Thanks to Anth for this from a couple of years ago:

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Version Control.

I’ve worked for almost twenty years in the computer business. Most of the time I’ve been writing, editing and updating technical literature. Usually I don’t understand 95% of it. They are books that only half a dozen people will ever read. Often they never get read. The people who read them are computer engineers who set up systems to store and send a few million messages to mobile phones every day, or work out the payroll for a company with operations in fifty currencies and fifty social security and tax systems.

I produce the latest version of each book, give it to the person who understands it, they check it, tell me what to alter, I go away, change it- and the cycle goes on until the product goes out the door.

My worst nightmare is to get multiple versions of a book. The books have lives of their own. The programmes are always changing and being fixed, and the books have to follow them and keep up. It’s impossible to hold a book still. They are alive, like the software they support.

Imagine this.

I write a book and give it to three people to review. I get the changes back from Charlie and put them into the master version. Then a fourth person, Fred, has changes. I give Fred my master version, and add his changes

This is the moment I should be fired.

I have now created two living versions of the book. There’s the version with Fred and Charlie’s changes, and then there’s the version Sally and Sue are still reviewing and changing. What if one of Fred’s changes conflicts with what Sally does? Sally hasn’t seen the verion with Fred’s stuff in it.

If you’re lucky, you see it coming, and right at the start, you scream, “Urgent Documentation Panic. Change Freeze.” You print out the different versions, stay up for two nights making them into one, and start again. “Sorry, we had a bit of a fuck-up. Could you go through this again please?”

If you do nothing, the two versions grow into different books. The nightmare grows. And at the end of the line, the engineer setting up the first system for the bank that has paid $100 million for your company’s payroll system finds something’s not working right because a vital bit of information is in another version somewhere. This little turd rises very quickly to the surface of the corporate swimming pool.

Why am I ranting about one of the most boring subjects in the world? (One reason is I know I have an indulgent audience.)

Well, Elan Vital, with the Captain at the wheel, is now entering the “Nightmare Stage” in their “Version Control”. All that remains is to sit back and enjoy the spectacle as they chase their own tail, until they collapse.

The cracks appeared a year or two ago. The cult have allowed two versions of Captain Rawat and his mission, to come into existence.

This is causing problems at every level.

The first version of the Captain is, “Perfect Master.” He is the Perfect Master of his age, just as Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Nanak, and the Captain’s father were. He reveals “Truth within”, known as “Knowledge”. He is the superior power in person. The secret to understand him is to surrender to him completely. He is the only one you can really trust- not your friends or family, but the living Perfect Master. If the Perfect Master beats you with a stick and steals your wallet, you are the most fortunate being alive, because he is giving you his undivided attention.

All the hardcore premies believe in this version of Captain Rawat. For years they danced before him, or his picture, every day and sang, “You are my mother and you are my father, you are my all my Lord to me. Guru Maharaji, my life is within you..”

The second version of the Captain, is, “He’s just an ordinary human being, with this ability to teach these techniques that put you in touch with something beneficial within.” (My own words, and I’m a bit out of touch, but you get the idea.). All that stuff about “God in human form”, “Perfect Master”, “Your Glory fills the World, Ki Jai,” was a big misinterpretation by some hippies who were looking for that anyway. They just laid a trip on the Captain when he was young and impressionable. He never said he was God or anything like that. He would sit down to relax, and 5,000 people would spontaneously organise themselves into a line and kiss his feet for a few hours. (If I can trust my Aussie nark, Catweazle, the same spontaneous misunderstanding happened again a few weeks ago at Amaroo.)

Then there were the times he was walking onto the stage and someone stuck this red and gold jacket on him, and the next thing he was being crowned as Krishna. Misunderstanding upon misunderstanding.

There is of course, a third version of the Captain, which only the “X-rated devotess are allowed to witness.” This is the drunk diving, philandering, bullying, and confused, out of the public eye Captain, which I’m not discussing here.

So, back to conflicting versions one and two, where the cracks are becoming chasms in three places.

The first chasm is inside the premies. What are they supposed to believe nowadays? Is he the bloody Perfect Master or what? If he is, how come you can’t talk about it? How come even the Captain is saying it was a big misunderstanding?

And if he isn’t the Perfect Master, then how come he still gets everyone to line up and kiss his feet?

Then there’s the conflict in public presentation of the cult. If the Captain and his yoga techniques are sold to the public as some new-agey, self-discovery trip, what happens when they find out everyone on the inside believes he is the Lord in human form, and still, “bows down before such a Wonderful Lord” at least twice a day?

Then of course, there’s the conflict within Captain Rawat himself. He has this holy mission from his Perfect Master, also his father. Has he abandoned this calling in his life?

But getting dressed up as Krisha and dancing around on the stage with a flute you can’t play doesn’t really attract the punters. Well, not the sort of punters a cult could use.

The solution has been pathetic. “Make it up as you go along. Hope it will all work out in the end. Let the believers believe. Tell the new punters whatever will get them through the door.”

The cracks in the walls are getting wider and the band are playing louder.

Anth, my version and I’m sticking to it.