.

North Korea was wide open.

Those days, victory depended solely on air power and America had overwhelming superiority there. Could America have moved in and delivered the coup de grace, bombed Kim Il Sung’s communist dictatorship back to stone age, united Korea into one vibrant democracy that is today’s South Korea and built a permanent presence right at the communists’ doorstep? Did it overestimate the USSR/China’s military capability at that moment? Did America chicken out? I think that it did.

America had no reason to be so apprehensive about a Soviet counter strike.

Yes, a Nazi son-of-a-bitch theoretical physicist named Klaus Fuchs, had recently been saved from the Nuremberg noose and pampered by the US. Yes, he had been put to work on the atom bomb in the Manhattan Project and yes, he had defected and shown the Russians how to build an atom bomb and they had tested their first device in 1949.

But the Soviets were yet to build a reliable nuclear inventory. My bet is that uniting the two Koreas would have been a cakewalk for America if they hadn’t chickened.

The 500BC Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu, has written that it is necessary to have an intelligence apparatus that has the means to assess the capability of the enemy. Israel’s Mossad and Aman have proved that. America’s intelligence agencies failed to accurately gauge the Soviet/Chinese preparedness and therefore we now have to live with two nations, North and South Korea, both nuclear-armed in an antsy truce, divided by a deadly DMZ on the 38th parallel.

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There is one country that profited hugely from the Second World War – The United States of America.

For America the Second World War turned out to be a boon which saw unparalleled economic prosperity, of the kind that is especially reserved for nations that fight wars in other lands far from their own.

Let’s get a sense of how the America that we know today became the America that we know today……

Before Pearl Harbour, the US was a peacenik nation, happy not to interfere in the conflicts of others, reasonably secure from cross-border invasions by two great oceans on either side and two friendly nations, Canada and Mexico, to the north and south.

Pearl Harbour changed everything. In the words of Franklin Roosevelt, it “awoke a sleeping giant”.

Between 1941 and 1945 the US government signed $175 billion (USD 4 trillion today) worth of prime defence contracts, 25% of which went to just seven companies – Boeing, Lockheed, North American, Grumman, GM, Ford and Chrysler. Between them, they provided the flying machines, the tanks, artillery, jeeps, trucks and armoured vehicles that were required for the war.

American industry provided almost two-thirds of all the Allied military equipment produced during the war: 297,000 aircraft, 193,000 artillery pieces, 86,000 tanks and 2,000,000 armoured personnel carriers and trucks. 

In four years, American industrial production, already the world’s largest, doubled in size.

Numerous large American corporations, that were making cars and trucks, home appliances, toys and other products for peacetime use, switched and transitioned swiftly to wartime production. Ford Motor Company began producing B24 Liberators, 18200 of which were built in the period 1940-1944. In addition to aircraft, Ford plants built 277,896 vehicles (tanks, armored cars and GPW (General Purpose Willys – reconnaissance vehicles known as Willys Jeeps). Chrysler’s wartime production included trucks, tanks, aircraft parts, guns, ammunition, rockets and bombs. GM’s Chevy specialized in all kinds of trucks, aircraft engines and artillery shells. Buick produced the M18 Hellcat tank destroyers and supplied radial engines for Boeing B-17s and B-24s, Douglas C-47s and C-54s. Alcoa, the aluminum giant, switched to airplane fuselages. The Lionel Toy Train Co. began making aircraft parts. Mattatuck, a nail manufacturer, switched to producing machine gun magazines and ammo.

Then there were large shipyards and steel companies such as Bethlehem Steel, Newport Shipyard, Norfolk Dry Dock and New York Naval Shipyard who churned out battleships and submarines by the dozen. By January 1945, the US Navy had 61,045 ocean-going vessels including 23 battleships, over 100 aircraft carriers, 59 cruisers, 425 destroyers, 400 destroyer-escorts, 237 submarines and 54,000 landing craft and assault ships. Plus 37,000 planes.

