Baba News of the Week in Review

Admittedly this news report arrives after the fact, but I thought it might be useful to post some of this information, which I learned about from emails from friends or posts to the Baba-Talk Listserv.

Following the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, a youtube video of the inside of the Leopold Café in Mumbai, where seven people were shot to death and several others injured by terrorists on November 26, showed the “Real Happiness” Baba poster on the wall (see photo below). I was told that Farhang Jehani, co-owner of the café, was from a Baba-lover family. He was quoted in an interview saying that the gunmen did not enter the restaurant, so it’s unlikely that they saw Baba’s picture there. A photo taken outside the café on the day of the attacks and featured in a New York Times online slideshow revealed an eerie fragmentary image of Meher Baba on the window of a vehicle riddled with bullets. I suppose Baba-lovers might feel that if the terrorists had caught a glimpse of the God-Man, Meher Baba, they would have unwittingly received his darshan (meaning literally “sight”), a compassionate dispensation of grace despite their horrendous actions. Let us hope they did. We know that the people inside the restaurant must have seen it.

Michael Files is a young artist from Myrtle Beach who wrote an account of his experience of the terrorist events in Mumbai as a Baba-lover; see it here.

Above, Love Street Bookstore wallis Dina Snow Gibson and Kathy Hill hold up the "Real Happiness" poster, which is the one seen in the Leopold Cafe video.

In other news, I learned that a group of Saranap, CA, residents is protesting a “sanctuary project” which they claim features “harshly colored white domes” planned by Sufism Reoriented, a branch of Sufism devoted to Meher Baba. They have organized under the name SOS, “Save Our Saranap.” They say they are not anti-Sufi, only trying to preserve their residential neighborhood.See also the Oakland Tribune article. (I am not siding with the critics; it's just that I became aware of their movement before I knew about the SR project itself.)