Author: PTI
Publication: Rediff on Net
Date: October 16, 2003
URL: http://in.rediff.com/news/2003/oct/16teresa.htm
Raising a voice of dissent as the
world prepares to celebrate Mother Teresa's beatification on October 19,
a doctor, who had deposed before an inquiry into the Mother's life, on
Thursday said she did 'more harm than good' to the image of the City of
Joy.
"It seems to me that she needed
the city more than it needed her," Aroup Chatterjee, a Kolkata-born doctor
settled in England, told PTI from London.
"Ever since I went to England and
travelled to other countries in the West, people looked upon me as an oddity
- a doctor from the world's ultimate hell-hole," Chatterjee said.
Persistent confrontations with his
native city's negative image in the West prompted Chatterjee to write Mother
Teresa: The Final Verdict, a treatise on the activities of the Missionaries
of Charity and its founder.
Kolkata's negative image was the
result of persistent media coverage of Mother Teresa and the activities
of the Missionaries of Charity that depicted the Nobel laureate nun as
the ultimate saviour of a city teeming with leprosy patients, he said.
Even small Western businesses did
not scout in Kolkata because of its negative image, which neither the Mother
nor her organisation made any attempt to allay, Chatterjee alleged.
"When a businessman friend from
Kolkata came visiting me in London, one of my neighbours, a Polish lady,
took half a day off from work just to see my friend. She was a Teresa devotee
and could not believe there could be a businessman in Kolkata," he said.
Chatterjee's book, which has been
received well in the West, deals with the process of creation of 'myths'
around Mother Teresa, her accounting policies, her politics, her relationship
with Kolkata, views from within her charity homes, profiles of Kolkata's
destitute based on extensive interviews and a comparison of her organisation's
work with that of other religious and secular charities.
"I wrote the book to set the record
straight since I realised that admiration for Mother Teresa is based less
on facts and more on the domino effect of myth making. She was a lover
of poverty, rather than the poor. She once said to a woman in pain: Jesus
is loving you," he said.
Encouraged by the success of his
book, Chatterjee is in the process of creating a network of sympathisers
who would
work in projecting the reality
that Kolkata is not all slums, leper colonies and hunger and that Mother
Teresa's is not the
only charity organisation working
in the metropolis.
An avowed atheist, Chatterjee has
no objection to the Mother being beatified or canonized in keeping with
Roman Catholic laws. "She subscribed to a religious point of view and it
is up to the clergy of that religion to decide what to do
with her. I myself am not against
her becoming a saint. I said this in my deposition in London on January
3 and 4, 2001."
Though Chatterjee's book has earned
accolades in the West, his views do not go down well with the Catholic
clergy in Kolkata associated with Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of
Charity.
Pointing out that while reviewing
the book, journalist-writer Khushwant Singh had observed that it was "hard
on facts, but weak on judgement," Fr C M Paul, Church spokesman for the
celebration committee of Mother's beatification, says: "I fully agree with
[Singh's] views. Chatterjee does not seem to use his intelligence and common
sense. He quotes facts out of context to arrive at weird judgements."
Describing Chatterjee as a bull
in a china shop, Paul said: "No one has the licence to misinterpret or
judge with malicious intent the well- intentioned acts of others if the
person judging cannot commit himself to such good acts."
Fr Gason Roberge, Jesuit priest
and professor of mass communication and videography at St Xavier's College,
admits that some of the poverty of Kolkata was known to the West through
media reports about Mother Teresa and her activities. "Yet such reports
focused on an area which no one can deny."
According to Fr Roberge, Mother
Teresa's appeal to the West lay in her radical reading of the Gospels and
using them as a spiritual basis to serve the poor.
"Her unconditional charity complemented
the Western idea of development which envisages making the poor partners
in development. Besides, she touched the conscience of the West by working
for the poor. The fact that she was a woman, a Christian and a Westerner
integrated into the Indian mainstream also enhanced her appeal," Fr Roberge
said.