All of these armaments were built at American factories that were never touched by aerial bombardment.

Before the Second World War, America was a nation ravaged by depression, with a 40% rate of unemployment. By 1950, 5 years after the war, that America was unrecognizable. Those same factories kept on humming with activity, quickly switching back to peacetime production of consumer goods and reconstruction materials.

Every European nation needed household appliances, cars, washing machines, radios, medicine, movies, food, concrete, cement, steel and everything else. Europe’s industrial sector had been flattened and there was a virtual monopoly named America, ready to sell. The Europeans stood in a queue, hungry to rebuild.

America’s employment and household incomes skyrocketted. Every home now had a car, a TV and a front lawn and every man, a job.

America had just discovered that it loved making war.

America had also realized that war was good business. The $175 billion had paid off.

And that is how, in the initial stages of the Korean War, American P51 Mustangs, F80s and F86 Sabre jets (and later on, F100s and F104s) came to own the skies over North Korea.

The term ‘Shock and awe’ would be an understatement. Bridges, railway sidings, workshops, army barracks, civilian settlements, large built-up areas…nothing was spared. North Korean ground forces were clobbered, bombed and strafed mercilessly. It was a turkey shoot.

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Then, suddenly the tide turned. Strange things began happening. Pilots in the F86s started engaging a new kind of hostile jet fighters that looked a lot like their own F86 Sabres, but were heavier armed and could climb faster. They would appear out of nowhere in tight boxes of four that came to be known as a ‘swarm’. Frequently a swarm would zoom right through, above and below a formation of F86s, leaving the Americans gaping, like ‘What the…&???? What were those?’

At first, some imagined them to be rogue American pilots in aircraft that had either been stolen or reverse engineered from the F86s. Given that the F86 Sabre was just a year into service then, the appearance of enemy hardware that strongly resembled and even outperformed F86s, was disquieting to the Americans.

Those “freaky fighters” were the newly developed Soviet Mig-15. In all 18000 were built. NATO gave the fighter the code name “Fagot”, a sobriquet that was meant to be a denigration that soon looked undeserved.

Quickly the American supremacy over the North Korean skies disappeared. The Americans were now fighting the North Koreans as equals. Only, these were not North Koreans actually. They were Soviet and a handful of Chinese pilots in Mig-15 jet fighters that had been loaned by the Soviets to the Chinese.

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As per the mandates of the farce that we all now know as the UN, it was important to maintain the illusion that the North and the South Koreans were fighting each other and not the Soviets & the Chinese, against the US & UK. These were nuclear powers at a time when the rules of nuclear engagement had not even begun to be written. Nuclear holocaust was just a trigger-happy pinkie away. Neither side wanted to risk expanding the war beyond the Korean peninsula.

The Mig-15s and the F86s engaged in dogfights and skirmishes mainly along a stretch of the border between North Korea and China where the Yalu River empties out into the Yellow Sea. The Migs launched from Antung Air Field, close to the border on the Chinese side and the Americans, from Kimpo and Suwon, 350kms away, in South Korea. 

The stretch of the border, where the two sides slugged it out 30000 feet above the ground, came to be known among the US pilots as Mig Alley. (Check out the box shown in the top of this piece).

Since the Americans had a greater distance to cover, they came to the party, equipped with drop-tanks and were therefore heavier and slower, a distinct disadvantage, especially when trying to maneuver or climb out of a tight situation. On the plus side, the American pilots were better trained and the F86 Sabres were more user-friendly and comfy, with heated cockpits that was spacious and a large bubble canopy that afforded the pilot a panoramic view.

But by far the greatest advantage that the Americans had was the invention of the G-suit, a sterling example of American ingenuity. The G-suit was a set of inflatable bladders that connected with a compressed air outlet inside the cockpit. Let me explain…..

