Cold Cash

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

I’ve been a buddhist all my lives, so I’m pretty sympathetic to some things in the religious realm that in the general scheme of things might otherwise be called just plain crazy.

Example: In Punjab, in northwest India, the High Court there is about to decide whether His Holiness Shri Ashutosh Maharaj has been meditating in a freezer for the past six months, or has just been faking it.

Meditating in a freezer doesn’t seem that bad an idea in an area that gets up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the lap of summer. Plus, it’s a good place to avoid all the crocodiles and cobras that hang out in Punjab.

It’s been a pretty strict meditation though: no bathroom breaks. Which is maybe less remarkable than it sounds because there haven’t been any breaks for food or water either. Did I mention it’s been six months?

It probably wouldn’t be that big a deal if 170 million dollars weren’t on ice with Maharaj. His wife and son have been so unkind as to suggest that all that money — his estate — has something to do with his sect’s elders disputing the claim by police and doctors that the whole time the holy man actually has been, well, dead. Of a heart attack on 29 January.

I don’t know if Maharaj is dead or in the perfect state where he is at one with the universe, as his accountants — I mean his followers — say. I don’t think he’d mind, though, if his body were returned to his wife and son for whatever next they plan for him. When my own guru became one with the universe, we took his body and set it afire. We were pretty sure he’d moved on.