Most of us know Christopher Marlowe’s
drama “Doctor Faustus”. Doctor Faustus was a very famous Professor in Germany.
Within a short time, he surpassed all the other professors in knowledge. But the
thought came to him that in spite of his present status he was still a human
being. So he wanted to achieve extraordinary powers by learning black magic and
go beyond ordinary human beings. When he was thus contemplating, a good angel
came and tried to dissuade him from going ahead with his plan. But an evil
angel lured him into it and he listened to his advice. Dr. Faustus then met
Mephistopheles, the assistant of Lucifer, the Lord of Darkness. Mephistopheles
told him that he could achieve miraculous powers with the help of Lucifer on
one condition. The condition was that he should forsake the Divine and sell his
soul to Lucifer. Then by the power of Lucifer, he would be able to fulfil any
ambition and indulge in all the enjoyments of life for 24 years. But after
that, he would have to live forever in eternal hell. As instructed by the evil
angel, Dr. Faustus signed the pact with his blood. For 24 years he enjoyed
power, prestige, wealth and sex to his heart’s content. Then came the time to
go to eternal hell. At this point, the
good angel advised him that, even if he had committed an unforgiveable blunder,
yet the compassionate Divine would forgive him if he repented for his misdeeds
and prayed to Him for His help. Dr. Faustus tried his best, but he could neither
repent nor pray to the Divine, and finally had to go to eternal hell.
A similar professor named Manoj Das
joined the Sri Aurobindo Ashram as an inmate. Everybody, especially the people
of his home state, were very hopeful to be benefited spiritually by his example
and vast knowledge. He managed to remain on the right track, controlling his
ambitions, till the Mother was physically there in the Ashram. In the physical
absence of the Mother, the suppressed ambitions of this famous professor raised
their heads in the same way as they did in the life of Dr Faustus. To fulfil
his ambitions, he became the disciple and spokesman of Manoj Das Gupta, the
present Managing Trustee of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, who is the assistant of the
Lord of Nations just as Mephistopheles was the assistant of Lucifer. Manoj Das
signed the pact offered to him by Manoj Das Gupta, the Mephistopheles of the
Ashram, on behalf of the Lord of Nations, who is one of the four Asuras
mentioned by the Mother. Thereby Manoj Das sold forever his soul to the Lord of
Nations to achieve power, prestige, awards and monetary gain. That he achieved,
but, according to the pact, he had to betray Mother and Sri Aurobindo to please
his present lord.
Manoj Das Gupta has actually no
respect for Manoj Das. He only wants to use the latter’s name and fame in
bribing and manipulating officials of high rank in order to protect the
Trustees. But this stupid professor (Pranab-da had given him this honorary distinction
after which he resigned from the Trust Board) accepts to do all the dirty work
as prasad from his lord. Manoj Das
Gupta once told everybody in a meeting that he was Gupta Manoj, and then he referred
to Manoj Das as the real Manoj. Therefore Manoj Das can be called Byakta Manoj,
the public Manoj who speaks on behalf of Gupta Manoj, who directs Byakta Manoj
from behind. From now on we will refer to Manoj Das Gupta, the Managing
Trustee, as Gupta Manoj and to Manoj Das, the writer, as Byakta Manoj.
Byakta Manoj, who is acting for Gupta
Manoj, remained quiet in the Krishna Nagar court when the Trustees’ lawyer said,
“Even the Mother did not understand Savitri.” After this incident, the
President of an Association sent a pleader’s notice to the Ashram Trust Board
to expel this ungrateful person from the Ashram immediately. Even today Byakta
Manoj supports the corrections of Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Peter Heehs, a taxi driver from America staying in the Ashram
as a pseudo disciple.
Byakta Manoj has been an imposter
throughout his life. His real nature was exposed when the controversy of
Peter’s book “The Lives of Sri Aurobindo” broke out in August 2008. Byakta
Manoj himself claimed that he was the
first person to find 90 serious objectionable points in the book. But when he
found his lord Gupta Manoj supporting the book, he shamelessly changed his
opinion and wrote a letter in 2010 to mislead the Oriya people stating that there
was nothing wrong with Peter, his book and the Ashram Trustees. He said that those
who were protesting against the book were possessed of a dark Sri Aurobindo. When
his letter was rebutted, his attempt to defend Peter Heehs rebounded back on
him, and he got the title “Utkala Kalanka“ – the “Disgrace of Orissa”. The
devotees and disciples of Orissa never expected a person of his stature to
stoop so low and extend his support to the denigration of Mother and Sri
Aurobindo in order to remain in the good books of his lord.
