on board as shareholders, albeit minor ones, at this point. As before, and as with Vedic Broadcasting Pvt. Ltd, Ramdev's pliant and trustworthy Balkrishna remained the largest shareholder by far. Notable among these new shareholders were Krishan Kumar Pittie and Sarvan Poddar Pittie would eventually play a major role in Ramdev's quest for media domination and Poddar would buy a Scottish island, Little Cumbrae, for GBP 2.1 million in September 2009 and donate it to Patanjali Yogpeeth's UK trust. Balkrishna also converted Vedic Broadcasting Pvt. Ltd into a public limited company. Kirit Mehta and his partners at Aastha were too busy struggling to survive to notice the dramatic changes that were taking place in Vedic Broadcasting's story. Had they been a little more alert they would have sensed that something wasn't quite sitting right. Ramdev was preparing to take over Aastha. But Ramdev himself missed something brewing in his own backyard. Amid his heady successes, and hectic travel, he failed to see that his guru Shankar Dev was ailing, increasingly unhappy and isolated in his own home, Kripalu Bagh Ashram. For instance, Shankar Dev, who was the convener of the Divya Yog Mandir Trust, was not on the boards of any of the new companies that were set up by Ramdev. But what Ramdev could not see, though it was in plain sight, many in Haridwar saw. Several remember the swiftly ageing Shankar Dev, ravaged by spinal tuberculosis, becoming increasingly frail and forlorn. Spinal tuberculosis causes the patient to cough blood, lose weight, get night sweats and chills, and experience a loss of appetite, fatigue and fever, and it can sometimes impair mobility as a result of pain in the spine and damage to the joints. Like in many small towns, friendships and kinship survive long years in Kankhal Sushant CS (OS) 27/2019 Page 24 of 76