Swami Aksharananda and the concept of my Jehovah Witness friend

Apr 30, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

You think you understand life? Well you may try but I doubt we can ever understand it. I am not a very religious person. I embrace the philosophical thought of existentialism. But ironically religious people have had an undue influence on me.
I was strongly influenced in my academic work by Catholic nun, Sister Mary Noel Menezes. She is one of the persons I respect and admire intensely. There was the Jesuit priest, Father Andrew Morrison. I owe a lot to Father Morrison. The Jehovah Witness denomination has a special place in my heart.
I came out of poverty and achieved social elevation because of a devout Jehovah Witness, Fred Philips. He was the administrator of the Georgetown Club and lived where Bonny’s Supermarket is, on Church Street. I left school at the primary level and lived a wasteful life on Durban Street. Fred Philips saw potential in me and bought all the books I needed to study privately for my GCE. If it weren’t for that man, I would probably have had a miserable future.
I simply can never forget what this staunch and devoted Jehovah Witness did for me. I have a friend who is a Jehovah Witness, Julian King, whose son is a long-standing staff at the Kaieteur News. One day, Julian gave me the answer to a question about God that somehow stays with me and won’t go away.
I asked Julian how God could allow people to preach the word of God, practise religion in a place of worship yet be bad people who do wrong things. I told Julian that I could understand how ordinary people could get away with it but why doesn’t God act against people who are priests, imams and pandits but who do terrible things; things for which God should punish them.
Julian with unrestrained nonchalance and a smile said, “Freddie you must understand that the Devil comes in many forms. The Devil tries to defeat God by assuming different roles like preachers.” In other words, the Devil gets people to lose their belief in God by inserting himself into people who commit sins in the name of God.”
This makes perfect sense to me. What do you think? How can people preach the word of God and be racist, narrow-minded, dishonest etc?
When I read Swami Aksharananda’s poisonous condemnation of AFC leader, Khemraj Ramjattan and Aksharananda’s politically dishonest portrait of the PNC in Government and his distorted description of Guyanese history in Tuesday’s edition of the Stabroek News, the first thing that came to my mind was, “Isn’t this guy a very holy man who is disgracing himself?’
After reading his jaundiced analysis only one type of assessment flew into my mind – this was a tribal support for the PPP to get Indians to vote for the PPP in the election. One thing for sure; after reading his caricatured commentary on Guyanese history, I have lost all respect for him. I can never see him as a true religious figure. The part of his venom that really made me livid was his return to the murder of Walter Rodney without even the decent recognition that Courtney Crum-Ewing was murdered in the midst of the election campaign. There is no mention of Ronald Waddell.
Why is this so? One has to go back to ancient Hindu scripts and what those documents say about dark-skinned people, Africans and the framework of the caste system. When Aksharananda (his real name is Oudaipaul Singh; the Swami title is a self-imposed one) points to Walter Rodney and leaves out Waddell and Crum-Ewing, his caste mentality was at work.
Waddell and Crum-Ewing are Africans. They were victims of an Indian Government. In the caste system, Africans are put on the lower rung of the civilization scheme. In Aksharananda’s thinking much weight needs not be put on the lives of these two Guyanese activists. The so-called Swami told us that a trade unionist was kidnapped and flown over waters in a GDF helicopter, and threatened with death.
He is referring to Gordon Todd in 1979. The incident never happened and Mr. Todd is on record as saying so. He was taken against his will and left in a far away place to walk back to Georgetown. Next, the so-called Swami refers to the concept of “PNC atrocities.” One wonders where the Swami was the past fifteen years when Jagdeo was on a rampage.
I guess the two attacks on my life don’t matter to the so-called Swami because like Waddell and Crum-Ewing, I am dark-skinned. In the caste system, an Indian like me would be just next to Africans. I think it is called Chamar. Hey! I am a Chamar.

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Swami Aksharananda and the concept of my Jehovah Witness friend

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