By JAKE HALPERN
Published: May 25, 2013
The New York Times.
THERE
are entourages — and then there is the retinue of Mata Amritanandamayi, a
59-year-old Indian guru known simply as Amma, or “mother.” On Friday, she began
a two-month North American tour during which she will be accompanied by 275
volunteers. They plan to ride in four buses across the continent from Bellevue,
Wash., to Marlborough, Mass., visiting 11 cities, including New York. And at
each stop along the way, Amma will sit on stage for 15 hours at a stretch,
greeting her thousands of devotees.
Amma
is best known for literally embracing the masses; she has hugged millions of
people around the world, a feat that has earned her the nickname “the hugging
saint.” Her status as a spiritual therapist has attracted a large following in
the United States. In India, however, what Amma
offers is far more significant and complex. She has built a vast organization
that is the envy of both India’s public and private sectors. As Oommen Chandy,
the chief minister of the state of Kerala, told me: “From nothing, she has
built an empire.”
I
first heard about Amma roughly a year ago, when I was living in India teaching
journalism as a Fulbright scholar. People kept telling me about a former
fishing village in Kerala, in southern India, that was now a utopia in the
jungle. Visitors talked about a mega-ashram, complete with a modern university
and free health care, and described it as a gleaming cityscape where foreigners
in pristine white uniforms swept the streets and scrubbed bird droppings off
park benches. The entire community supposedly worshiped a middle-aged woman
whose devotees came by the thousands, hailing her as a demigod.
They
said she performed miracles, diverting storms and turning water into pudding.
They said she’d built a place where everything, from light switches to
recycling plants, worked as it was meant to — and, in India, this was perhaps
the greatest miracle of all.
Lured
by these tales, I decided to visit this place, called
Amritapuri, to see for myself. To get there, I rode in a taxi through the
backwaters of Kerala, past villages where bare-chested men fished from dugout
canoes, a landscape that, unlike much of India, has changed little in
centuries. When I saw high-rise buildings jutting above the canopy of palm
trees, it was clear we were getting close. Traditionally, ashrams are quiet and
secluded — much like monasteries — but Amma’s ashram was so vast and built up
that it resembled a small metropolis.
After
exiting the taxi at the main gate — there are no cars within the ashram itself
— I set out on a series of footpaths that wound through a 100-acre campus
containing the buildings of Amrita University (also founded
by Amma) as well as dormitories, temples, restaurants and shops. I eventually
reached a great hall where people were gathered, waiting patiently to meet
Amma.
With
the sort of effort required to navigate a New York City subway car at rush
hour, I made my way through the crowd toward Amma, who was perched on a
cushioned chair on a stage. One by one, people dropped to their knees and let
her cradle them. In a span of roughly four minutes, she consoled a sobbing
woman, chatted with an aged man and conducted a wedding. One of Amma’s many
attendants, a volunteer who served as her press aide, helped me nudge, wedge
and high-step my way to a coveted spot of honor at Amma’s feet.
I
asked Amma how she maintained this pace. She smiled. Then she pinched my cheek
and began to tickle me — the way a mother might tease a troublesome toddler —
and said through an interpreter, “I am connected to the eternal energy source,
so I am not like a battery that gets used up.”
In
fact, Amma has energized an entire organization that often fills the vacuum
left by government. When a tsunami devastated parts of southern India in 2004,
it took the state government of Kerala five days merely to announce what it
would do by way of aid and relief. Amma, however, began a response within
hours, providing food and shelter to thousands of people; in the following
years, her organization says, it has built more than 6,000 houses.
How
Amma’s efforts are paid for remains something of a mystery. Her organization
raises about $20 million a year from sources worldwide, according to a
spokesman, but in India, the finances are not public. And the M.A. Center, her
United States organization, is registered as a church and thus doesn’t have to
disclose its finances the way secular tax-exempt groups do.
But
this doesn’t seem to have dissuaded would-be donors. In 2003, A.P.J. Abdul
Kalam, then the president of India, was so impressed with Amma’s charitable
work that he donated almost his entire annual salary to her organization. His
enthusiasm may stem from the simple fact that Amma appears to do what
politicians cannot. Mr. Chandy, the chief minister of Kerala, told me rather
dejectedly, “The government has so many limitations, but Amma gives an order
and next day the work will start.”
