Not feeling good about India

In an online article about Buddhism and free will (which I do not entirely "grok", and quite possibly never will!), I found this passage interesting:

Hindu scripture describes the saints as veritable supermen. For example, the Taittiriya Upanishad tells us that the yogi "attains . . . independent sovereignty,” and enjoys a bliss that is a billion times grea­ter than that of the highest gods (1.6; 2.8.).  In the Mait­ri Upanishad the ascetic surpasses Brahman, the Godhead, and "will go [yet further], he [will surpass] the gods in the realm of divinity. . . ." (4.4) In the Shvetashvatara Upanishad yogis gain in­credible pow­ers: they “shall roll up space as if it were a piece of leather" (6.20); and a yogi in the Taittiriya Upanishad boasts that "I am the first-born of the world-order, earlier than the gods, in the navel of immortality. . . . I have over­come the whole world" (3.5).  Such a view has been called “spiritual Titanism,” an extreme form of humanism in which humans take on divine attributes and prerogatives.5

 
            In the Pali texts the Buddha rejects these incredible claims of the Hindu and Jain yogis.  He was particularly critical of their claims to omniscience. 

Well, yes.  Almost certainly a good idea to reject anyone's claim, be they yogi or not, to omniscience.

This leads me to something I have been thinking about lately - I'm still slowly making my way through the Indian Netflix series Sacred Games, and the second series in particular is making a case for considering Indian mythology to be much, well, weirder than I had previously thought.   The show also seems to spending a lot of time on deriding the country's cult of the guru. 

Was the author of the book a cynic who thought religion in Indian and the Middle East (Muslim  terrorism features too) causes more harm than good, because the TV series is giving me that vibe?

Watching Foreign Correspondent last night also did nothing to improve my image of the nation, showing how so many of the poor "migrant workers" from within the country had been completely caught off guard by the sudden, COVID-19 closures:

Tens of millions of migrant workers, who'd moved to the cities to find work, lost their jobs, their wage and their shelter overnight. To find food and shelter, hundreds of thousands hit the road to head back to their villages.

In a bid to stop the exodus of people and the virus to the countryside, governments cancelled trains and buses, and closed state borders. Many kept walking anyway, often trekking hundreds of kilometres to get home.

While the government has tried to help those in need by providing food and financial aid, not everyone has benefitted.

I think that last sentence is an understatment, if ever there was one.