The Indian who fights for Native Americans
Sadhguru is back to doing what the world needs to be done
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I’m not good ‘disciple’ material so when I got an opportunity to adopt a guru online a few months ago, I decided to try it out. Sadhguru is quite a character, with a rare ability to constantly surprise me with his unusual take on things. He’s 63 now, but one of those ‘never-a-dull-moment’ kind of people. Like most famous gurus, he has had his fair share of controversy. But the way I see it, he has done far more good than most of us. So I feel he’s entitled to use his time to do more of the same, instead of wasting it countering countless accusations of those who have done nothing of any consequence in the world.
One of Sadhguru’s teachings that I have been struggling to grasp is that we should do ‘what the world needs.’ I mean how on earth will I know what the world needs. But recently I saw him actually put his teaching into practice. Let me explain.
I began following Sadhguru around the time lockdowns were imposed in India in mid-March 2020. I was stuck at home, and I needed to take on something with a challenge. Meditation has been a big bugbear for me. What made it particularly galling was it’s as Indian as anything can be, and yet, I, an Indian, couldn’t make the slightest headway in it. So I signed up for his online Inner Engineering course, and have been industriously pegging away at it ever since. Not much progress, I have to admit. But yesterday, I was struggling to follow an audiobook on the Bhagavadgita, where this great warrior Arjuna tells Krishna (a much beloved Indian God), that it would be such a waste if he spends years trying to learn meditation, and dies without succeeding. At which, Krishna replies it will not go to waste. Arjuna will be reborn in a family where meditation is practised in his next life, and pick up where he left off in this life. I mean in his progress in meditation. That made the whole meditation exercise seem a bit less futile as I like this whole idea of reincarnations. I mean imagine, if I, who don’t have a head of heights, end up being reborn as a bird. I’m trying to imagine myself as a crow flying high in the sky, looking down, and saying, “Oh, crap.” Come to think of it, is that why flying crows crap on us?
Coming back to Sadhguru. Anyway, he was stuck in the Isha Yoga Center in India, just like I was stuck at home. He usually never stays long at one place and is always traveling, making speeches at international forums, organizing these massive rallies to save India’s rivers, planting zillions of trees… in short, doing what needs to be done in the world.
Then one day, I see Sadhguru has pulled a Houdini act and popped up in Tennessee (where he has another Yoga Centre), right in the midst of Covid when most flights were canceled.
By now, I was beginning to get a feel for Sadhguru’s mindset. So I wasn’t too surprised when he shortly announced that he would be going on a motorcycle tour of the USA. You just can’t keep a good man down, Covid or not!
Sadhguru knows how to use social media to get his message across. Here he is discussing sound and other things with Taboo of the Black Eyed Peas. Here he gets on Logan Paul’s podcast. Here he describes his trip to his daughter back in India. Here he gets into deep stuff with a group of movers and shakers in Los Angeles, while in between finding time to drop in on Will Smith.
What really took me by surprise is that Sadhguru has again found ‘something that needs to be done in the world.’ A 63-year-old guru going on a 36-day, 10,000 mile, motorbike trip across 18 states in the US is an amazing feat. Doing it just to raise awareness of the plight of native Americans takes it to a whole new level, and it’s caught the imagination of the world’s netizens.
The indigenous people of the US or the native Americans are in a sorry state. From what I understand and I may be wrong, there are about 80 million of native Americans left, with many living on reservations. Their main food was the bison with somewhere between 30–60 million roaming the plains of the US when Colombus landed. To get control over the native Americans, the European settlers decided to kill off their food, and by 1884, there were just 325 bison left. The scale of that slaughter is truly terrible and mindboggling.
It gets much worse.
It was not just the bison that was slaughtered. Those founding fathers of the US actually offered immigrants a fee for slaughtering indigenous Americans: $7 for a woman’s scalp, $5 for a man’s scalp, and $3 for a kid’s scalp. Thinking about that made my heart go out to these people who have endured so much.
Those who survived this genocide, and the destruction of their way of living, were confined to the reservations. Keep in mind that these are people who for generations have hunted for their food. They don’t have a clue about farming the land. They were not even legally allowed to worship their Gods till the 1970s, and didn’t have a vote till around the same time.
Giving them free food and alcohol was the last straw, taking away meaning from their lives, and destroying the dignity of these once-proud people. Even the land where the reservations are, the land which is everything to these people, is being taken away by farmers. How can farmers buy lands reserved for the indigenous people?
This is the cause that Sadhguru, who isn’t a US citizen, has taken up. Somehow, in the midst of Covid, he has managed to find something that needs to be done in the world.
So centuries after Columbus claimed to have found India, we have an Indian trying to raise awareness of the plight of American Indians in America.
Truly a citizen of the world.
