Robert Priddy (he for much longer) and I can fairly claim a friendship with the late V.K. Narasimhan, who had been, before he retired to Puttaparthi, the legendary and courageous editor of a number of India’s top newspapers, such as ‘The Hindu’ and ‘The Indian Express’ and ‘The Deccan Herald’. VKN and I would regularly sit together in his humble quarters at Puttaparthi, and he also received me as a guest in the family home in Chennai. Not long before VKN died, he instructed the hospital staff to allow me, even though considerable restrictions had been placed on visitation rights, to visit him at the Sathya Sai Superspeciality Hospital at Puttaparthi. I had been editing his book on the great French Jesuit philosopher and palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
I had seen a Priddy note in which he took to task a Sai Baba apologist who typified those many followers who reveal deep and repeated flaws of reasoning that are simply not acceptable in any proper discussion. He wrote to the individual: “I also know that there have never been “millions of foreigners” visiting him, though he has made such claims. The 70th birthday, which I attended, registered less than 40,000 foreign visitors from the entire world”
I have just asked Robert Priddy to send me a note from his writings that precisely record his observations on Sathya Sai Baba proneness to extraordinary exaggeration of crowd numbers. It reads: ...