Chasing The Godman Dream
How Sriram from Chennai found his calling (scam).
On a boring Wednesday, as most are, he sat on his couch. He was feeling one and only one emotion — boredom. Sriram was bored. Both in the moment and life in general. He wondered how he got here. In life. How did an upper-class, Brahmin, Tamil Boy who did Mechanical Engineering end up doing what he was doing. How was he now a 32 year old……godman.
When Sriram was 21 and on the verge of completing his Engineering, he knew one thing. He didn’t want to live his life as an Engineer. He thought it fuckin’ sucked. Being a nameless robot in the corporate machinery that we call life. He needed to find his scam. He needed to find a way to be rich and powerful without having to do any work. After rejecting various other fields like sports and teaching and spoken-word-poetry, he had almost given up. But Sriram was astute.
On one of his family’s bi-daily temple visits, they introduced him to their baba-of-choice. Every family has one. Sriram had an epiphany. One simple SWOT analysis and three 60ml Diamond triple-x rum later, he knew. He knew this was his calling.
There were many things that added up. The thought of seeing himself as a godman had occurred to him once before when he was 12. The invitation card of his thread ceremony had his name written as ‘Sri Sriram’. Having 2 Sri’s consecutively in your name was not a mere coincidence, surely. Sriram also had another important trait — inexplicable amounts of self-confidence. When he was eight, he once told his classmate that he could fly. His classmate, Mohammed Khan, said “OK” because he thought he was merely talking about being taken off a no-fly list and the aviation authorities had permitted his family to fly again. Conversation is subjective, you know how it works. To this day Sriram believes that somewhere out there, there is a person named Mohammed who thinks he can fly. That lack of self-awareness is paramount for a godman.
In Chennai, parents only want 2 things: (1) to be able to pray to the almighty every waking minute of the day and (2) for their kids to become Engineers. Who says science and religion can’t go together? Chennai has been producing industrial quantities of god fearing engineers for decades now. If you’re one who lives their life seeking a good oxymoron, look no further than good ol’ C-town. Convincing his parents that this would be his career of choice after graduating would be a challenge. But what he thought would be a week-long set of fights and shouting matches, ended rather quickly. His Brahmin parents were so religious that when he said he had access to the man in the cloud, they believed him instantly and became his first two official early-bird bhakts. Slowly the extended family followed and then neighbours and friends and slowly but surely, Sri Sri Ram built an empire over the last decade.
Today he lives in a palace. Not metaphorical. Literally. But can never go to the old government liquor store like he used to. He has three cars but can’t just cruise down the streets in them. He has enough money to buy a mall. But all that he’s permitted to wear is saffron. Not very flattering. He smokes Cuban cigars that that the Havana branch of his religious trust ships over, but can’t ever blaze up a fat-J of Mary-Jane like he used to at 20 minutes past 4PM every day. He found his scam, but got engulfed in it.
He got everything, but actually got nothing. He is…..bored.
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