Did you know that Dubai has started selling real estate digitally? Yes, it’s as bizarre as buying stars online. The world is changing fast digitally. It’s an amazing world we live in now. You could spend your whole day in your room and still be able to connect to the world.
Whether it’s your grandmother sending you those clichéd good morning messages or your friend sending you yet another dark reel, everybody uses the internet and to some extent gets influenced by it.
Unfortunately, not everything in this world is white-like pure. We have a lot of people creating and promoting negative content like below-the-belt – roast culture, kids doing everything but attending school and so on.
It’s hard to decide what’s “content” and what’s not, what are the defining factors? Well, you can’t tell. And then these creators or should I say spiritual Baba’s creators such as Aniruddhacharya Maharaj and Abhinav Arora have the internet divided.
If you are one of the lucky ones, then you might not be aware of these spiritual gurus’ or rather content creators.
Here’s the thing, being a ‘Baba’ in India is never going to get out of style, and taking things to a whole new yet concerning level is the 10-year-old boy named Abhinav Arora, who claims to be the ‘Bal sant.’
Google search will tell you that Abhinav Arora’s net worth is 5 crore rupees. What it won’t tell you is that this innocent kid is being exploited by his manager who happens to be his father too. The problem is this innocent kid is controlled by his manager, who is his father.
And by saying controlled, I mean it. Every word that this kid utters is his father’s doing almost like a toy was being controlled with a remote.
It is almost as if his father has pimped him out to gain some extra money. With popularity, comes trollers. Unfortunately, trolls pay no regard to age, they don’t think twice before commenting nasty mean things on a kid and as always comment some pretty mean things to him, often forgetting that he is a kid and probably doesn’t even know what he is doing.
There are hundreds of YouTubers posting roast videos online and bashing this young kid for his responses, tours, interviews, and whatnot. They should have called out the parents or the persons who are behind it.
The problem with having a kid-creator is that they don’t understand what’s happening around them and why people are so mean to them. Abhinav is not the only kid who is facing criticism, a lot of parents out there put their children through this for mere money.
These kids, often, deprived of education, and a normal childhood fall into these traps because of their parents. The saddest thing is that despite their parents knowing the whole truth, they never seem to care about their kid’s mental health.
Making spiritual content, and gaining fame through it has somewhat been a part of India’s online world. Things go downhill when people start believing these internet sensations.
Using the current famous example, Aniruddhacharya Maharaj aka the Pookie Baba is also trending now.
Known for his funny and cute replies to his followers, he has gained such fame. Charging around 10 Lakhs for one Satsang session, he mostly posts videos online where he responds to his followers’ questions with something funny and cute, hence earning him the name.
This doesn’t sound problematic at all, right? Well, sorry for being the bearer of bad news. He is notoriously known to divert problems by replying to something so absurd that it gets confusing whether he is solving your problem or making fun of it being considered a spiritual Guru.
For example, a woman has shared that her in-laws have tried to abuse her by hitting her and mixing poison with her food, to which he cuts her off and replies that if there were poison in her food, how is she alive? He failed to provide her with a proper solution and turned everything into a joke.
Many times, he asks his Sabha some weird questions, like what can you add to make 70 into a 17? One can’t help but notice if he attempts to distract his beloved audience from asking anything real.
Before you start hating me for hating such content, were you aware of the fact that Pookie Baba attended the premiere of Bigg Boss? For context, Bigg Boss is solely famous for showing the aggressive personality of the contestants for entertainment purposes. A Spiritual Baba attending an entertainment show in the garb of gaining fame, Ironic enough?
It is a proven fact about the internet that ‘jo chalta hai wahi bikta hai’ (what works, sells) and a large chunk of the population follows this.
In real life, people often go to such Babas because they feel that their religion has failed them to provide the necessary support. Usually the less fortunate are the ones who get manipulated.
They often don’t have the education to understand what’s happening is wrong, and well, they don’t realize that it’s all a business. What’s even surprising is that even the educated ones get manipulated. There are a lot of people online who share their stories about getting scammed by such people.
Another disheartening reason for their popularity is social media. Even if they are getting trolled, they are getting views, which for them are again, a profit.
If we truly want to stop this, we need to stop giving them attention. We as the audience need to recognize it as wrong and stop this Baba Culture that tries to gain popularity and earn profit in the name of religion. It not only degrades our thought process but also our religion from the actual good values.
More importantly, we need to understand that any child creator probably isn’t aware of what they are doing, and hence, it is our responsibility to be RESPONSIBLE.
Authored by Harbani Goindi, a 3rd year B.Voc. Media and Communication student at Fergusson.
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