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Now, air connectivity has made Shirdi even more accessible to morbidly religious Indians living in India and abroad. Its location advantage (not far from Bombay and Poona) has added to its popularity.
Sincerely, you have been to this place several times and have seen its exponential growth as a tourist spot. I have never believed in any god, baba (spiritual guru) or darvesh (muslim religious mendicant) in my whole life. I have just visited Shirdi and also Tirupati and Vaishno Devi to see how religious places degenerate into commercial centers and centers of corruption.
If any netizen has ever visited Calcutta’s Kalighat (not Calcutta for me), Varanasi temples, Puri’s Jagannath temple, Kamakshya in upper Assam, among others, he/she will go down with me in terms of the despotic religiosity that prevails in these places and how the pandas plunder you by driving the fear of the unknown into your always scared psyche.
Now the same can be seen and experienced in Shirdi. On Thursday (known as Shirdi ke Sai baba ka din!) in Shirdi, the queue of devotees seems to reach Ahmednagar which is 82 km from Shirdi! Without exaggeration, anyone with even a semblance of faith in divine powers and Shirdi ke Sai baba will be taken aback by the endless queue. If you are a VIP (nowadays even the VVIP culture has come out of nowhere!), you can see and touch Sai Baba’s feet. Others have to wait for darshan for hours.
Shirdi has no aura of divinity because the commercialization steals the positive vibes from a religious place (if any!). One feels as if one is in a rapidly developing city, rather, in an asphalt jungle, with a falsely perceived divinity in and around the place. Land sharks are grabbing the land from poor farmers just as Gurgaon was usurped by developers and developers.
Many fancy restaurants have sprung up. The popularity of the place has spawned resorts and other worldly entertainment. Divinity has been put in the background. Those who visited the place some twenty-five years ago and when they visit now, feel that the pristine spiritual connectivity is woefully missing.
However, insecure and totally frustrated people go there en masse and think that all will be well in their lives thanks to Sai Baba’s unfailing blessings. Plan your Shirdi darshan and if you find my reading wrong, I am ready to take my words back.