Rationalism versus superstition - guess who won?

The night a guru tried to kill me on TV

When Surender Sharma said he could kill me with magic, I had to put him to the test. The result was a triumph for rationalism

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Well, the pig still didn't fly. But the mere idea of it kept millions and millions of viewers all over India glued to their TV sets. I was laughing throughout. Not just because it was a scene of superb absurdity, but mainly because I felt that so many people out there in front of their screens urgently needed a signal from me that there was nothing to be worried about. In fact, I laughed the tantric out of power. After hysteric escalation and a dramatic countdown, it all ended as you would well have anticipated, with the defeated tantric silently quitting the field – down, out and over. Reason had won the day, as James Randi later happily commented.


Life is not always like that. But this TV show turned the tables. It influenced the climate in public debates inside and outside Indian TV studios far more deeply than I expected when I caught hold of Sharma. Our experiment became a textbook example for the hollowness of tantra-mantra power. Prick a pin in the great balloon and it comes crashing down, that was the message. But make no mistake; it's not always as easy and rarely as amusing. Recently, we were able to put behind bars, with the help of a TV documentary, a tantric who used to make his living with a dangerous stunt of rare brutality: he trampled on the bodies of little infants brought to him in hundreds by their illiterate parents to benefit from the godly powers of his feet. A local politician and high priest, to whom I talked during the programme, defended the holy man in the name of religion. This shows the complexity of the problem.


For several decades, rationalists in India have been working quite successfully on different levels to educate people against spiritual fraudsters of all denominations and ranks. In earlier years limited to (still important) village campaigns, the television revolution has opened up new dimensions. Last year, I personally attended some 240 programmes on various channels. Some of them made an enormous impact.


While Sai Baba celebrated a recent birthday, as usual surrounded by India's high society including top politicians, one TV channel gave me an opportunity to perform and explain his trademark tricks for any kid to try at home – a landslide success, but the king kept sitting on his throne. However, these kinds of superstitions are slowly coming into the firing line of a courageous new media force supporting the rationalist line. The next generation of India's top godmen are already starting to appreciate the shift. Recently, one of them threw away the mic and fled with bodyguards and armored cars when I came into a TV studio. Pity.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/mar/23/surender-sharma-tv-ritual-edamaruku