I
WOKE up after my first night in the ashram to Amma’s plump, smiling face
looming from a giant portrait above my bed. There was no escaping her gaze. Her
photographs were everywhere — offices, lobbies, hallways, dining rooms, even
elevators.
On
the way to the cafe for breakfast, I passed a printing operation and met a
bright-eyed worker who told me that his crew had just finished a production run
of Amma’s biography, in Russian. This authorized story of Amma’s life, which
has been translated into 31 languages, intertwines a tale of grinding Indian
poverty with the fantastical: She was born poor, into a low caste, but as a
child would give away whatever valuables the family had to the less fortunate,
which prompted her father to tie her to a tree and beat her. From an early age,
she hugged strangers. She eventually left home to live in the wild, where the
biography relates that she survived by eating whatever she could find, a diet
that included shards of glass and human feces.
By
the time she was a young woman, the biography continues, she was performing
miracles — kissing cobras, diverting rainstorms and feeding more than a
thousand people from a single, small pot.
Gurus
emerged thousands of years ago in India as learned explainers of the
Upanishads, philosophical teachings underpinning the Hindu religion.
“The
guru was someone to be awed,” says Karen Pechilis, an expert in female
gurus who teaches comparative religion at Drew University in Madison, N.J. “You
stand back, you keep your distance, and you are dazzled.” They generally
weren’t big on snuggling.
Amma
turned this notion on its head, Professor Pechilis says, by combining the role
of the spiritual guide with that of the mother who protects and comforts.
Amma’s
transformation from an eccentric girl into the mother guru started in the late
1970s. Word of her hugging spread, and she received a steady stream of
visitors, many of them Americans like Neal Rosner, a Chicago native, who would
take up residence. Mr. Rosner, who moved to India after graduating from high
school and still lives at Amritapuri, told me he was one of the first to donate
a significant amount — $10,000 from selling a rare coin collection — to improve
the ashram. Before long, it had a dormitory, a free medical clinic and a
vocational job-training center.
And
then Amma was crisscrossing the globe to promote her Hindu philosophy, which
espouses love, introspection and selflessness, as well as her many charities,
which now include hunger and disaster relief, free health care for the poor,
orphanages and recycling efforts.
Her
trips have become increasingly elaborate. In each city, she takes over a hotel
or a convention center, where she feeds and hugs thousands of well-wishers.
Events also occur at Amma’s satellite ashrams; she has eight in the United
States, including a 164-acre campus near San Ramon, Calif. The tours have
helped Amma expand her following and generate donations for her hospital and her
charities.
Over
breakfast in Amritapuri, I chatted with Dante Sawyer, an American who has lived
in the ashram for more than a decade and volunteers in the foreign visitors
office. As I sipped my cappuccino, perused the cafe’s pizza menu and
contemplated a swim in the ashram’s pool, I asked if these amenities weren’t a
bit indulgent for a spiritual place.
“If
this were a traditional ashram with just huts and rice gruel, there would not
be this many people, or they would come for a day and then get the hell out,”
he said. “Amma feels it would be a tragedy if people didn’t come here for their
vacation because they couldn’t get a pizza — so, O.K., we have pizza.”
ONE
day, Amma offered lunch to a gathering of several hundred devotees in an ornate
temple. A team of 20 women scooped rice and curry onto plates that they passed
from hand to hand — old-fashioned-fire-brigade style — until they reached Amma.
Then she personally handed the meals to the followers. One of those receiving a
plate was Maneesha Sudheer, a computer scientist at Amrita University.
Dr.
Sudheer gained some attention for developing a landslide-detection program that
impressed R. Chidambaram, the principal scientific adviser to the Indian
government. One of Mr. Chidambaram’s goals is to create a system to predict
Himalayan landslides, which cause hundreds of deaths and costly damages each
year. The technology seemed so promising that Mr. Chidambaram made a trip to
visit Amma at the ashram. He told me that Amma, who has only a fourth-grade
education, was “far more successful” than the Indian government in attracting
top-caliber scientific minds.
