(ARTICLE I FOUND ON THE NET)
Open Letter to Buddhadeb Bhattacharya
Dear Chief Minister of West Bengal Mr. Buddhadev Bhattacharya:
I have come to learn that there is some possibility of renaming Park Street as Mother Teresa street and erecting her statue.
I think this is a very bad idea. The image of Kolkata has been forever tarnished as a result of Mother Teresaâs activities. For greater details on why this is so, I would urge you to read what some neutral observers have to say about the lady. I have a few articles on the subject (
http://are.berkeley.edu/~atanu/teresa.html) and I recommend a book by a son of KolkataâDr Aroup Chatterjeeâs âMother Teresa: The Final Verdictâ which I have reviewed here. (see bottom of page)
We in India are totally brainwashed to accept uncritically anything that is Western and white. Mother Teresa, motivated by missionary zeal, used the poverty of the poor of Kolkata to enrich her mission. While I do not deny that India has abject poverty, she used that poverty and showcased it around the world not to solve the problem but to evoke pity from affluent people so that they would contribute to the welfare of her mission, not for the welfare of the people she so ruthlessly used.
I urge you to carefully review the evidence and reconsider.
Sincerely,
Atanu Dey
I have followed the Mother Teresa phenomenon with a sick feeling in my stomach because of a number of reasons. The primary reason for me is that she epitomizes what is the fundamental flaw that led to what we see in India around us today. The flaw is in not thinking through things, of busying ourselves with the symptoms of anailment rather than eradicating the cause.
Mother Teresa ceaselessly championed for uncontrolled breeding. She did her best to derail any serious attempt at addressing one of the primary causes of poverty in the developing countries, namely, the growth of human populations way beyond that which can be sustained at a humane level. All she wanted was that there be sufficiently large number of abjectly poor in a place so she could gather brownie points to assure her place amongst the sainted. As she honestly put it, if there were no poor, there would not be any reason for hermission to exist. The poor, she held, were blessed because they suffer.
I feel that she should be called Teresa, the Merciless. Millions will be forced lead miserable lives because of what she has done and the institutions she supported (the Vatican, primarily) and the institutions she has created.
I expect hate mail as a result of this post. But I hope that the writer of hate mail at least read some of the articles which I have provided the links to above. My request is that you send me hate mail only after you have honestly read the articles.
Feb 17th, 2003
Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict â A Review
I am delighted that Dr. Aroup Chatterjee's book, "Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict", ends up in the small but select body of work that fails to endorse the winner of a rather special version of the much celebrated Keynesian beauty contest. Keynes had noted that in a contest where each judge votes for the contestant most likely to be chosen by other judges and therefore win, rather than voting for the contestant he (or she) finds most attractive, the winner could well be the one who is perceived to be the most likely winner and not necessarily the one who is the most beautiful. Keynesian beauty contests are a recurring feature in any population exhibiting herd behavior â from stock market speculators, to readers of gossip columnists, to political parties.
Mother Teresa is the undisputed winner of this particular 'beauty' contest. The challenge was to be the one who is most widely perceived to be the savior of the poorest of the poor. Note the operative word 'perceived' above. Never mind what actual good was done, or worse still, the real harm done to the poor. The game appeared to be one of taking in as much donations as possible from conscience-stricken Westerners by displaying as ugly a picture of India as possible, and seek as much adoration from the necessarily grateful but gullible Indian population.
Challenging prevailing notions cannot, by definition, be popular. But there are honest and brave people in any population. Chatterjee is not alone. He is in good company â Sunanda Dutta-Ray and Christopher Hitchens, to name a couple. Hitchens too has critically examined the MT phenomenon and wrote (in a 1993 article which appeared in The Nation magazine)
'The Pope is still fornicating with the Emperor,' wrote Dante in one of his pithier staves, and with M.T. one sees yet again the alliance between ostentatious religiosity and the needs of crude secular power. This is, of course, a very old story indeed, but when one surveys the astonishing, dumb credulity of the media in the face of the M.T. fraud, it becomes easier to understand how the sway of superstition was exerted in medieval times.
Committed people often sacrifice their own self-interest for the sake of the greater good. I could be persuaded that MT perhaps did that too -- but her greater good was the glorification of her religious beliefs. But her religious beliefs are not sufficient for ensuring the common good. Maybe she was well-intentioned, but that itself does not guarantee the common good. "Let me save you from drowning," said the monkey to the fish, as the monkey put the fish on a tree. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
In a country that is suffering from the burden of extreme overpopulation, she single-mindedly advocated against birth-control. Not satisfied with the misery that was already the lot of millions in her adopted city alone, she took her mission global and tried to derail international attempts to stop the population explosion that is both a cause and consequence of poverty. It would appear that she wished to perpetuate, rather than alleviate, poverty and suffering so that her mission could continue into perpetuity.
I have heard that there exist beggar-lords. These are people who deliberately mutilate children so that these children will evoke pity in people and who would give more generously as a result of the mutilation they see. Unfortunately, these beggar-lords are not celebrated on the front pages of newspapers. For if they were, they would be out of that business. No one could ever imagine that the beggar-lords do it for some greater good. That is, I believe, the fundamental difference between them and the likes of those who inflict harm with a clear conscience. I think C.S.Lewis put it best when he noted that
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
The Spanish Inquisition was not so merciless because they were evil but rather because they were so convinced of their righteousness. MT was not plauged by doubt or moral ambiguity. She knew what her god expected her to do and she did it regardless of who she had to enlist the support of.
Dr. Chatterjee's book is a welcome addition to a growing literature on the MT phenomenon. Pointing out that the emperor's new clothes hide little is not very popular with the cheering crowd of admirers. One reviewer, Mr. Khushwant Singh, went so far as to claim that Chatterjee was spitting against the wind. But I believe that the wind will change. In an age where information is so freely accessible, the truth cannot be concealed too long. The final verdict, to my mind, is in but not fully known. Satyameva jayate!