'The
Eternal Presence' is a film on Sathya Sai Baba (commonly known as Sai Baba),
a spiritual leader in Andhra Pradesh in the South of India. His following now
is estimated to be in excess of 30 million people worldwide. Sai Baba was born
in 1926 as Sathya Narayan Raju in Puttaparthy, one of the poorest districts in
India at the time. When he was 14, he announced that he was Sai Baba (which means
'Divine Mother and Father'), and gave up his education. His family did not know
what to believe and even took him to an exorcist who tortured him for several
days. However, Sai Baba was resolute about his calling and in those early days
gained several devotees, mostly through his supernatural powers. Although he has
never solicited funds or advertised, he now has a charitable trust which runs
into several hundred million dollars. He has created the only totally free state
of the art super specialty hospitals in the world, provided drinking water for
over 1,000 villages and set up several educational institutions. He has been known
to cure people of incurable diseases and raise others from the dead by his mere
will or divine power.
Sai
Baba lives in one room in his ashram, wears a simple robe and eats only enough
food to maintain his physical form. Recently, he has been accused of paedophilia
and the BBC aired a documentary on this subject in 2004. His following has only
grown since then.
Many
believe that Sai Baba is an ‘Avatar’ i.e. God in human form. The objective
of the film is to unravel the mystery behind the man. What is it that makes people
flock to Sai Baba? Our film spreads the ‘news’ about his existence,
so that people can evaluate him for themselves.
The
film is weaved around a pair of narrators who seek to understand Sai Baba through
interviews with recent devotees who have been drawn to Sai Baba in uncanny ways
(mostly dreams and visions) and through interviews with long time devotees of
different religious faiths who have been with him over the decades.