In order to get back his respect from
the Oriya people, he with the help of Gupta Manoj removed Niranjan Naik from
the editorship of the Oriya monthly “Navaprakash”. Niranjan Naik was editing
the magazine since it began in 1970 with the Mother’s blessings. Byakta Manoj became
de facto editor and started writing a new Life History of Sri Aurobindo in
order to repair the damage done to his public image. But people did not
appreciate his face saving attempt due to two reasons: (1) Sri Aurobindo did
not encourage or approve anybody to write his biography which is not on the
surface for men to see. (2) People expected from him a book challenging Peter’s
derogatory comments on Sri Aurobindo. But Byakta Manoj wanted to cheat people
without displeasing his lord Gupta Manoj.
A senior and respected Oriya lady of
the Ashram wrote a letter to Byakta Manoj requesting him to come out of his
illusion and restore the prestige of Mother and Sri Aurobindo. She had written her
letter in English but Byakta Manoj, the imposter, cleverly wrote back in Oriya, because he knew
that, if he wrote in English, many people would read his letter, and he will be
further exposed. He wrote that it is completely false that he supported Peter
Heehs, and only a few misguided elements blamed him for it. In another paragraph
of the same letter, he contradicted himself by writing that these misguided elements
had brought out some portions of Peter’s book without the proper context,
meaning thereby that the book was good, but that the interpretation of the
protesters was wrong. In this letter, he condemned outright those who were
protesting against the book. In reply, the senior lady wrote back saying that she
herself was a staunch protestor against the book. So Byakta Manoj need not write to her again in this deceptive
manner.
People asked Byakta Manoj, “Why are
you not protesting against the derogatory book?” He said, “See, we have come
here for spiritual sadhana, not to find fault with others.” To some others he
said, “Everybody has got freedom of speech and one can write the biography of
anybody.” To others he unnerved them by counter questioning, “Have you read the
book? Without reading it, how do you know that the book is bad?” But he knew
very well that the book was so bad that it had been banned in India.
When about 75 MPs wrote a letter to Gupta
Manoj asking him to reply 7 questions, Byakta Manoj immediately flew to Delhi
and persuaded some of the MPs not to write such letters to his lord Gupta Manoj.
During the first Dharna from 1.1.2012
to 7.1.2012 in front of the Ashram Trust’s office (nicknamed now as DisGrace
Office), Byakta Manoj was passing by that road stealthily, counting the number
of protestors. At that time, an Ashram sadhika offered him the protesters’
symbolic wrist band on which was written “Cling to Truth”. He did not accept it
and told her, “I am already clinging to Truth.” The sadhika told him, “No, no,
sir, you are far away from the Truth.” Byakta Manoj felt very uncomfortable and
lost no time to run away from that place.
There was a second Dharna from
26.2.2012 to 28.2.2012 in front of the same DisGrace Office demanding that the
present corrupt trustees should step down. On 27.2.2012, Dr. Dilip Datta (a
Trustee nicknamed as Dr Death) and his unworthy daughter Shoma insulted the Oriya
protesters by shouting at them, “You bloody Oriya Devotees”. This was a blatant
racial abuse. A question was raised in the Orissa Assembly regarding this
incident and Byakta Manoj immediately rang up the leaders of the political
party who had raised the question and asked them how they could believe that
the trustees of Sri Aurobindo Ashram could behave in such a manner. But except for
his chamchas, all the others said that
they had seen this incident of racial abuse on video.
When the Trustees did not listen to
anybody and gave moral, legal and financial support to Peter Heehs, the
desperate protestors had no other recourse but to file cases against the Trustees.
Byakta Manoj labelled them as Matrudrohis
because Mother did not like to go to courts. But this very shameless person
filed three false cases against a Tamil person who had occupied the house of
his brother-in-law in Pondicherry. That person happened to be a member of the
Communist Party of India. The entire party staged a Dharna in front of the Head
Post Office near the Ashram Dining Room on 28.7.2011 with a big banner saying,
“Manoj Das, Do Not File False Complaints”.
