I guess I should comment, since I've been more vocal than usual about the latest TMO travesty. :-)
1. I'm pretty surprised that a reporter would not object to being presented only four older pandits as potential "interviewees." They were obviously cherry-picked by the MUM administration. Any real reporter would have said this explicitly in their article and demanded to be able to pick a few others at random. She obviously had Hindu interpreters there to allow her to do this. Why didn't she do it? 2. As others have noted, the "pandit compound" resembles a concentration camp more than anything else. 3. I was sorely disappointed that the reporter was so pussywhipped by the TMO spin machine that she either never heard of the "paid yagyas" or, if she did, didn't think they were worth mentioning. She *did* get that the pandits are really paid only $50, the rest of their nominal $200 being supposedly "held in trust" for their parents, but she didn't seem to get the enormous PROFIT that the TM movement is making off of these indentured servants' labor. They get paid 63 cents an hour for services that the TMO is charging thousands and tens of thousands of dollars for. The reporter seemed to have been snookered into believing that the only thing they were "chanting for" was world peace, not to "cure" the boil on some rich TMer's ass. Throughout the entire article, the reporter parroted the party line told to her by the MUM shills, and even quoted one source as believing that "no one is getting rich from this program," when that simply isn't true. Any time you can charge gullible cult followers tens of thousands of dollars to chant a "yagya" while paying them 63 cents an hour, somebody's getting rich. 4. I was also disappointed that the reporter wound up parroting what she was told about the whole program being run on "donated funds" when the organization running it has assets in excess of a billion dollars. Again, a real reporter would have done a little pre-research and then asked, "WHY are you asking for 'donations' to run this program if 1) it's so important to the world and 2) you already have more than enough money to fund it yourselves?" 5. I think it's good that she focused on the "human rights violation" issues, and the living conditions the pandits live and work under, but I don't think she went far enough in her "bottom line" closer. All in all, a first step. It's good that someone is taking notice, but next time they need to send in a real reporter... ________________________________ From: feste37 <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sunday, March 23, 2014 7:46 PM Subject: [FairfieldLife] des moines register article today on the pandits http://www.desmoinesregister.com/comments/article/20140322/BASU/303220080/Maharishi-Vedic-City-Inside-compound-Rekha-Basu Main article: http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20140322/BASU/303220080/Maharishi-Vedic-City-Inside-compound-Rekha-Basu