Dr.
Sudheer invited me to her lab at the university, reached by a short walk from
the temple. She showed me a gigantic landslide simulator that she had helped
design to test her wireless landslide sensors. Many of the labs looked like
ones you might see at M.I.T., save for the fact that Amma’s picture was
displayed more or less everywhere.
Amrita
University has 17,000 students, who pay tuition that is much higher than that
of state-run schools. Critics complain that the university caters mainly to the
wealthy, and to a great extent it does, but it’s hard to argue with the
school’s success. Its medical school is generally well regarded, and Amrita
also offers a dual-degree program in business with theState
University of New York at Buffalo.
“We
call Amma the best headhunter there is,” said Bipin Nair, who is a dean of
Amrita’s school of biotechnology and is leading an effort to create an
affordable insulin pump for diabetics. “Every year, when she comes back from a
trip to North America or Europe, she has a list of people who have expressed
their desire to be a part of the ashram.”
Born
and schooled in India, Mr. Nair did postdoctoral work at the University of
Tennessee at Memphis. He landed a job at a biotech company in Seattle and
bought a six-bedroom house, and yet he felt dissatisfied. He and his wife, Dr.
Geetha Kumar, met Amma during one of her American tours and decided to move to
the ashram in 2004.
Mr.
Nair does not take a salary, working only for room and board. “What we live in
now is probably smaller than most bathrooms in the U.S.,” he told me, but
added: “I don’t have to do anything. I am not paying a mortgage. I am not
cooking, cleaning or shopping — everything is taken care of — all I need to do
here is focus on my work.”
People
who work without pay keep costs down at the ashram, a selling point that
entices donors. “When someone gives one dollar to Amma,” one ashram spokesman
told me, “it is really worth 100 times more than that, because if you give that
same money to another institution, they have to pay the administrative costs.”
Benefactors have included people like Jeff Robinov, the president of the Warner
Bros. Pictures Group.
Amma’s
fund-raising success, especially within India, also hinges on the fact that
people “trust her more than the government,” which is so mired in red tape as
to be ineffectual, says John Kattakayam, a sociology professor at the
University of Kerala, who studies the role of women in Indian society. Amma
inspires this trust, he said, even though there is no financial transparency at
the ashram and “everything is secret.”
The
ashram’s treasurer, Swami Ramakrishnananda, acknowledged that its finances were
not open to the public, but he added that it is audited annually both by the
Indian government and by the ashram’s own internal auditors. I asked if there
was an official, like a chief compliance officer, who could be contacted if
people saw money being misused. “Yes, of course,” Mr. Ramakrishnananda replied.
“They can go directly to Amma.”
In
the United States, a charitable organization typically has to file for
tax-exempt status, be approved by the I.R.S. and then file an annual Form 990
detailing, among other things, how much money it collected, what it paid its
top employees, who served on its board, and whether it spent money on lobbying.
If, however, an organization declares itself a church — as Amma’s center in the
United States does — it is not required to do this and there is far less
transparency and public scrutiny.
In
general when it comes to religious organizations, there is a “possibility for
abuse,” saysRoger Colinvaux, a law professor and expert on
tax-exempt organizations at the Catholic University of America. “Churches don’t
have to apply for tax-exempt status, they don’t have to file an information
return, and it is difficult for the I.R.S. to audit them.”
V.S. Somanath, dean of Amrita’s business
school, said: “By God’s grace we have not been hit by any scandal, and so
people are willing to open their wallets and their purses. The image is clean.
Amma is like Jack Welch — she’s a great communicator — and the growth is
spectacular.”
LATE
one evening, Amma granted me an interview in her cramped sleeping quarters,
which felt all the smaller because several of her advisers, dressed in
saffron-colored garb, were also present, sitting cross-legged on the floor.
There was also a press liaison, a two-man camera crew and an interpreter who
relayed my questions from English into the local language of Malayalam.
“You
are not like a guest to me,” Amma told me as I sat down. “Your doubts will be
the doubts of the world. So you may ask anything.” Her tone was intimate.