G-forces bear upon a human body in motion, during sudden accelerations or decelerations or vector changes (ie: change in direction of motion). The more abrupt the change, the more severe is the effect on the human body. You may have noticed how your body gets shoved forward when you are driving and have to brake suddenly. Or how you feel the securing straps bite into your chest when you are on a monster roller coaster that has begun its downward plunge. In both cases, the force that impacts your body is known as the G-Force.

The internationally accepted unit of acceleration caused by gravity is “1G”. In metric units, it is equivalent to the weight of 9.81 Newtons of force per one kilogram of mass.

Imagine you are a F86-Sabre pilot coming out of a dive to get away from a Mig tailing you. You are pulling more than 6-7Gs. At that vector change, blood fails to reach your brain and your eyes, preferring to remain around your ankles. You develop tunnel vision and black out within minutes. Not a good situation to be in when the ground is rushing up at you at twice the speed of sound.

A fighter pilot’s G-suit bladders inflate and squeeze tight against the lower body parts, preventing blood from going down, allowing it to circulate to the brain. The Mig pilots didn’t have G-suits and many Migs were lost in dives or tight maneuvers, without a single shot being fired. To the Sabre pilots, this was a huge advantage.

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The most severe recorded case of G-force death was that of Princess Diana when her limo slammed into a Paris tunnel entrance at 70 mph. Without her seatbelt on, her body experienced a sudden deceleration, relative to her heart, that had the force of 70Gs. If we assume she weighed around 80kgs, that would have been a force of nearly one metric tonne. In that instant it tore her pulmonary artery, a condition that was impossible to survive. Had she worn her seat belt, the deceleration would be around 30Gs and she might have had broken ribs but would most likely have survived.

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A Mig-Sabre party in Mig Alley usually lasted only 20-30 minutes max. But that half-hour looked like the Battle of Britain, the famous 1941 air battle for Britain’s skies where hundreds of British Spitfires and Mosquitos buzzed around hundreds of German Messershmitts and Stukas inside a restricted airspace of maybe one or two city blocks, often colliding with each other and breaking apart in mid-air.

In the Korean skies, at one point in the spring of 1951, a dogfight recorded 50 Mig-15s, 48 B-29s and 54 F86s at the same time, zipping around inside an airspace that resembled a box with sides just 10kms long.

Mig Alley saw the dawn of a new kind of air warfare – aerial dogfights with jets zipping around at 600mph. Soon pilots on both sides realized that they needed far swifter reflexes in order to come out of a dogfight unscathed.

Dogfights create aces and within weeks of the arrival of the Mig15s and the start of the aerial skirmishes, Mig Alley began producing aces among the American pilots.

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Aces were being born on the Chinese/Soviet side as well. A wiry young 23-year old Chinese, the eldest of three children of a carpenter from Anshan in the far eastern province of Liaoning, became the first Chinese ace of the Korean War.

That Chinese ace was Flight Lt. Zhao Baotong, Zao Bao to his mates in the 4-aircraft Mig-15 schwarm that he lead.

In case you are still wondering what all this has to do with Babayev, his Tu-95 and his bombing run, take it easy, Part-4 is coming soon.

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A street like this never sleeps. The bars hum till three in the morning and after that it is the turn of the all-night cafés. They are waiting for the drunks and the late revellers who will stagger in for a coffee, a burger or a shish taouk.

Around 3am, those cafés switch the food below the counters with stuff that was put away because it had gone stale. Even the shish taouk is taken off and replaced with an older, skinnier one that had been tucked away inside a mammoth walk-in fridge.

All the stale food is commonly known around this part of town as the 3 o’clock junk. A drunk wolfing down a shish taouk that was spinning on it’s stand two days back and has just started to smell, won’t know the difference anyway.

Lesson-1 : Post-3am, never eat anything in a café on The Main, unless you want to get into an intimate relationship with a lady named Salmonella.

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Every metropolis has one street like this one, deep in its downtown core. If you happen to be flying in low, you will recognize it very easily. It is invariably the brightest string of lights. It isn’t the biggest street in Montreal, mind you. That honor would go to Sherbrooke Street or Sainte Catherine Street. But it is the liveliest, no question about it.

