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The Master jester of Spiritualism |
Yoga's Latest Joker of the Pack |
What you will see above set side by side are the images of
two prominent religious buffoons of India, the first Sw. Chinmayananda, a ‘shining star’ of
yesteryears and the next, Baba Ramdev, an exponent of contemporary religious buffoonery.
Ardent devotees of the Chinmaya Mission will surely feel
revolted by this clubbing of a country bumpkin guru like Baba Ramdev with the so-called
towering intellectualism of Chinmayananda. But to a skeptic and critic, these
represent but different faces of the same spectacle of cheerleading fervor and insanity
that is at the heart of the phenomenon of organized religion.
Chinmayananda, the founder and organizer of Chinmaya
Mission, a growing and sprawling empire of religious and spiritualist cultishness,
goes by the honorifics of Swami (Master)
and Gurudev (Divine or Godly teacher) and is a highly revered and deified
personage in spite of all clownish antics that are the hallmarks and trademarks
of his public behavior and demeanor.
To a rational and dispassionate observer, the reputation and
image of Chinmayananda as an intellectual and leader of high order would be an
enigma and puzzle. To me it has always been a wonder that a person so slovenly and
clumsy in attire and appearance as Chinmayananda and exhibiting oddities and eccentricities in his
speech and mannerisms would ever be considered an object of reverence and awe.
But such are the ways of the world and people that the irony
of the magnetic appeal or charisma of a clown or buffoon is not altogether
uncommon.
The success and growth of Chinmaya Mission does testify to
the business acumen of Sw. Chinmayananda and his understanding and successful application
of the sociology and psychology of mass religious fascination and delirium.
In this article I have tried to reassess a common impression of his commentaries on Hindu treatises, which is about his so-called oratorical skills. That article provided an analysis of his commentary to examine whether his style and manner of narration really qualifies for the lofty encomium of oratory that is so easily conferred on him by the religious and intellectual gentry of India.
In most lexicons, oratory is defined as
eloquence or skill in making speeches to the public, or as a manner of
public speaking marked by the use of overblown or effusive rhetoric. So
it can be seen that there are not one but two requirements for a speech
or expressive style to be properly denoted or qualified as oratorical;
firstly the eloquence of speech or expression and along with that the
predominance of rhetoric.
Quoting from Wikipedia
“Eloquence (from Latin eloquentia) is fluent, forcible, elegant or
persuasive speaking. It is primarily the power of expressing strong
emotions in striking and appropriate language, thereby producing
conviction or persuasion. The term is also used for writing in a fluent
style.”
While a speech or expression needs to be
forcible or persuasive, we must not be unmindful of an almost equal
emphasis on fluency, elegance and use of appropriate language.
While Chinmayananda’s talks may sound
forceful and persuasive to many, they miserably fail the test of
fluency, elegance and use of appropriate language. Using appropriate
language involves adhering to the rules of a language pertaining to its
grammar, idioms, semantics and context, while improvising on style and
effect using the freedom that figurative expression allows us.
Chinmayananda’s style of speech and
writing are in complete violation of these rules of the English
language. He confuses prose and poetic style and mixes literal and
figurative elements of expression without any sense of proportion,
placement or agreement with context. He repeatedly uses common jargons
of spiritual lingo, which is a clear sign of his lack of fluency in his
subject matter and language. He is notorious for coining new words, many
times by tagging Sanskrit or Indian words with English words.
There is nothing wrong about coining words- neologism, as it is termed in linguistics. Many languages are enriched by the addition of new words. But new words to gain currency in a language need to satisfy certain requirements of semantics, with associative and derivative qualities of coherence, cogency and ablity to blend with other words and groups.
His terms like ‘mud-tattwa’, ‘packet-yoga’ ‘rama-gold’, ‘Krsna-cure’, ‘Arjuna-disease’ etc., exhibit a tendency for playing to the gallery with weird-sounding words, which may yet signify some ethnicity. But, from the perspective of eloquence, they represent an atrocious use of language.
There is nothing wrong about coining words- neologism, as it is termed in linguistics. Many languages are enriched by the addition of new words. But new words to gain currency in a language need to satisfy certain requirements of semantics, with associative and derivative qualities of coherence, cogency and ablity to blend with other words and groups.
His terms like ‘mud-tattwa’, ‘packet-yoga’ ‘rama-gold’, ‘Krsna-cure’, ‘Arjuna-disease’ etc., exhibit a tendency for playing to the gallery with weird-sounding words, which may yet signify some ethnicity. But, from the perspective of eloquence, they represent an atrocious use of language.
The purpose of rhetoric is to create an
effect and persuade an audience to its point of view. But still,
rhetoric needs to be phrased in meaningful and appropriate language.
Looking at the style of Chinmayananda’s commentaries, one really wonders
whether he knows how to construct rhetoric. It will be noticed that he
poses questions with exaggerated terms and fancy phrases and then
answers them himself, stumbling in the process of doing both of these. A
typically well phrased and delivered rhetorical question is one that
does not need an answer or has a reply in the question itself. Rhetoric
also demands some grandeur and luxuriance of vocabulary and phraseology
that does not seem to exist in Chinmayananda’s literary arsenal.
Surely Chinmayananda’s eccentricities and antics
in the process of speaking, like the waving of hands, bobbing of the
head, conflation and contortion of nostrils, stealthy wiping of the nose
(mostly the result of his regular snuff intake), the bird-droppings of
uneven and ‘un-parliamentary’ words and phrases, abrupt changes of voice
tones etc., may make for entertaining and comic occasions and
interludes. But to take these as marks of oratory and eloquence is to
grossly misunderstand the meaning and demands of oratory. If
Chinmayananda’s verbal acrobatics is to be considered as oratorical
flourish, one can only say that oratory is sorely in need of a
redefinition.
To conclude, a few
specimens from the book-loads of Chinmayananda’s commentaries were looked at. But one can be pretty certain that the
bulk of his writings and speeches very nearly mirror these specimens in
their sheer desultory nonsense and aimless exposition of theological
concepts. While it may not be a wonder for his devotees to marvel at his
intellectual prowess and expressiveness, to any thinking and reasonable
student of a langauage and subject, Chinmayananda’s speech and writing
represent the most cruel mockery of language, and constitute an insult
to human intelligence and understanding.
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