There was a time when the devotees and
disciples were collecting signatures to make Columbia University Press withdraw
Peter Heehs’s book in America. Byakta Manoj labelled the campaigners as foolish
and dark forces. But when Dr. Salila and Meera Gupta threatened the Ashram
inmates and collected signatures from them in order to protect the Trustees
from the Collector’s enquiry, the same Byakta Manoj anxiously asked people
whether they had given their signatures. He said, “Sign the petition, otherwise
those “rascals” will do a lot of harm to Gupta Manoj and the Ashram.” But does
he not know that those so-called “rascals” are not against the Ashram but
against the misdeeds of Gupta Manoj and his supporters?
An ex-student/inmate of the Ashram used
to often reproach Byakta Manoj for his double standards. Unable to bear his
reproaches, Byakta Manoj once threatened him, “My Guru has given me a mantra
and told me that if anybody insults me more than three times, I can recite the mantra
which can do serious harm to the person. So be careful.” The ex-student/inmate
laughed and said, “If you have such a Guru, why have you come here leaving his
discipleship?”
Recently Peter’s advocate in the
Orissa case had come to visit the Ashram. He asked an Ashramite, “Will you
please tell me where Prof. Manoj Das stays?” The Ashramite replied to him, “Why
do you want to meet that ****? The advocate was stupefied, he said, “How can
you say such a thing about a renowned person like Manoj Das?” The Ashramite
told him, “Go and throw some pieces of bread before him and see how he will
follow you.” The advocate somehow managed to find out Byakta Manoj’s house and
in the course of his talk asked him, “Why
do Ashram people talk like this about you?” Byakta Manoj replied gravely, “The
consciousness has gone down very much.” The advocate asked, “Whose
consciousness, sir?” Byakta Manoj replied even more gravely, “The consciousness
of the Ashram people. That is why they cannot recognise my personality.”
After receiving a memorandum from the
protesters, the Pondicherry Collector started a probe against the misdeeds of
the Ashram Trustees. When the Trustees saw that they might be jailed if the
enquiry continued, they filed a case against the Collector and managed to get a
stay order from the High Court on the Collector’s probe. Byakta Manoj and eight
sycophants of Gupta Manoj impleaded themselves in the case saying that the
charges against the Trustees are false, and that the Trustees are as clear as crystal.
But if the Trustees are so clean and have nothing to hide, why are they afraid
of the probe?
When the people of Orissa were deeply disappointed
at Byakta Manoj’s support for Peter Heehs and the Trustees, they thought that he
was supporting the anti-Guru group in order to get financial help for his medical
treatment and expensive operations. So they very generously and sympathetically
wrote a letter to him saying that they will provide all the money he needed for
his costly operations. But the letter had no effect.
Because Byakta Manoj has sold his soul
to the Lord of Nations through Gupta Manoj, he, like Dr. Faustus, has now lost
his capacity to repent and pray. So he will surely have to go to eternal hell!
But Nolini-da has said that there is no eternal hell for a soul touched by the
Divine. Even now Byakta Manoj can free himself from Gupta Manoj if he realises
his folly and prays to the Divine – he can then become Mukta Manoj (liberated
Manoj).
I will now end with what Mother told
Huta-ben on the three categories of people in Yoga:
1)
People who aspire for the Truth but are not sincere enough in their aspiration
to discriminate between the Truth and the Falsehood and they fall always into
trouble and misery and get out from the path leading to Truth.
2)
This category is dangerous. People who can very well discriminate between Truth
and Falsehood, who know that Truth is better but have no strength to resist the
temptation and fall constantly into falsehood.
3)
The last one is the most dangerous of all. People who are aware of the Truth
but refuse to recognise the Truth and choose deliberately the falsehood. They
have a kind of hate for the Truth and reject it violently. These, on the list
of the Eternal can be stamped “Missing Souls” – as it is written in Savitri:
So
might one fall on the Eternal’s road
Forfeiting
the spirit’s lonely chance in Time
And
no news of him reach the waiting gods
Marked
“missing” in the register of souls”
(Book
Two, Canto Seven, p 239; Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo, Volume 33, p 210)
(Mother
You said so, pp 80-81, Mother to Huta Hindocha)
Byakta Manoj and Gupta Manoj certainly
belong to the third category!
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