What Sathya Sai Baba, Dr Kalam and Yakub Memon have in common

Consider the following statements, all made in some form in the media:

I will be happy when he dies.

India would have been a better place had he never been born.

He is going to hell for sure.

Pause for a moment. Consider these words.

Would you condemn them as an example of right wing Hindu jingoism? Would you lament the "blood lust" and "mob mentality" that goes into thoughts like this in the face of a man's mortality?

We have heard plenty of questions like this in the last few days, and no doubt, we might have even seen some examples of inappropriately expressive displays of happiness at justice (or revenge, as some might argue) being delivered for the 1993 Mumbai massacre.

But these statements have nothing to do with this week's execution, or with the perpetrators of a mass terrorist attack.

These are some of the statements that were made about a frail, elderly, ailing Hindu holy man that millions of earnest seekers of many different faiths from around the world revered as guru and god.

These are some of the things that supposed public intellectuals, experts in science and rationality, and just pompous hacks passing themselves for journalists said and wrote about Sri Sathya Sai Baba, as he lay ill, four years ago.

I remember every word vividly, because I knew the man, as I might have known someone like my own father or mother. Whatever the names I might have called him, God, Guru, Swami - and in a free country one is perfectly free to worship and revere and adore whom they like, even a poor, lower caste peasant elder who taught the world to love each other and serve each other - I still knew a man who was good and kind, and steadfastly so towards the hundreds of thousands of people who had interacted with him intimately over decades, and knew him just as I did.

Yet, on the whims of a handful of critics, a whole national media culture decided to go to town trashing the memory of one of the most influential and most beloved spiritual figures of our time. And it wasn't just the supposedly "rational" criticism that was made of his supposedly "irrational" claims that we need to recall this week. It was, and I will say it emphatically, precisely the kind of gleeful gloating that public voices indulged in about his death that we need to remember now.

I do not agree with the idea of celebrating death. I do not even know if I agree with the idea of a death penalty. But it is an incredible lapse of reason, judgement, memory and indeed, decency, in Indian intellectual life that some of us who have felt so much pain about the expression of public anger against terrorism these past few days did not even notice the abomination that has already become institutionalised in our public discourse.

The media circus maximus that roared at Swami's illness was not an exception. It is an illness that has become part of common sense in our supposedly better ethical and intellectual quarters today. The same type of well-educated, liberal, secular, cosmopolitan writers and activists who came on TV and newspaper columns to display their lack of even a glimmer of human feeling for the pain of an elderly man who had helped millions in his lifetime was also in evidence this week in its mockery of our grief and love for another peaceful, spiritual, and inspiring figure.

"How can you grieve for a man who built missiles, which bring death?" We, the easily-led nativists who admire easily and give our love to those who have clearly shared theirs with us selflessly and tirelessly, were asked.

And we can ask a question or two ourselves.

Did it occur to anyone that Dr Kalam never really took a human life, even with his creations? Did it occur to anyone that unlike the Dr Strangelove and real military-industrial complexes, Dr Kalam and India were not actually imagining commies and WMDs and going out to invade other countries?

Most of all, did it occur to anyone how bizarre it sounds when someone mocks admiration for a good, peaceful man as militarism and brushes off a devastating city-wide terrorist massacre as just some understandable backlash for a riot?

This was not a good week for satya, or ahimsa. Coming to think of it, it has not been a good decade, or maybe century, either.