Time to close our change.org petition on spiritual fraud Madhusudan Rao Naidu?

Note that most of this blog post's contents are taken from the contents of my public Facebook post with same title dated 23rd Sept. 2021: https://www.facebook.com/ravi.s.iyer.7/posts/3220637204819501.

I think it is time to close our petition: Declaration by Sathya Sai devotees and alumni & staff of Sai educational institutions, condemning spiritual fraud Madhusudan Rao Naidu, https://www.change.org/p/sathya-sai-devotee-fraternity-worldwide-we-condemn-spiritual-fraud-madhusudan-rao-naidu which we put out in end 2018/early 2019 [Related Facebook post: https://www.facebook.com/ravi.s.iyer.7/posts/2381164682100095 , dated 1st Jan. 2019.] [Related blog post: https://ravisiyer.blogspot.com/2019/01/changeorg-petition-declaration-by.html , dated 1st Jan. 2019.]

I think the petition-declaration has had some impact. It achieved top-ten Internet search engine ranking on related search terms and even today it has a top-ten search ranking for some related terms. E.g. "is madhusudan naidu having spirit of Sathya Sai" lists this petition as the 3rd result in Google today, 23rd Sept. 2021, when I checked using incognito Chrome browser window.

Well after we had stopped publicizing the petition, people who were searching the Internet for this matter seem to have got to this petition-declaration with some of them choosing to sign the petition.

Now I think Madhusudan goes by the name of Madhusudan Sai. Perhaps he has stopped claiming to be a communicator of subtle body/light body of Sathya Sai or having the spirit of Sathya Sai (fake claims).

New signatures to the petition are very few - there have been only 8 new signatures this year, so far.

Given this background, I think it is time to close our petition.

Please feel free to express your views on this decision. We put it up as a kind-of joint initiative and I think it is appropriate that we close it as a joint decision.

Note that it seems that change.org gives me two choices: "Declare victory" or just "Close petition". Our petition is more of a declaration rather than a petition to somebody. So I think it would be more appropriate to simply close the petition rather than "Declare victory". Please feel free to express your views on this too.

I have uploaded the latest list (downloaded today, 23rd Sep. 2021) of signatures on our petition as a public Google Drive file here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mUtjipMMdmI78_A_fSl9jaZHpoqivWJ_/edit . Note that now the file is in .csv format which is usually opened in a spreadsheet viewer (earlier it was a pdf file even if .csv download was also provided).

The file has 575 signatures out of which 2 or 3 are test signatures, and so we have over 570 presumably real persons' signatures from across the world.

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Given below are some of my comment(s) on the Facebook post. To see the full exchange please visit the Facebook post - https://www.facebook.com/ravi.s.iyer.7/posts/3220637204819501 .

[I thanked those who commented on the post for their valuable views/responses.]

After seeing the comments provided so far, it is clear that we don't have a consensus on closing the petition.

My initial thoughts are that we should close the petition only after having a consensus, or at least an overwhelming majority, on that decision.

So I now feel that we should NOT close the petition now.

I should also mention that I don't know how long change.org will allow a petition to be kept open. So far I have not received any message from them about closing the petition even though it is 2 years and almost 9 months since the petition was created on 31st Dec. 2018-1st Jan. 2019.

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