> > According to Raja Jose Luis Alvarez, 400 000 students in > Peru(?) are willing to learn TM! That's huisii! :D
All news from the TMO is always wildly exaggerated, everyone knows that. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a grain of truth buried underneath the propaganda. That figure of 400,000 students could well be true if you make certain assumptions like (a) the kids aren't paying for it, (b) they're extrapolating from a knowledge of the percentage of students who express an interest in places they've actually visited to the whole country. For example in the Philippines, during the campaign there, people were walking into schools, teaching pretty much everyone and then walking on to the next school. Given that you could go into a school and teach nearly all the kids for free it would be reasonable to say that all the school students in the country were willing to learn TM. The same number is probably true of every country, provided someone else is paying. As soon as people have to pay for themselves then it's an entirely different matter. The present business model is to extract money from rich people, use it to teach poor kids, make videos of poor kids saying how much they like TM and play them to rich people to extract more money from rich donors & so on. Taking a percentage on each turn. It stalls when they run out of rich donors, when someone does due diligence on the accounts for the global operation, or when someone asks an awkward question like "why do we have to stump up so much cash to teach kids? Why don't we just teach the kids for the cost of the teachers living expenses?". To which the only answer is "we need the percentage to maintain a regal court" or "hand over your dome pass". In any case the sharp eyed will notice something. A couple of million dollars in Peru teaches hundreds of thousands of kids, a few hundred million dollars in India yields just 1,500 pundits. Mmmmm.