Welcome to Blvd St. Laurent in downtown Montreal – pronounced ‘Boolvah Sang Lawrang’ in French-speaking Quebec.

You needn’t bother with the pronunciation – no one calls it Blvd St. Laurent anyway. A street like this one will always have a more identifiable moniker, like ‘The Strip’ in Las Vegas. Everybody calls Bengaluru’s MG Road ‘Main Street’ and Kolkata’s Mother Teresa Sarani is unrecognizable because you and I know it as ‘Park Street’.

Likewise, Blvd St. Laurent is known to Montrealers as The Main and it is a boolvah. The French Quebecois fuck with your mind constantly. They put consonants at the end of words and mandate you not to pronounce them.

The only redeeming feature about the Quebecois is their women – the Quebecois girls that The Main is always teeming with. Audaciously forward and precocious, they can lead you right up to the edge until all that remains is your choice – whether to end the evening in her bed or just turn around and go home. I have lost track of the number of times when I ……. just turned around and went home.

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Everything is available on this stretch of glitter – for a price. Whether you’re looking for a gun or a gal, some weed or ecstasy, a haircut or a hamburger or sex in the guise of a full-body massage, this length of asphalt has all these and more.

Every waiter and bartender along this street is a drug trafficker if you need to get high. And a pimp, in case you are horny. These gents have none of the furtive looks and the whispered directions to the alley out back, spoken in a hiss through the corner of the mouth. You come to expect that in my country of birth, India.

Not here. This is the west. Here, everything is hanging out there in the open. You want to fuck, do some coke or buy some weed – you do all these things proudly. Folks here have eyelids that are unbattable. The police precinct that covers this street is reported to be ‘on the pad’. You are better protected from a mugger or purse-snatcher on this street than anywhere else in the city.

The Main is a hybrid, between Kolkata’s Park Street and Free School Street. Except for the graffiti and the murals. Nothing in Kolkata matches the wall art you find on The Main. The talent is simply awesome, at once gaudy and then beautiful. Business owners with building walls facing out, gladly pay for the scaffolding and the paint and let amateur painters go to town on them.

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At the corner of The Main and Des Pins, was a Lebanese shish touk joint called Falafel, run by an Armenian named Ben, where I manned the counter for a whole year back in 2002. I said ‘was’ because I don’t see it there anymore. Restaurants have a short life span on The Main.

Falafel was like a half-way house for new immigrants with degrees who hadn’t yet found a position in their field of work and who – like me – had run out of cash. You slogged a bruising 8-hour shift, rubbing shoulders with more PhDs and medical doctors from all over the third world than you would find even in Johns Hopkins.

No, that is an exaggeration but there was more enlightened conversation and wit in there at Falafel than the College Street Coffee House in Kolkata.

Ben himself had been a respected metallurgist in Yerevan before he came to Canada and started out as a dishwasher in Falafel while he looked around for a job. Then 9/11 happened and the slump hit Montreal hard, this city being the Canadian hub of the aerospace industry. Jobs vanished overnight and Ben quickly realized he was going to be there at Falafel for a long while.

The slump however proved to be a blessing for Ben. The owner of Falafel, an old Tunisian guy, had made some risky investments in the stock market that left him deeply in debt, following the stock market crash that followed 9/11. Falafel went into receivership and Ben took out a bank loan, bought the owner out for a song and took over the joint.

The other day I was out on a jaunt in this part of town, taking photos of the murals that cover every inch of every building wall on The Main and gathering masala for this blog post. I wanted to breathe the air before I wrote. To my dismay I found that the joint where Falafel stood had been boarded up, sold to a high-end eyeware retail outlet called Harry Toulch. Instantly I felt a pang of nostalgia.

I remembered the last time I was there, in 2014.

I had ordered a shish taouk and was sipping a coffee, staring at the crowd milling at the counter, one that I had manned for a year once. Ben came and sat with me for a while sharing the usual gossip about what the rest of guys were up to, who had got a job in his field and where, that sort of thing. Ben soon had to zip back behind the counter.

