‘Sai Baba’s Tip To Keep Ageing Away. But He Couldn’t’, the Australian scholar Brian Steel’s remark of February 2002 seems almost prescient:

     ‘Since the ‘discrepancies’ appear to be increasing nowadays, is there any possibility that Sai Baba is suffering from a degenerative ageing disease which might have an effect on his thinking and speaking?’ http://bdsteel.tripod.com/More/Nonsense.htm

Likewise, in October 2002, a Swedish psychologist and former devotee, Åsa Samsioe, noting physical signs of Sai Baba’s ageing like his development of a ’turkey throat’ and also the “low intellectual level” of his discourses, remarked:

    ‘He must have one heck of a job, Sathya Sai Baba… it can’t be easy to age in his situation, besides being under so much criticism as he has recently been… not surprising that it leaves its marks. Occasionally I think ‘poor man’… feel some pity for him. A whole life built on lies… captured by the myth about himself… to be the object of the projections of millions… and to be forced , at least outwardly, to live up to all the expectations put to him… to always have to have all those people around him’. http://home.no.net/anir/Sai/enigma/Swede4.htm

It is just under a decade since Sai Baba informed devotees all round the world that his aircraft is about to take off to bring his mission to the whole world. But the runway, like his own imagination, would seem to have run away on him. He turned 81 last November (though evidence indicates that he has falsified his actual birthdate by three years). Here, in his own words, in almost in full flight, is yet another of his myriad failed predictions:

    ‘Swami’s mission has made this turn to face the runway. The 70th birthday was the signal from the tower to accelerate. In the 75th birthday, the airplane will leave the ground’.