La Via del Loto

 

Naga Baba Shiva Giri
 
He isn't a Baba known all over the world, with one long wave of followers, but in some area of India, and above all in Nepal, where he spends long period during the year, he is received with great joy from their disciples.
The movie directors Daria Menozzi has recorded a documentary, entitled Bike Baba, following him in his pilgrimages for 40 days. The documentary was trasmitted in May 2000 and also the magazine Sette, enclosed to one of the main newspapers in Italy Corriere della Sera, has published an article about him.
His name "Naga Baba" means the Baba of snakes, but he is also known as "Bike Baba". This name was attributed for the characteristic to travel, from Nepal to south India, with an old motorbike. He travels for very difficult roads, forests, villages in order to acquit to his task of take aware the Hindu people to the conservation of the ancient spirituality that is getting lost.

The Baba is a free spirit, as I define some people. He has a large hearth in one spirit of child. He alternate the wants to play with innocence to the desire to be protagonist. The great eyes that warms your heart, that wraps you and then, unexpected, forgiveness in something that you don't know.
When he tells his stories, mixed between religion and superstition, his face is illuminated and the look becomes penetrating. If he notices that you are not understanding his English, he stops for a moment, seems enter in you with his dark eyes and says in positive way: "no understand"!
He tells that he attended the school only for 7 days, because since when he was a child he was nonconformist, he always loved to make the contrary of what they would to be the rules: to enter from the escapes, to go up from where it would have to be come down, tell you "don't smoke" and offers you a beed. But when he draft of the spirituality he transforms themselves, to move in sacred way, devout person, strict, untiring, practising of all those rituals fascinating and mysterious of the Hindu culture.

Patrizio Assi
 
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Photos by Daria Menozzi and Patrizio Assi