That’s when I spotted a disheveled guy with a backpack at the entrance. He was leaning against the handrail and scoping the joint with furtive eyes. I knew him well – that was Nick, the fence. He was thinner and paler than the last time I had seen him, more than a decade back when I was employed there.

Nick’s eyes fell on me and he slouched over, ‘Hey man, where you bin?’ He looked me over with watery eyes that danced around incessantly, the mark of a regular drug user. You had to watch it with Nick.

“Need a Mac, an SLR, man? I got a Nikon1000, brand noo. How about an Iphone?” He unzipped his backpack halfway and I was looking at a pile of cellphones, laptops and cameras in there. For guys like Nick, there is only one way things usually go – in a back alley with knife in the gut.

I shook my head and tried out my street tone,” Ah doan have no dough, Nick. Maybe some other tam?”

“Suit yoreself. dude, but I could give you a great deal. Pick any SLR for twennie. Here, take this Iphone, 64 gigs, brand noo, man. Only thuree dahlars.” He quickly realized I wasn’t buying and he zipped up and went back to standing by the doorway, so he could make a quick exit in case a cop happened by. Nick was the son of a low-level associate in the Rizutto outfight and therefore no one messed with him. Even Ben had better sense than to ask him not to loiter at the entrance.

Falafel was a part of my life in 2002 but during my 2014 visit it felt like another universe, even more difficult it is now after more than two decades, to imagine I had actually spent eight hours a day there. For a brief moment of one year, I was washing dishes, manning counters, mopping the floor, cleaning toilets and I was being cursed at viciously by junkies, prostitutes, teenage drug addicts, fences and Mafioso.

No, let me make a correction there. The mafioso were well mannered and polite and they invariably asked for the bill even though I was under strict instructions not to charge them and they already knew that.

For a year I was in the middle of the madness known as The Main. Every moment of that one year, I was like ‘is this really happening to me?

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There were some fleeting moments too, that are etched in my heart – moments when I crossed paths with living, breathing, vulnerable folks during that graveyard shift. One such moment that I decided to chronicle is in the blog post titled Turning the corner. I hope you will enjoy reading it.

The other lovely moments were those murals I mentioned earlier, if you have been paying attention. I have appended below some photos of the murals of the Main.

In the south, The Main ends up at Chinatown, a most interesting place that I have reserved for another blog piece when I have the time.

In the north, The Main reaches into Little Italy, an area that I am not very familiar with, even though I have been there a few times and found that it could be quite inviting, if you happen to dig Italian food.

Otherwise, Little Italy seems too wrapped up in itself and it’s own.

Besides, I never did develop an affinity for Italians – after the Almighty Lord stopped making any more Lorens, Cardinales and Lollobrigidas.

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The murals of The Main

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When I was in engineering school in Chennai, an older cousin dropped in from Kolkata, her ultimate destination – Sathya Sai Baba’s Ashram at Puttaparthi, a small town that was a 9-hour bus ride to the west.

My cousin, Runadidi, was to Sathya Sai Baba, what rednecks are to Donald Trump – sold, lock stock and barrel on him. Runadi insisted that I accompany her and because my college was on a one-week spring break and also since I wanted to experience the sight and sounds of a weirdo god-man first hand, I tagged along.

Back in the early 1970s, Puttaparthi was about as remote as Novaya Zemlya is, to a Muscovite. Folks visited Puttaparthi only when they had issues that they could no longer deal with – mainly health related issues that they had given up trying to fix medically and were at their wits’ end. Tales of the Sathya Sai Baba miraculously curing folks of life threatening ailments just by the wave of a hand, some holy ash, a cheap trinket that he magically materialized out of thin air and crappy mumbo-jumbo, these were legion in those days.

