Message from discussion MOTHER TERESA DID MORE HARM THAN GOOD: WITNESS

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Subject: MOTHER TERESA DID MORE HARM THAN GOOD: WITNESS
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Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 22:28:09 GMT
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Mother did more harm than good: Witness

'Admiration for Teresa is based less on facts and more on myths'

Report
The Free Press Journal
Friday, October 17, 2003

Kolkata - Raising a voice of dissent as the world
prepares to celebrate Mother Teresa's beatification on
October 19, a hostile witness who had deposed before
enquiry into Mother's life, on Friday said that she had
done 'more harm than good' to the image of the City of
Joy abroad, especially in the West.

In my opinion, mother Teresa has done more harm than good
to Kolkata's image abroad, especially in the West.  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.

Chatterjee, who had deposed as hostile witness at the
inquiry into Mother Teresa's life and virtues in London,
said, "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."

Persistent confrontations with his native city's negative
image in the West has prompted Chatterjee to write
'Mother Teresa " The Final Verdict"` a treatise on
activities of the Missionaries of Charity and its
foundress.  This image, he said was the result of
persistent media coverage of Mother Teresa and activities
of the Missionaries of Charity, that depicted the Nobel
laureates nun and sisters of her order as the ultimate
saviour of the city teeming with leprosy patients and
grovelling in poverty.

Even small Western business did not scout in Kolkata
because of the city's negative image which neither Mother
nor her organisation had tried 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 received an excellent press in the West, deals with
among other things, the process of creation of 'myths'
around Mother Teresa, her accounting policies, her
politics, her relation with Kolkata, views from within
her homes, profiles of Kolkata's destitutes based on
extensive interviews and a comparison of her
organisation's work with that of other religious an
secular charities here.

"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.  But
she herself received the best care possible," 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 Mother being beatified on canonised in
keeping with Roman Catholic cannon law. "She subscribed
to a religious point of view and it is up the clergy of
that religion to decide what to do with her.  I myself am
not against her becoming a Catholic saint.  I said this
in my deposition in London on January 3 and 4."

End of forwarded message

Jai Maharaj
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Om Shanti

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