Radhikaranjan Das: victim of his own folly.

On Raman Reddy’s and Sradhalu Ranade’s website, where every effort is made to misrepresent information with the single purpose of tarnishing the Ashram’s image, Radhikaranjan Das (Radhika) is protrayed as a “poor victim” of the Ashram school’s (S.A.I.C.E.’s) administration. Evidently nothing is more far removed from the truth.

Because the truth is that Radhika is not fit to teach at the S.A.I.C.E. For, teaching at the S.A.I.C.E. is an act of service to the Divine and the Ashram and not a means of self-gratification or self-promotion. There is absolutely nothing in Radhika’s behavior to suggest and support that his pursuit of a teaching career at the S.A.I.C.E. is an act of offering to the Divine. On the contrary he has repeatedly displayed just the contrary, where he has used – or rather misused and abused – the S.A.I.C.E. as an institution, his colleagues and even his students for the purpose of self-gratification and self-promotion.

One may recollect how in his early days as a teacher he misused the S.A.I.C.E.’s name to raise funds that were meant for his personal ambitions which resulted in his immediate expulsion from the S.A.I.C.E. This has been recently recounted in detail on the blog the Public Ashramite. On the same site, one can also find a clear description of how a disgraceful Radhika physically abused some of his adolescent students.

What has not been mentioned is that instead of teaching the subjects of  Sanskrit and Biology as he is supposed to, Radhika has instead always been more keen to try to awe young, easily impressionable, innocent children with some of his stale “tricks” all of which are meant to promote himself as well as his preferred personal ideas. Thus, during his class hours he will typically:

– Use tarot cards to recount the future of the personal lives of his adolescent pupils, telling them who will be more or less successful in life, even more or less wealthy.

– Look into the future of the lives of others, such that of the school’s registrar, whom he despises, and tell his young pupils when the registrar is going to decease.

– Recount the horror stories of ghosts, murders, armed burglaries, etc., that he has written and published instead of recounting the many more beautiful, enriching and educative stories that have been written by numerable other authors.

– Promote his extreme religio-political propaganda to his innocent pupils by brainwashing and giving them distorted, one-sided and misinformed views on issues that have no academic interest or relevance but that are meant to polarize the community based on his preferred political opinions; Peter Heehs’ book “The Lives of Sri Aurobindo” and the issues surrounding the related controversies that have been fabricated has been his preferred topic off late.

More recently, although he has been requested to discontinue taking classes and new teachers have been appointed for taking the classes of his former students, he has been making a public nuisance of himself by deliberately defying the authority of the school’s administrative body. For example, during the school hours, he has been disrupting the classes of his former students by barging into their class rooms and requesting the newly appointed teacher to leave the place to him. He has even been chasing and harassing his former students, asking them not to attend the classes that are held by the teachers who are replacing him and instead to return to him, putting the young students through undue embarrassment and stress.

As though his behavior has not been the most shameful and deplorable to be ever witnessed at the S.A.I.C.E., setting the lowest standards and worst example for all the pupils young and old, he now has even dragged the court into the affairs of the S.A.I.C.E., setting a precedent that only self-centered egomaniacs like himself, Raman, Sradhalu and his mouth-piece Sridharan can be proud of.

Radhika alone is to be held responsible for making himself an accessory to the systematic designs and execution of some sort of an impasse in which he, Raman and Sradhalu hope to trap the S.A.I.C.E. and the Ashram as a part of their political maneuvering. But in so doing Radhika  has shown to all the pupils young and old how, when someone’s Ego, a huge Ego, drunk with power of defying authority that inebriates the head and blinds the intelligence, an Ego that flaunts in public with a holier-than-thou spiritual pretense, can in reality turn a person into a victim of his own folly.

Because  there’s nothing in Radhika’s behavior and actions that even faintly reflects the values that are imparted at the S.A.I.C.E. and upheld by the Ashram and its founders. There’s nothing that indicates Radhika’s dedication to serving the Divine and the Ashram. Instead, Radhika has all along and is even more so clearly displaying that it is more important for him to put his personal interests above and before the interests of the students of the S.A.I.C.E. as well as that of the institution. By his actions he is clearly demonstrating that he is unfit to be a teacher at the S.A.I.C.E. If he had even an iota of decency or dignity left in him he would have resigned fromn the S.A.I.C.E. on his own. But with Raman and Sradhalu as his mentors, he has chosen to suffer their undignified fate.

By: – Well-wishers of Sri Aurobindo Ashram –