Sai Baba's School Records - A New Light 4

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By way of a quick recap, we have been discussing the possibility of Sathya Sai Baba's true birthdate as being October 4 1929, and not November 23 1926 as we have all been led to believe. The latter date was chosen as a means of hijacking a cryptic statement and mentioned date by Sri Aurobindo - a renowned contemporaneous saint - that signified the descent of "Krishna consciousness" onto earth on November 24 1926. Sathya Sai Baba's records from three of the schools he attended universally agree on his date of birth being October 4 1929 without exception. The young Sai Baba (Sathyanarayana Raju) also spent long periods of time away from school.

In this section we'll discuss circumstantial evidence that point to 1929 as being the real year of birth as well as it's knock-on effects regarding other monumental events in Raju's life. The devotee editors of LIMF attempt to present an unconvincing argument to explain away the glaring date discrepancy by referring to the allegedly relaxed recording of census information in pre-Independence India and why dates and birth registrations were carried out much later after the fact. This conflicts with their earlier insinuation that Raju's family deliberately engaged in deception in order to facilitate his so-called career prospects by making him appear younger. Of course nobody would begrudge any parents their ambitions for their children, and indeed it is related that Raju's parents wished for him to be highly educated so that he could attain a prestigious job working for local government. This argument flies right out of the window when you consider that changing the birth year to 1929 (supposedly three years "younger" than his "original" year of 1926) did him a disservice after all; both the Bukkapatnam and Uravakonda records show that most of Raju's classmates were born in the early to mid-1930s. If the family were deliberately trying to fix his date, they should have thought about bringing it forward into the early 1930s so that Raju could be on a par with his own classmates, putting aside the possibility that their birthdates were faked too. With their "faked" date of 1929, they ended up making Raju look like one of the older children!

Other anecdotes come from a very popular book - 'Anyatha Saranam Nasthi' - by Smt. Vijayamma Hemchand revealing Sai Baba as being the unwitting source of the 1929 birthdate. Readers should note that Vijayamma and her family first visited Raju in 1945 at a time when he was openly promoting himself as an incarnation of God. They attained an exceptional level of closeness to the young Baba that has been documented elsewhere on this blog. As noted already by Brian Steel:

"In 1945 the little girl's cousins were strolling in the affluent Bangalore suburb of Malleswaram when they heard bhajans being sung and entered the house to listen. Sai Baba, who was present there, invited them to go to Puttaparthi (whose name they had never heard). When they returned to their town of Kuppam (south-east of Bangalore, but in today's Andhra Pradesh), the cousins told the girl's mother about their meeting. The latter was keen for them all to go, but the idea was vetoed by the father, who said: 'You tell me He is sixteen years old and claims to be a reincarnation of Shirdi Sai. This is all humbug'." (p. 12)

If Sathya Sai Baba was considered sixteen years of age in 1945, do the math:

1945 - 16 = 1929

It's almost magical when you factor in the new year of declaration. To wit, Sathya Sai Baba's biographers have always contended that he was fourteen years of age when his momentous declaration of May 23 1940 (as the reincarnation of Shirdi Sai Baba among other things) took place. This is problematic as noted by Erlendur Haraldsson (an eminent devotee author), who contended that the biographers had either got the date of the declaration wrong or that Sathya Sai was thirteen at the time. Now that research has provided new evidence that this declaration took place in 1943, you can check the sums yourself:

1943 - 14 = 1929

Voila! It's amazing that such simple conclusions were under people's noses for so long. Vijayamma's book is good for one thing in particular by informing us that the first official celebration of Sathya Sai's birthday on November 23 took place in 1950, the year his ashram 'Prashanti Nilayam' was formally inaugurated:

"Till that day, prominence had not been given to Swami's Birthday. But that day we prayed to Swami to permit us to celebrate it." (p. 161)

Our recent Shirdi Lies exposé turned up the information that many of the momentous events took place in 1943, namely Raju's being bitten by a scorpion, his announcement of being 'Sai Baba', and then his formally leaving home and material attachments. Combined with the newly released school records that conclusively prove that he was a school student between 1936 and 1943, how is it that the official biography contains such appallingly inaccurate information about how these events took place in 1940? How could Raju be bitten by a scorpion in Uravakonda in March 1940 when he was still studying in the Puttaparthi Government-aided Elementary school and would transfer to Kamalapuram in the next three months? How could he declare himself as 'Sai Baba' and the reincarnation of Shirdi Sai Baba in May 1940 when he was still in the Puttaparthi Elementary school as per the records? And how could he leave home (in Uravakonda) and be free of material attachments in October 1940 when he had gained admittance there in July 1943?

We are dealing with a two-pronged problem; if the events happened with a fourteen-year-old Raju in 1943 then this implies a birthdate of 1929, and if Raju was born in 1929 then this would make him fourteen years of age in 1943. The years 1926 and 1940 don't even figure since neither are supported by the documented and administrative evidence. LIMF tries to fob people off with the following:

"Indian spirituality tends to discourage numerous debates on scholarly details relating to time and space, for it is concerned with a realm beyond time and space. Sri Sathya Sai Baba also disapproves of such debates ... In this light it is not so mystifying that, right from the middle of the 1950s, biographers have accepted 1940 as the year of Declaration. Many important evidences were not readily accessible to researchers at the time - hence, this difference. The year of the Grand Declaration is officially taken as 1940. " - LIMF, p. 149

This argument also flies out of the window when you consider Kasturi's pre-eminent position as Sathya Sai Baba's authorised biographer and his having been granted unfettered access (from 1948 onwards) to the Baba himself in order to collect information, what to speak of being granted permission to speak to the Baba's relatives, friends, classmates and kinsfolk of the village. If it was so easy for the LIMF research team to acquire access to the Baba's school records, why couldn't Kasturi have done it at a time when they were still 'fresh', what to speak of including that information in his work? As we have shown elsewhere, Kasturi's reportage of the 'scorpion bite' incident was decidely sloppy.

Moreoever, we must not forget that we are dealing with an 'Avatar' in Sai Baba, the most powerful Avatar in the history of creation according to him. Consequently, and at least for the sake of his devotees, isn't it appropriate to hammer out all these details and get them correct so that a proper life history can be preserved? One would think that if Jesus Christ had such a great and dominating influence over people for them to divide Time itself into 'Before Christ' and 'Anno Domini' eras, how much more chance exists of a similar division taking place in honour of the great 'Sai Avatar'?

The intrinsic message of this series of articles is to highlight a grand deception and massive cover-up that is going on with Sathya Sai Baba. The usurpation of Sri Aurobindo's "Avatar date" was itself a shameless act in itself, but to proceed with a wholesale arrogation of Shirdi Sai Baba's name and fame and continue the deception for several decades is an action of breathless arrogance and complete disregard for truth and righteousness, ironically two of the values that 'Sathya' Sai Baba appears to stand for. It remains to be seen for how long Raju & Co. can keep up with the charade until the whole empire comes crumbling down by itself, creaking on it's own weak foundations.

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