Everyone waited for me to speak.
I
soon broached the subject of the failure of the Indian government to provide
services. She told me: “It is like somebody gets bitten by a snake and, by the
time they figure out what kind of snake it is, the person dies. That is what
happens with government intervention.”
The
most striking example of this, she said, occurred after the 2004 tsunami, when
her relief operation effectively stepped in for the government.
More
recently, in 2011, Amma organized a cleanup at Sabarimala, a mountaintop temple
in southern India, which attracts religious pilgrims — more than Mecca each
year — who leave thousands of tons of trash. Ostensibly, the man to fix this
problem was K. Jayakumar, who manages Kerala’s nearly one million government
employees. Mr. Jayakumar, however, told me bluntly that, in his experience, you
simply couldn’t pay people to do this kind of work well. So he called Amma.
She
dispatched 4,000 followers, who got the job done in a few days. At the time, Amma
was in Spain on a hugging tour, but she monitored the cleanup via webcam. She
succeeded where the government failed, and for a simple reason, Mr. Jayakumar
told me: she possessed divine authority.
“It
is an advantage,” he said. “The only thing is, if she makes a mistake, nobody
will point it out.”
During
our chat, Amma told me that she and her “children” never disagree and that this
was one key to her success. “Even if the people in the government stand
together and do things, they can’t implement their actions without discussing
it over several meetings,” she said. “I’m not blaming them, but this is the
only way they can do it.”
Wasn’t
there ever a single occasion, I asked, when one of her devotees contradicted or
doubted her? “To date there has been no major difference of opinion between
Amma and her children,” she told me, matter-of-factly. “Until now, we have
functioned as one mind.” What’s more, Amma said, she always led by example. “I
am the first person to get down into the septic tank and clean the feces,” she
said.
Perhaps
inevitably, Amma’s authority occasionally ends up shaping the personal lives of
her followers. I talked to one middle-aged American follower who said he racked
up $40,000 in credit-card debt for multiple trips to India to see Amma. “I
figured people take loans for education, for houses, for cars,” he said. “I’m
doing it for my spiritual growth.” Two of my guides later tried to dissuade me
from talking further with the man.
Another
foreigner, who has lived at the ashram for years, told me that longtime
residents were “not supposed to make big life-changing decisions without
telling Amma.” She sometimes has “really strong opinions about whether certain
people should have kids,” said the devotee, who spoke on condition of anonymity
for fear of being identified as a dissenter within the community.
In
our conversation, Amma was adamant that she does not tell her devotees when to
marry, whether to have children or how to live their lives, and she seemed
intent on dispelling the notion that her organization was in any way a cult.
“I
don’t like it when people say that I have divine powers,” she told me. (This
preference had not influenced her authorized biography, however, which
discussed at length the miracles she had performed.) “I don’t tell people that
you can only attain enlightenment through one way,” she said. “If you think
love is a cult, then I can’t do anything. My religion is love.”
DURING
the days I spent at the ashram, devotees kept asking me if I sensed Amma’s
divinity. My honest feeling was, not really. That being said, I understand how
other people might feel that way about her — especially in India, where the
failure of services and infrastructure is often a given.
In
the city where I lived, Trivandrum, the electricity failed so often that
whenever I turned off the lights, my 3-year-old son would exclaim, “Power’s
out!” A more disturbing example involves Bihar, India’s poorest state, where
the government’s public distribution system is supposed to provide free grain
to the impoverished masses. But studies have suggested that only between 10 and
45 percent of the grain reaches the intended recipients, with the rest
effectively stolen and sold on the black market. All of this is to say that
when someone emerges who can get things done properly and efficiently — even
some of the time — it’s easy to understand why that person can seem superhuman.
This
became most apparent to me one afternoon while speaking with Dr. Krishna Kumar,
a pediatric cardiologist who trained at Boston Children’s Hospital. I followed
him around as he met with patients at Amma’s AIMS
Hospital, a 1,500-bed facility in the nearby city of Kochi. Dr. Kumar said
that when he finished his training, in 1996, there were many pediatric
cardiologists in the United States and just a handful in India. That fact alone
inspired him to return to the subcontinent.
