Amma's multifaceted empire, built on hugs

There are entourages — and then there is the retinue of Mata Amritanandamayi, a guru known simply as Amma. On Friday, she began a two-month North American tour during which she will be accompanied by 275 volunteers.

They plan to ride in four buses across the continent from Bellevue, Washington, to Marlborough, Massachusetts, visiting 11 cities, including New York. And at each stop along the way, Amma willsit on stage for 15 hours at a stretch, greeting her thousands of devotees.

Amma is best known for literally embracing the masses; she has hugged millions of people around the world, a feat that has earned her the nickname “the hugging saint.” Her status as a spiritual therapist has attracted a large following in the United States. Here, however, what Amma offers is far more significant and complex. She has built a vast organisation that is the envy of both India’s public and private sectors. As Oommen Chandy, the chief minister of the state of Kerala, told me: “From nothing, she has built an empire.”

I first heard about Amma roughly a year ago, when I was living in India teaching journalism as a Fulbright scholar. People kept telling me about a former fishing village in Kerala, that was now a utopia in the jungle. Visitors talked about a mega-ashram, complete with a modern university and free health care, and described it as a gleaming cityscape where foreigners in pristine white uniforms swept the streets and scrubbed bird droppings off park benches. The entire community supposedly worshiped a middle-aged woman whose devotees came by the thousands, hailing her as a demigod.

They said she performed miracles, diverting storms and turning water into pudding. They said she’d built a place where everything, from light switches to recycling plants, worked as it was meant to — and this was perhaps the greatest miracle of all.

Lured by these tales, I decided to visit this place, called Amritapuri, to see for myself. To get there, I rode in a taxi through the backwaters of Kerala, past villages where bare-chested men fished from dugout canoes, a landscape that, unlike much of India, has changed little in centuries. When I saw high-rise buildings jutting above the canopy of palm trees, it was clear we were getting close. Traditionally, ashrams are quiet and secluded — much like monasteries — but Amma’s ashram was so vast and built up that it resembled a small metropolis.

After exiting the taxi at the main gate — there are no cars within the ashram itself — I set out on a series of footpaths that wound through a 100-acre campus containing the buildings of Amrita University (also founded by Amma) as well as dormitories, temples, restaurants and shops. I eventually reached a great hall where people were gathered, waiting patiently to meet Amma.

Coveted spot

With the sort of effort required to navigate a New York City subway car at rush hour, I made my way through the crowd towards Amma, who was perched on a cushioned chair on a stage. One by one, people dropped to their knees and let her cradle them. In a span of roughly four minutes, she consoled a sobbing woman, chatted with an aged man and conducted a wedding. One of Amma’s many attendants, a volunteer who served as her press aide, helped me nudge, wedge and high-step my way to a coveted spot of honour at Amma’s feet.

I asked Amma how she maintained this pace. She smiled. Then she pinched my cheek and began to tickle me — the way a mother might tease a troublesome toddler — and said through an interpreter, “I am connected to the eternal energy source, so I am not like a battery that gets used up.”

In fact, Amma has energised an entire organisation that often fills the vacuum left by government. When a tsunami devastated parts of southern India in 2004, it took the state government of Kerala five days merely to announce what it would do by way of aid and relief. Amma, however, began a response within hours, providing food and shelter to thousands of people; in the following years, her organisation says, it has built more than 6,000 houses.

How Amma’s efforts are paid for remains something of a mystery. Her organisation raises about $20 million a year from sources worldwide, according to a spokesman. And the M A Centre, her United States organisation, is registered as a church and thus doesn’t have to disclose its finances the way secular tax-exempt groups do.

Huge donations

But this doesn’t seem to have dissuaded would-be donors. In 2003, APJ Abdul Kalam, then the president, was so impressed with Amma’s charitable work that he donated almost his entire annual salary to her organisation. His enthusiasm may stem from the simple fact that Amma appears to do what politicians cannot. Chandy, the chief minister of Kerala, told me rather dejectedly, “The government has so many limitations, but Amma gives an order and next day the work will start.”