Little is known about Sathya Sai Baba’s past, except for the hagiography -mostly fable, that turned him into a superhero – that has sprung up around him over the decades. Wikipedia says…

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“As a child, he was unusually intelligent and charitable, though not necessarily academically inclined, as his interests were of a more spiritual nature. He was uncommonly talented in devotional music, dance and drama. From a young age, he was alleged to have been capable of materializing objects such as food and sweets, rings and watches, out of thin air.”

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When we visited Puttaparthi, it was little more than a village, albeit a neat, well-organized village. The internet tells me that today Puttaparthi boasts a shiny planetarium and a sprawling ‘super-speciality’ hospital.

I saw the pics of the hospital on google images – it looks like a multi-tiered wedding cake. The hospital treats patients for free, so who are we to complain. Besides that, there is a college, a music school and immaculate colorful schools and playgrounds, everything free and all financed by the Sai Baba Organization.

Luxury apartment buildings have sprung up on land that was covered with ramshackle mud huts just a few decades prior. A state of the art airport caters to wealthier devotees who fly in on their business jets.

Today, 10 to 50 million people worship Sathya Sai Baba as God incarnate. They stream into Puttaparthi from six continents, finding lodgings in one of the ashram’s myriads of guesthouses and hostels – some really snazzy, with jacuzzis and air-conditioning. Those are smart infrastructural investments made by the Sathya Sai Organization, that ensure a steady inflow of hard currency donations, running into millions.

The largest single donation is reported to be $20 million, from the founder of Hard Rock Café. I guess even billionaires can be schmucks.

In 1975, the Sathya Sai Organization’s cash reserves were $5 billion.

Sathya Sai Baba is raising the daisies but his brainchild, the Sathya Sai Organisation, is a multi-billion dollar financial juggernaut that has 1500 branches all over the world and millions of followers, many of them whole families who have migrated from the west, with kids in tow, after cashing in every last nickel and dime they owned and bringing it with them.

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While “His Holiness” was alive, some of his followers (usually young boys) suddenly found themselves bestowed with extra attention from the guru. You know where this leading, right? Yeah, Sathya Sai Baba had a sinister secret, known only to his close associates – a wholly human craving for the bodies of pre-teen boys. The evidence is strong that Sai Baba frequently used his power to get inside their pants, fondling young penises and rendering to them what came to be his signature obsession – divine blow jobs.

I hasten to add that these are claims made by ex-devotees that have never been proven. Neither has His Holiness ever been charged with any sexual wrongdoing. But the body of testimony is so vast and instances in contemporary history of powerful godmen having their way with innocent followers are so many, I am convinced there was not just some smoke but fire too.

The reason why Sai Baba was never investigated, let along charged is quite clearly his political connections.  Sathya Sai Baba was hobnobbing with senior politicians – including some prime ministers – all his life. At the local level, the Sai Baba Organization has always had most of the top officials of the local state and district bureaucracy in it’s deep pockets. The SSO is their ticket to rich lifestyles that their meagre government salaries could never afford.

And then of course there is all that charity – hospitals, schools, colleges, playgrounds, libraries, bore-wells for drinking water, cisterns for water storage, public toilets – Sathya Sai Baba was untouchable, the populace loved him and anyone who attempted to even think of arresting such a guy would be signing his death warrant.

But I digress…..

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Runadi and I rested ourselves in a guesthouse upon arrival that evening and at sunrise the next morning, we presented ourselves at the vast Prasanthi Nilayam (abode of peace) mandir and lecture hall that the brochure said could easily seat 15000. This is where the Holy Swami would deliver another one of his divine homilies.

We spent an hour waiting in a line and another hour sitting cross-legged amid thousands of other worshipers on the marble floor of the terrace outside. The hall was already packed and we would have to watch him from the terrace. Through the large doors, we could see as many foreigners in the hall, as there were Indians. Half of all the staff were white men and women, walking around barefoot, in simple white sarees and kurta-pyjamas. Dozens of chandeliers hung from the ceiling, which was garishly decorated with gold, pink and yellow.

