The irrepressible pop guru
‘To Hell with Gurus’
Society makes a fresh dig into the enigma that is U.G. Krishnamurti — and finds him still the same: a ‘not-guru’ who has no message for you and no answers to your questions
“Buddha was a crackpot. Jesus was another misguided Jew. Freud was the biggest fraud of the 20th century, and J. Krishnamurti is the biggest phoney,” UG tells a group of people eagerly looking at him in the hope of hearing a message that will change their lives.
“If this country is broken into different states, what's wrong? What's common between me and my best friend Mahesh Bhatt? Nothing. He's from Gujarat and I'm from Andhra. What he eats, I don't like, and he detests my kind of food. I can't stand north Indian music and when you play south Indian music he runs away,” he says, pointing to Mahesh Bhatt who has come to Bangalore just to be with him.
“Meditation is a self-centered activity. Health food and yoga destroy the body. For a vegetarian I don't eat fruit or vegetables. Instead, I drink two pints of double cream every day. What I eat is no better than sawdust. What's wrong with me?” he asks of a man sitting next to him.
“Do I have a message? Yes I do; I say, get lost and stay lost,” he tells a young boy.
“There's no way we can reverse all this. We are doomed. Any time anyone says, I'm the avatar, kick the bastard and throw him down the drain. He creates another temple, another organisation and adds to the mess. Don't ask me what's the answer. I don't know,” he tells me when I ask him if something can be done to alleviate the human condition.
So what's new about U.G. Krishnamurti, the messiah without a message, the guru who doesn't want to save the world since it's doomed anyway?
He's older now, but wears his 72 years lightly; a few wrinkles line his face, but his hair has gone all grey. He may not be the balm for troubled minds looking for a mantra to chant, but his legion of admirers is growing as he seduces minds with the sonorous cadences of his voice. “Even if you don't always understand what he is saying, just listening to his voice is calming,” says an admirer. Claiming to have no institutions, organisations or disciples, UG still goes around the world twice-over every year, talking to those who come to him, answering those who put questions to him, sometimes shocking, at times remaining silent, but most of the time being cryptic. Omni magazine, he says, had done an interview with him recently, but the editor was not happy with the 10 drafts the journalist had prepared of the interview. “She's now working on the 11th draft,” UG says gleefully, implying that journalists can make what they want of him. “You write whatever you feel, you can make up the whole interview, it really doesn't matter to me,” he says.
‘UG’ as he is called by those around him, from Mahesh Bhatt to his own daughters, talks in contradictions and riddles, often leaving you wondering whether he is deliberately being shocking. For instance one thought he was being merely shocking when he said he drinks two pints of cream every day, but his host in Bangalore, Chandrasekhar, confirms UG does indeed drink two pints of cream every day when abroad.
“Nobody has so far succeeded in putting me into a slot. It's not that I feel superior to all those people who have been categorised and put into a slot. But there's no way you can put me into any framework, for the reason that whatever I'm saying is destroying the reference points you have. What you are left with you have to figure out yourself,” he says.
He refuses to be slotted as a guru. “You can make up the whole interview. But for heaven's sake don't portray me as a guru,” he pleads. If he is not a teacher or a disciple, then what is he? “I don't know how to describe myself. But teacher I'm not. Teaching implies there is something you impart to bring about a change in you and around the world. I emphasise that there is nothing to be changed in you or around the world. What's wrong with the world? What's there to be changed here within? Because there is no soul here, or enlightenment, that has to be realised.”
If he has no message to communicate or no philosophy of life to enunciate, then why does he even talk to those around him, I ask him warily, remembering that on occasion he has thrown out journalists who have come to him only to argue and prove a point. “But that's another religious idea, that if you don't have anything to say that you should remain silent,” he says angrily. “Why shouldn't I talk? I'm part of this world. I never invite anyone to come and see me. Why did you come? Did I ask you to come?”
UG is a free spirit, living from moment to moment, going from place to place, belonging everywhere, but to no one place in particular. He is like the Zen masters who try to break the spirit of the questioner by asking questions like “Do you know what the sound of one hand clapping is?” Only with UG there are no longer any questions, either for himself or for those around him. When unhappy men and women ask him for solutions to their problems, he tells them, simply, “Don't ask me, I don't know.”
According to UG, there is no enlightenment, salvation or after-life and there is nothing we have to strive for. If anything, he believes it is the questions: ‘Is there salvation?’ or ‘Is there after-life?’ that are driving us neurotic. Since his 49th year, when UG went through a physical transformation — some call it “enlightenment” — which he simply describes as a physical calamity, there have been no more questions for him. Only basic questions interest him now: “Are my tickets ready?” or “How do I go to Geneva?” The search is over, he says, because ultimately there was nothing to search for.
For UG, life is now a series of disconnected events which have no connection to what he has done before or will do in the future. Instead of building a cult or performing miracles, UG simply eats, sleeps and shops. “Why should you think there is some higher purpose to life than what you are doing? The moment you think there is something more to life than eating and procreating, boredom sets in,” he says.
What may seem mundane activities to us, don't bore UG. Julie Thayer, the American photographer who is currently video taping his travels, says, “At airports when I want to hurry up the visa formalities, he says, ‘Julie, what is the hurry?’ At that moment, standing in the line and watching people assumes importance to him.”
In Bangalore, it is not only spiritual seekers who come to him seeking answers, but also friends and relatives…