I woke up after my first night in the ashram to Amma’s plump, smiling face looming from a giant portrait above my bed. On the way to the cafe for breakfast, I passed a printing operation and met a bright-eyed worker who told me that his crew had just finished a production run of Amma’s biography, in Russian. This authorised story of Amma’s life, which has been translated into 31 languages, intertwines a tale of grinding Indian poverty with the fantastical: She was born poor, into a low caste, but as a child would give away whatever valuables the family had to the less fortunate, which prompted her father to tie her to a tree and beat her. From an early age, she hugged strangers. She eventually left home to live in the wild, where the biography relates that she survived by eating whatever she could find, a diet that included shards of glass and human feces.
By the time she was a young woman, the biography continues, she was performing miracles — kissing cobras, diverting rainstorms and feeding more than a thousand people from a single, small pot.

Gurus emerged thousands of years ago in India as learned explainers of the Upanishads, philosophical teachings underpinning the Hindu religion.

“The guru was someone to be awed,” says Karen Pechilis, an expert in female gurus. “You stand back, you keep your distance, and you are dazzled.” They generally weren’t big on snuggling.

Amma turned this notion on its head, Professor Pechilis says, by combining the role of the spiritual guide with that of the mother who protects and comforts.

Amma’s transformation from an eccentric girl into the mother guru started in the late 1970s. Word of her hugging spread, and she received a steady stream of visitors, many of them Americans like Neal Rosner, a Chicago native, who would take up residence. Rosner, who moved to India after graduating from high school and still lives at Amritapuri, told me he was one of the first to donate a significant amount — $10,000 from selling a rare coin collection — to improve the ashram. Before long, it had a dormitory, a free medical clinic and a vocational job-training centre.

Crisscrossing the globe

And then Amma was crisscrossing the globe to promote her Hindu philosophy, which espouses love, introspection and selflessness, as well as her many charities, which now include hunger and disaster relief, free health care for the poor, orphanages and recycling efforts.

Her trips have become increasingly elaborate. In each city, she takes over a hotel or a convention center, where she feeds and hugs thousands of well-wishers. Events also occur at Amma’s satellite ashrams; she has eight in the United States, including a 164-acre campus near San Ramon, California. The tours have helped Amma expand her following and generate donations for her hospital and her charities. Over breakfast in Amritapuri, I chatted with Dante Sawyer, an American who has lived in the ashram for more than a decade and volunteers in the foreign visitors office. As I sipped my cappuccino, perused the cafe’s pizza menu and contemplated a swim in the ashram’s pool, I asked if these amenities weren’t a bit indulgent for a spiritual place.

“If this were a traditional ashram with just huts and rice gruel, there would not be this many people, or they would come for a day and then get the hell out,” he said. “Amma feels it would be a tragedy if people didn’t come here for their vacation because they couldn’t get a pizza — so, OK, we have pizza.”

One day, Amma offered lunch to a gathering of several hundred devotees in an ornate temple. A team of 20 women scooped rice and curry onto plates that they passed from hand to hand — old-fashioned-fire-brigade style — until they reached Amma. Then she personally handed the meals to the followers. One of those receiving a plate was Maneesha Sudheer, a computer scientist at Amrita University.

Dr Sudheer gained some attention for developing a landslide-detection programme that impressed R Chidambaram, the principal scientific adviser to the government. One of Chidambaram’s goals is to create a system to predict Himalayan landslides, which cause hundreds of deaths and costly damages each year. The technology seemed so promising that  Chidambaram made a trip to visit Amma at the ashram. He told me that Amma, who has only a fourth-grade education, was “far more successful” than the Indian government in attracting top-caliber scientific minds.

Dr Sudheer invited me to her lab at the university, reached by a short walk from the temple. She showed me a gigantic landslide simulator that she had helped design to test her wireless landslide sensors. Many of the labs looked like ones you might see at MIT, save for the fact that Amma’s picture was displayed more or less everywhere.