“I
thought I should use my training to make some difference back in India,” he
told me. He said he landed a job at a private hospital in New Delhi but quickly
became “deeply disheartened” that the hospital was turning away 90 percent of
would-be patients because they couldn’t pay; that number included children who
might die from a heart problem that he could have fixed.
Dr.
Kumar said he wanted to practice medicine in a different way but saw no other
options. Then, one day in 1997, he got a call from Ron Gottsegen, the chief
executive of Amma’s hospital, who encouraged him to come work for Amma. “I was
very skeptical,” Dr. Kumar said. “I didn’t believe that a religious leader
could run a medical institution.”
Even
when he met Amma, he wasn’t entirely convinced. When I asked him if he ever had
a spiritual epiphany in her presence, he replied: “Not at all — nothing like
that whatsoever.” Instead, he said, Amma has “grown on me” over time. He is
grateful to her, he said, for giving him a chance to build the kind of practice
that helps poor people. At Amma’s hospital, patients must pay at least some portion
of their bill, though often it is a minimal amount.
Late
in the day, Dr. Kumar met the mother of a teenager who had just had open-heart
surgery, at almost no cost. He told the mother, who worked as a maid and earned
roughly $40 a month, that her daughter would be fine. The woman was so overcome
with relief that she began to weep and dropped to her knees and touched her
head to the doctor’s feet, and then to my feet as well. Afterward, I asked Dr.
Kumar what that was about.
“It
is a sign of extreme respect,” he replied uncomfortably. “As doctors, we almost
have a godlike status in India. It is unfortunate — we do not deserve it — we
are just human.”
LAST
July, near the end of another two-month United States tour by Amma, I traveled
to Alexandria, Va., where she was holding a hugging session at a Hilton hotel.
The place bustled: there were families who traveled with Amma for their summer
vacations and first-timers who wandered in on a whim.
“My
therapist told me to come,” Leslie Sargent, a high-school guidance counselor,
said. Moments later I met the therapist, Sharon Bauer, who seemed pleased to
see her patient. “The energy that Amma transmits deepens our sense of inner
essence,” she said.
Amma’s
organization says that the purpose of these events is not to raise money and
that foreign contributions account for only a third of all donations.
Nonetheless, donation boxes were placed at almost every turn, and donations can
be quite sizable. In 2009, one benefactor bought the former home of Sargent
Shriver and Eunice Kennedy Shriver near Washington for $7.8 million and donated
it to Amma as a local meeting house.
The
entire back portion of the Hilton’s ballroom had been converted into a
mini-mall, where visitors could buy an array of Amma-related products. At one
shop, some crystals cost as much as $500. A vendor told me that “if Amma
touches the crystal, some of her energy goes into it.”
A
medicinal shop sold a tincture from the flowers in Amma’s garland that promised
to fight “colds, flus, stomach aches and even cancer.” And, next to a pole on
which four security cameras were mounted, a table was laden with sweaters,
bathrobes and nightgowns. “These are items that Amma has worn,” the saleswoman
said.
Proceeds
from all the sales go to Amma’s organization, for charitable work and to cover
expenses.
As
I mingled with the shoppers, I bumped into a couple from Washington, D.C. — Ian
and Debra Mishalove — who run a yoga studio. Mr. Mishalove had just bought two
necklaces.
I
asked what motivated them to support Amma financially. “I know very little
about what she does,” he acknowledged, “but I have seen literature about her
helping people in need.”
“She
has charities alleviating hunger and helping with disasters,” his wife added.
“This
is the nicest kind of commerce,” he said.
We
parted ways, and I headed over to the jewelry shop where Mr. Mishalove had just
bought the necklaces. The saleswoman, Nihsima Sandhu, 48, from San Francisco,
told me that she previously worked at Saks Fifth Avenue, but that she now sold
jewelry for Amma instead, which gave her much more satisfaction.
The
saleswoman paused to tell a customer that Amma had, in fact, touched a
particular item. Does that mean, I inquired, that the item is blessed? The
saleswoman smiled and then assured me, “Everything in this room is blessed.”
