Missionary Position [Paperback]

1. Any small charitable organization (including many catholic/christian organizations)in Calcutta do thousand times more to help the poors of Calcutta. Although MC does some charitable work, it is so miniscule given the amount of donation it recieves I would call it only a religious organization, certainly not a charity.

2. Contrary to popular belief, MC helps primarily christians or makes sure those who recieve help converts to Catholicism. Of course there are exceptions. I am against any religion which do not consider people of other religion as equally worthy human beings.

3. In the last 30 years of her life, mother spent overwhelmingly more time touring the Western world than working with the poor in Calcutta. I doubt whether even 0.01% of Calcutta's poor ever even saw her.

Of course I do not mind the above things and mother had a constitutionally guranteed right to religious freedom and to spend her organizations money the way she wants, but as a Calcuttan I do take offense in her extremely negative (if not outright lying) portyal of Calcutta. Just like any other third world or Indian cities, Calcutta also has its share of poverty but it is by no means greater than any other city of India. In reality, Calcutta is better off than most of the other cities in India. Not only it had a very vibrant cultural/social/political life for last 200 years, till date it continues to be the cultural capital of India and one of the most tolerant, multi-cultural, liberal city of India. Calcutta boasts the best public traportation system among Indian cities, it is not as densely populated as Delhi or Mumbai and it is not as polluted as Delhi. The real estate price in Calcutta will be higher than London, believe it or not!! Yes, there are homeless people in Calcutta (so are there in New York), but most of them are not beggars. They do odd jobs but not rich enough to afford a home. There is no wide-spread hunger in Calcutta, food is plenty, cheap and available in vast quantities. The government does enough to take care of the poor and I can gurantee, that even if you search really hard, you wont see the kind of squalor and poverty in Calcutta that mother made her Western followers believe. Interestingly, most of the Westerners get frustrated by not seeing enough poverty when they visit Calcutta, so the locals arrange some kind of poverty tour! and they search hard and find out the most wretched place (usually populated by illegal immigrants from Bangladesh or rural areas of neighboring states) to get the Western tourist see what they want to see. Her negative portryal of Calcutta caused the city to lose millions of dollar on tourism revenue, since no one wants to visit this nightmarish place. Some of you might find it hard to believe but in my 24 years of life in Calcutta I never saw the kind of poverty mother's followers tend to assume about Calcutta. The worst part is, mother fed her followers with such exaggerated image of poverty to raise money but in reality did not do anything about it or atleast nothing of any significance. No wonder the people of Calcutta, the so called recipient of her generosity does not care at all about her charitable work, but they do respect her because she brought a Nobel Prize (incidentally two more Indians won that prize before her from Calcutta)to the city and they are unaware of the stories mother tells rest of the world about Calcutta. I do not question her holiness, but I think by constantly lying about Calcutta, she used faudulent means to raise money and did not use the money for which it was raised in the first place.

I am still amazed, that the old, innocous looking, saintly woman had the capacity to pull-off one of the biggest frauds in recent history and even managed to get a nobel prize for God knows what contribution to peace! I dont know whether the truth will make any dent in the belief of her admirers, but it is the truth and you have to visit Calcutta to realize it.

P.S: I suggest a book (Mother Teresa The Final Verdict)in the following web-site for a more revealing account of her activities.

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But what was most shocking was when one of the doctors in my group asked where the money had gone. She apparently had been here last year, and she and others raised $25,000 for this particular nursery--they had sent the money a few months before we arrived to buy cribs, diapers, formula and medicine. The nursery was exactly the same now as it had been a year ago.

The sister in charge said something to the effect that they had to give the money to the main MC office--or something like that. They never saw a penny of it. One of the babies died during our visit--of starvation. He could have been saved very easily.

My doubts began at that time, and I read more about Mother Theresa, how her nuns were spreading AIDS and hepatitis by using unclean needles in their clinics. You can buy bleach to sterilize needles for just a few pennies, but yet, they didn't even have that. Where then, does the millions go that is donated to this woman and her charity?

If she believes that suffering is so holy, then one would think she would have wanted to be treated when she got sick, the same way that the poor are treated. But instead, Mother Theresa got top notch care. I guess when one is on the fast track to sainthood, they don't have to do their penance and suffering like the rest of us.

I don't think that she was an evil woman, and maybe she meant to do well at one time. But keeping medical care and food away from the hungry and sick is a crime. She became known for caring for the dying because that's what people did best in her clinic--die. True, many of them lived on the street, and she did offer than food and shelter. However, why allow someone to die when you have the means to save them?

I would like to know where all of the money that Mother Theresa got in donations has gone to. If she is a true Christian, she would have returned the donation made by Keating back to its rightful owners, the people he stole it from. But she didn't. She never even acknowledged it, only pleaded for clemency for the criminal who robbed 17,000 people of their life savings. One truly has to wonder about the "Christian" mind of such a person.

At any rate, my personal experience has convinced me that Hitchens is on to something. The sisters were basically doing nothing for these babies, not even holding them. Not even changing the worn cloth diapers that they wore. It was totally disgusting. Just waiting for them to die, what Mother Theresa does best.

Hitchens does a great job of documenting in this thin book the dictators and flim-flam artists who used Mother Teresa's iconographic presence to lend a patina of divine approval to their nefarious deeds. That Mother's approach to misery was to counsel others, especially the poor who usually had no other choice, to offer it up, rather than seeking to eliminate or ameliorate it, comes through loud and clear. The most egregious hypocrisy: Mother's houses reject such creature comforts for the poor as air conditioning and elevators for the handicapped and, most telling of all, adequate pain medication. But Mother Teresa herself was treated at some of the finest medical facilities in the world. To take vows of poverty in imitation of Jesus is one thing; it is quite another to insist that those you purport to serve must share in your misery.

This is an honest book. Some may conclude that it is derivative from the author's anti-religion bias. I very much doubt it. Rather, from the evidence amassed herin, as well as by such other scandels that the Church has (unsuccessfully, finally) tried to cover up, there may be some very good reasons for people to conclude that it is precisely when living vessels of clay are raised to altars around the world, it is a darn good time to check your wallet or pocketbook.