Amrita University has 17,000 students, who pay tuition that is much higher than that of state-run schools. Critics complain that the university caters mainly to the wealthy, and to a great extent it does, but it’s hard to argue with the school’s success. Its medical school is generally well regarded, and Amrita also offers a dual-degree programme in business with the State University of New York at Buffalo.

“We call Amma the best headhunter there is,” said Bipin Nair, who is a dean of Amrita’s school of biotechnology and is leading an effort to create an affordable insulin pump for diabetics. “Every year, when she comes back from a trip to North America or Europe, she has a list of people who have expressed their desire to be a part of the ashram.”
Born and schooled in India, Mr Nair did postdoctoral work at the University of Tennessee at Memphis. He landed a job at a biotech company in Seattle and bought a six-bedroom house, and yet he felt dissatisfied. He and his wife, Dr Geetha Kumar, met Amma during one of her American tours and decided to move to the ashram in 2004.

Mr Nair does not take a salary, working only for room and board. “What we live in now is probably smaller than most bathrooms in the US.” he told me, but added: “I don’t have to do anything. I am not paying a mortgage. I am not cooking, cleaning or shopping — everything is taken care of — all I need to do here is focus on my work.”

Selling point

People who work without pay keep costs down at the ashram, a selling point that entices donors. “When someone gives one dollar to Amma,” one ashram spokesman told me, “it is really worth 100 times more than that, because if you give that same money to another institution, they have to pay the administrative costs.” Benefactors have included people like Jeff Robinov, the president of the Warner Bros. Pictures Group.

The ashram’s treasurer, Swami Ramakrishnananda, acknowledged that its finances were not open to the public, but he added that it is audited annually both by the Indian government and by the ashram’s own internal auditors. I asked if there was an official, like a chief compliance officer, who could be contacted if people saw money being misused. “Yes, of course,” Ramakrishnananda replied. “They can go directly to Amma.”
In the United States, a charitable organisation typically has to file for tax-exempt status, be approved by the IRS and then file an annual Form 990 detailing, among other things, how much money it collected, what it paid its top employees, who served on its board, and whether it spent money on lobbying. If, however, an organisation declares itself a church — as Amma’s centre in the United States does — it is not required to do this and there is far less transparency and public scrutiny.

In general when it comes to religious organisations, there is a “possibility for abuse,” says Roger Colinvaux, a law professor and expert on tax-exempt organisations at the Catholic University of America. “Churches don’t have to apply for tax-exempt status, they don’t have to file an information return, and it is difficult for the IRS to audit them.”VS Somanath, dean of Amrita’s business school, said: “By God’s grace we have not been hit by any scandal, and so people are willing to open their wallets and their purses. The image is clean. Amma is like Jack Welch — she’s a great communicator — and the growth is spectacular.”

Amma’s authority occasionally ends up shaping the personal lives of her followers. I talked to one middle-aged American follower who said he racked up $40,000 in credit-card debt for multiple trips to India to see Amma.

“I figured people take loans for education, for houses, for cars,” he said. “I’m doing it for my spiritual growth.” Two of my guides later tried to dissuade me from talking further with the man.

Another foreigner, who has lived at the ashram for years, told me that longtime residents were “not supposed to make big life-changing decisions without telling Amma.” She sometimes has “really strong opinions about whether certain people should have kids,” said the devotee, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being identified as a dissenter within the community.

In our conversation, Amma was adamant that she does not tell her devotees when to marry, whether to have children or how to live their lives, and she seemed intent on dispelling the notion that her organization was in any way a cult.

“I don’t like it when people say that I have divine powers,” she told me. (This preference had not influenced her authorized biography, however, which discussed at length the miracles she had performed.) “I don’t tell people that you can only attain enlightenment through one way,” she said. “If you think love is a cult, then I can’t do anything. My religion is love.”