An aisle bisected the hall, cutting right through to the stage and that’s when I noticed that it was gender segregated, with women to the right and men to the left. Runadi and I were at the door, just outside the hall, where the rule apparently didn’t apply. Behind the stage, at the far end, I noticed a door but it was only in the late 1990s that I began reading about what went on behind that door. It was His Holiness’s private ‘sexual healing’ room, probably the place where he molested those young boys.

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Runadi and I were beginning to get bored when an electric charge ran through the crowd. Immediately necks craned to catch a glimpse of the guru.

Sathya Sai Baba appeared through the door of the back room – a stocky guy with a broad smile and that ridiculous Jimi Hendrix afro cut and his customary floor-length ochre robe. He waved as he walked down the aisle, pausing first on the women’s side and then on the men’s side and back again, taking turns, readily accepting what looked like slips of paper (probably pleas and petitions) that were being feverishly stuffed into his hands which he passed on to an aide following him.

I turned to glance at Runadi and she was gone, her eyes glazed over, chest heaving as if she was short of breath, pretty face glistening with sweat.

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The instant he began to speak, I felt like throwing up. He spoke in English. He was no schmuck – most of the suckers gathered there were white-skinned.

His Holiness, Sathya Sai Baba’s voice had a gravelly texture, his south Indian  accent laughably cringe-worthy. “Gaaad louse you. He louse yeevarybaaddy,” he proclaimed, to ecstatic cheers. The blondes in the audience didn’t care if they understood a word or they didn’t.

The lecture itself was a simple one. Aside from stressing on strict vegetarianism, Sai Baba didn’t appear to subscribe to any specific ideology. His words seemed flowery and vague, combining the symbolism of Hindu mythology with a dash of the Buddhist belief about all that transcending-worldly-desire crap. He added to that a table spoonful of charity that the Abrahamic faiths espouse and he had a winning brew.

Most of all, the guy sounded so corny. Here are some of his quotes that I’m definite he spouted that day….

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God is the Seed, The Universe is the Tree, Impulses and passions are the branches, Intelligence is the flower, Pure Consciousness is the fruit, Love is the sweetness in the fruit. 

Man’s many desires are like the small metal coins he carries about in his pocket. The more he has the more they weight him down. 

Love all. Serve all. Help ever. Hurt never. 

Every experience is a lesson. Every loss is a gain. 

Without God, life is like a school without a teacher. It is a wire with no current passing through it; it is a body with no soul.

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No kidding. That is supposed to be profound? Frankly, His Holiness needed a better quote writer.

In fact, a brochure we had been handed confirmed my impressions of the lack of an ideology. It stated that, ‘there is no new path that His Holiness is preaching, no new order that He has created. There is no new religion that He has come to add or a particular philosophy that He recommends. His message is unique and simple – that of love and compassion’. (Love – in very broad terms, I presume).

I admit that I found the vagueness of his message rather refreshing. His chatty tone seemed like he didn’t aspire to be anything but being like just one of us, warts and all. Judging by the prosperity that the Sathya Sai Organization has seen, that style has obviously worked. Today, followers of the Bhagwan are the most fanatical anywhere. They see his hidden hand in everything that happens on earth.

Behind me, a woman wailed and I turned – she was white, maybe around 30. Her eyes had a maniacal shine and her whole torso rocked back and forth ecstatically. Spittle dribbled from the corner of her lips. She was pretty but she looked as if she had stopped taking care of her physical appearance. Man, the woman really was out of it.

Disgusted, I tuned out and waited gamely by Runadi’s side while she stared at the charlatan, mesmerized. She didn’t look much different from that woman, except for the rocking and the spittle dribble part. Ugh, I couldn’t wait to be some place else.

