Lord Of Tirumala

hy can’t gods keep secret diaries? Our power and influence are spread over the world. It’s true, at times we do wish to keep certain thoughts away from our wives, followers and so on. Thorne Smith, an American author from the 1940s, wrote a funny novel, Night Life of the Gods, where statues of Greek gods in a New York museum came to life and took off for a night of fun. They were skimpily dressed and had only one thing on their mind, if you know what I mean. We Indian gods are more sober and even in our diaries mention only serious topics. Of late, I am more and more worried after learning that an average devotee at Tirumala has to spend 21 hrs in a queue before he can have my darshan of 0.8-1.5 seconds. I was appalled. The wise men in charge of temple affairs had decreed that three seconds of darshan is a satisfactory rate for the ordinary devotee. I knew ‘class’ differences existed in India, but not to this extent with the VVIPs hogging most of the darshan time. That Andhra governor bloke, Narasimhan, drops in 3-4 times a month with a large entourage and enjoys all special privileges. I hate to mention this, but that man who can’t pay salaries to his staff, Vijay Mallya, the Ambani brothers and the Bachchans drop in as and when they please and genuine devotees suffer. The other day, I did some quick calculations. On a single day, rituals took up eight hours and VIP visits six hours, leaving only about 10 hours for darshan for common people who numbered 65,000 daily, 80,000 during weekends and over 1.25 lakh on festival days.

Isn’t this grossly unfair? By the way, there are enough scams in and around me. The super-rich are building villas and luxury resthouses for themselves all around here. Very soon we shall have Taj Tirumala, Oberoi Tirumala, Hiranandani Tirumala, Vilasrao Tirumala and so on. Subash Ghai could soon start an acting school for budding ‘devotional’ actors here and I heard rumours that Srini, who has his fingers in cement, BCCI, IPL and the cheerleaders, is fixing cricket pitches on temple land for IPL matches from 2014. The Tirumala Devasthanam could even field its own IPL team. Money is no problem (Ram Navami ‘hundi’ collections alone was Rs 5.73 crore this year, beating the previous high on January 1 of Rs 4.23 crore!) My chief priest sees nothing wrong in making big money officiating at VIP weddings, pujas and so on, for which he is airlifted! Sometimes, I wonder who’s the Lord, him or me! Not just Tirumala, but everywhere God is linked with Greed. At Shirdi Sai Baba Sanstan, the government has coolly packed the new temple trust with Congress and NCP blokes. Thankfully, the HC stayed the farce commenting, “God is not a fiefdom of the ruling coalition...keep god away while distributing public largesse’. By the way, the last word came from Tendlya who invoked my name to question god for the long, agonising delay for his 100th century. I was left speechless!

The Mumbai-based satirist is the creator of ‘Trishanku’. E-mail your secret diarist: vgangadhar70 AT gmail.com