Stainless mother of communication

Googling her name invariably displays a long list of websites praising her love and compassion in action. It surely means that Amma spends all her time showering her grace over humanity, thus the whole world loves her. In fact the reality is not so magical. She has faced opposition since the very begining, but the critics are erased as they rise.

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If you want to inflict on yourself a serious headeache, then create an account on wikipedia, log in and search for "amritanandamayi". Click on the definition to display the corresponding page and choose the "View history" tab. This unfolds all the modifications which have been made on her biography since its creation. It's amazing. The number of alterations is huge. Each time someone tries to add a critical item, it is deleted by a faithful devotee.

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For instance, this picture shows the deletion of 2 paragraphs speaking about the AIMS hospital. The first one was giving details about the nurses strike. The second one was dealing with illegal drug trials. Thanks to faithful devotees, her history remains clean.

Communicating over the web is very convenient. The electronic content can be erased and written, over and over again, without leaving much trace. And when someone is not welcomed at Amma's lotus feet anymore, he can even be erased from the photos. It's easy to then claim that he has never been part of the organisation and that he has never been seen in the ashram.

The AmritaSatyaMayi Team is not the first one who tries to expose the dark side of Amma's organisation. In 2007 another group created Cult of the hugging saint. Of course Amma's devotees immediately responded by creating “Cult Of The Hugging Saint” Exposed, thus triggering a violent smear campaign against all the ungrateful ex-devotees and critical fellows. The famous cyber-stalker Joe Moreno even partook of the chase. The rogue website has been shut down.

Since the publication of Gail Tredwell's book, the related amazon page has turned into a cyber-war zone as well. Among the 25 users who have rated the book with less than 3 stars, 19 of them haven't purchased the book on amazon. Have they really read it?

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5 of these users have an empty profile, which means that they have never bought anything on amazon, they have never made any review, not even about Gail's book. The picture on the right shows an instance of empty profile. There is absolutely nothing in it, no activity is reported.

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No shopping? No review? Then why do they spend so much time on amazon? What do they do? They post negative comments inside the customers reviews! Their negative comments almost always mention 3 blogs, spreading controversial stories about Gail. In some of their comments, they have just pasted the links, not even deigning to write a little sentence, to explain their point of view.

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According to our counting, they have thus inserted 57 references to these blogs inside 65 reviews.
These 5 users have never ever posted a single review but they have commented 87% of the existing ones.






Although it looks like brainwashing, it's just a technical trick. When users perform a search on the internet, the search engines return a list of websites and the most visited ones are displayed first. As the links to the 3 blogs have been pasted in numerous places, a lot of people click on them daily, even if it's just out of curiosity. Thanks to this high number of click, the search engines consider the 3 blogs as highly visited websites. As a result, typing words like "amma scandal" in a search engine will display the 3 blogs on top of the results list. The technical name of such practise is "natural referencing". In fact Amma' PR team uses the curiosity of the internet users to score their blogs higher in search engines.

Clean, erase, delete, suppress, remove, chase, stalk... It's such a paradox to see that the devotees of the mother of compassion are keen on destruction.

Unfortunately paper is not as malleable as bytes and pixels are. A paper book lasts in time. It's not easy to make us forget what has been printed when the wind changes. Amma is clean on the web but she has a printed biography. Amma's PR has changed her biography several times, but its main plot cannot be completely remixed. In spite of the unverifiable allegations in the pink frame, this article puts the stress under the numerous nonsenses in Amma's biography.  In case of public scandal, some of this book's statements won't testify on behalf of her honesty.

Amma is a stainless saint. Her image is perfect because a team of devotees called "Ammabot" daily scrutinizes the web and cleans it whenever something is likely to tarnish their leader's reputation. They take good care of her publications and communication. Only the bright side of the organisation is allowed to shine in public. They seem to work so hard. Is the opposite side so muddy?