Such zombie-like followers in that ashram were in plenty that day. Stories of brainwashed believers of Sathya Sai Baba are legion if you care to check the internet – an American schmuck named Leland says that His Holiness came to him in the guise of a Tijuana (Mexico) traffic cop and then later on as a Japanese airline stewardess. An Argentinian woman gave up her Buenos Aires apartment and her medical practice after ‘Baba’ summoned her in her dreams. A wheelchair-bound cancer patient from Amsterdam – abandoned by her husband and living with friends who were Sai Baba devotees – saw a vision of the guru beckoning her. One day her friends surprised her with a ticket to India and she took off and remained in Puttaparthi till she ultimately succumbed to her illness.

They say she died with a smile on her face.

Ultimately they all (barring a few hundred disgruntled, sexually molested ex-devotees) got what they were looking for. Maybe I am the sucker here, but if I wanted a blow job, a pot-bellied guy in an afro-cut and an atrocious accent is the last person on earth I’d go to.

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I don’t remember exactly how long the lecture went but when I came to, Runadi was shaking me. Our muscles creaking, we rose from the cramped cross-legged position by the door. Folks were crowding around the main aisle that led down from the podium, watching rapt, as His Holiness slowly made his way toward the exit. Runadi and I just happened to be standing right by it. Great!

Then as the Sathya Sai Baba neared us, something amazing happened.  He came to a halt right in front of Runadi and waved his arm around to signal to everyone to pipe down. He brought his gaze down and gestured toward Runadi’s tummy and told her, “Don’t worry, it’ll all go away in a few weeks and you will feel like new once again….”

Funny, even I found the voice strangely clear and reassuring, like he knew what he was talking about. The words were carefully vague – you could look at anyone who obviously looked stressed out and say those words, but Runadi was clearly moved. There she stood, shaking, tears streaming down her face. I didn’t know in what context he was saying she would be fine. Fine from what?

I didn’t know anything was wrong with Runadi, but that’s because I came to know of it only later that evening –

Runadi, though just 27 then, had very severe ulcers that had all but eaten away at her innards, thanks to years of eating very spicy food laced with hot chillies. I mean, she couldn’t eat if you didn’t put a bowl filled with those lethal red chillies right next to her thali. She said she had given it up and sought treatment but the damage to her stomach wall had been too extensive. This trip was a desperate last ditch effort to try and seek help from the supernatural.

A month after that visit to Puttaparthi, I got a postcard from Runadi and in it she was ecstatic. After nearly a decade of pain and suffering and blood oozing out of her bowels, her tests now showed perfectly healthy tissue, instead of bleeding ulcers. Her doc was amazed that recovery had been so complete and swift.

I am a man of science and I dismiss anything that cannot be explained by science. Runadi’s recovery was nothing short of a miracle and I am convinced that Sathya Sai Baba had something to do with it, though I have no idea how.

So, there you go – child molester to some and savior to others. Take your pick. But if he could heel just by a glance, isn’t building a superspeciality hospital an oxymoron?

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Runadi’s ulcers had undergone what medical science calls remission, a phenomenon that is described as the spontaneous disappearance of the symptoms of an ailment that is not fully understood by medical science. Through history, medically documented cases of remission are legion. Cancers have been known to have set in and then mysteriously disappear.

The first known cases of remission were recorded by the disciples of a certain carpenter named Jesus H. Christ. Of course, in Greek and Hindu mythology almost nothing can be explained through science. Gods and Goddesses routinely went a step further than just making ailments disappear – they made their surrogates immortal. But I am done with all that nonsensical mumbo jumbo.

Today, there is even a branch of science known as neurotheology (a.k.a spiritual neuroscience) – the study into the possibility of a neurological basis for not only the role of spirituality in health, but any subjective experience that cannot be explained by objective scientific observation afforded by pure science. It says that if a disease afflicted person believes strongly enough that he’ll get better, he actually will.

In Runadi’s case, I am certain that the chance meeting she had with Sathya Sai Baba convinced her that he had appeared before her for a purpose and that she could heal and that was entirely sufficient to completely cure her.

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I am thinking of doing a PhD in neurotheology. That way I can convert a date with Scarlett Johanssen from being a merely subjective fantasy to an objective negligée clad reality.