I’m currently reading Gregory David Robert’s ‘Shantaram’. It’s an interesting book, albeit slow and meandering, but interesting none the less. For me, having stayed in Mumbai for a bit, it is especially more interesting as it chronicles many fascinating things about Mumbai that I did not know / have never heard of. One of these being the Den of Standing Babas!

When I read the bit about them in the book, I was really intrigued! Babas or Sadhus as they are commonly known in India are religious men who renounce everything material in their search for nirvana. The book records that the standing Babas are men who have taken a vow to never sit down. They do everything standing up (sleep, eat and yes, even their number 2s! They do that in a sitting chair position, not taking the weight of their feet). They are of a belief that if they suffer enough pain in this lifetime, they would have repented for their sins and would be able to escape the mortal cycle of seven births and be one with god (as in get moksha). The book shares that there is a place in Mumbai where these babas come together, share kashmiri hash and walk around/swing to devotional music in a mesmerized smoked up haze.

Shantaram also chronicles how these babas endure crushing pain, where in the beginning their legs start to swell up (due the blood not being pumped properly) with their veins jutting out and then over time how their legs become thin sticks with only a transparent film of skin on them. A really moving picture… but I was not sure whether the den of the standing babas really existed or if they were a materialization of Robert’s fertile imagination. I didn’t think they really existed because I could not believe that humans could be capable of enduring such torment for the promise of something that might not really be there.

So I did some research on the net on them and found that they really do exist! There is a now some info available about them on the net… I think they became some sort of celebrities after their mention in Shantaram. I found a few entries by visiting firangs on travel sites that asked about info where one could find the den of standing babas!! (One query mentions that he had read about the adventures of Shantaram and wanted to do a list of things that Robert’s had done in the book!) Their new found stardom has the ‘standing baba’; now even defined in Wikipedia. But for me the one conclusive proof that they do exist came as a you tube video by a Music channel anchor Shenaz interviewing some of these Babas. Check out the video.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojeR1fOKv_A

It’s amazing how these people, and young people at that (one baba in the video is just 35 yrs old) have given up everything in this world and are enduring a life time of incredible pain in their faith of a better afterlife. Makes you wonder….Would God rather reward humans who inflict self pain (and contribute nothing much else to the world, society, the people they live with) with nirvana and have normal people who are just trying to be good honest human beings bound in trails of earthy life before they are allowed in his realm?

Hmm… that is the eternal question of afterlife I guess. We’ll probably have to wait till someone makes the superest ever Super Computer (something like the ‘Deep Thought’ from ‘Hitchhikers Guide the Galaxy’) before we can come by the answer to ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’. Ha!