India has again seen a painful chapter of bombings. Over 20 bombs targeted the Indian cities of Bangalore and Ahmadabad and killed 10s of innocent civilians and injured 100s.
While I feel very sad and rattled by the developments, I also fail to make sense of them. I only have questions for the militants on a killing spree and also questions for myself and all Indians.
“The Key Selling Point Of The GodMen Is Their Talk About Things That Make No Sense”
Right from childhood, stories that had their foundation in magic and ‘chamatkars’ always appealed to me. I must have watched 10s of combinations of stories like - Ramu’s son is ill and no doctor is able to cure him; Ramu goes to a godman who whips up a magical powder; Ramu applies the powder on his son’s forehead and the kid is magically cured. As a child, I remember being in awe of the godman and thinking, “Wow! This man is amazing!”. Friends readily contributed their own stories of how the godman was indeed magical.
Lokmanya Tilak initiated public ganesh festivals with the noble intent of creating a forum for people to come together and work for the nation’s independence. However, I am sure Tilak would have been saddened to see the avatar that his creation has taken today. Although the festival celebrated in each home is still vibrant and fun, the public festivals are loud, rowdy, political and disconnected from the ordinary masses. The demerits are endless while the benefits are a handful. Also it doesn’t end with just the 10 days of the festival, as even throughout the year the idols are placed in cabins that almost always are on encroached public land, in most cases footpaths. At times I even feel like writing to the Tilak family, saying “Please stop this thing you’ve started!”.
Unfortunately that won’t work. The fact is that ganesh mandals today are well established, used to getting their way and enjoy support from some political party or the other. So sweeping measures like banning the mandals from using public property are not going to work. Also a ban will face stiff resistance and will only result in burnt down PMT buses. Over the last decade or so, we have all experienced that the products and services that have improved have been those where healthy competition has emerged. So why not learn from this experience and create a parallel, planned and well organized version of the public ganesh festival that will compete with the public festival on the street? We can keep writing and complaining about all that’s wrong with the public ganesh festivals but that’s unlikely to make much difference. Why not instead toss ideas on how the ganesh festival could be revamped? I am sure many ideas might seem fanciful, but unless we start discussing and working on a way out of the mess we will only see things going from bad to worse.
(Cont…Click the scanned article image on the left). Published as part of my column for the Maharashtra Herald that’s published on alternate Saturdays )
I used to think that Amitabh Bachchan was a great role model for Indians. But his regular treks to temples across India are consistently eroding his stature in my eyes.
Ref- Bollywood’s Bachchan walks barefoot to pray
India is anyway full of religious fanatics and superstitious people who would believe and follow so called god men and waste their lives believing in some hocus pocus.
The biggest name in India acting in such fashion only makes things worse. I am sure thousands of Amitabh followers would soon imitate Amitabh and maybe even try to make the idols drink milk!
In today’s India it seems “Science” and “Scientific Temper” are topics meant only for speeches but never for actual implementation.
Although I like early mornings, I very rarely manage to get up early. Today was one of those rare days. As the newspaper had not come in, I switched on my TV set and had a look at some of the early morning religious preachings being aired on various channels.
While many channels had people talking about religion and god, there were some that also aired a mix of Yoga and religion. I do not remember the name of the swami I watched but I was impressed by the way he held the audience and made them do various yoga poses.
TV swami’s have become very popular in India and some like Baba Ramdev have become even more popular due to some recent controversies. The one thing I like about these swami’s is that they ask the listener to do good. The yoga swamis I think have had a good impact on society as Yoga today is more popular in India than it might have been in 100s of years.
I too was fairly ignorant of yoga until a few years back and used to associate yoga with PT drills that we had in school. Yoga is nothing like Physical Training (PT) and the mind plays just as important a role as the body.
Anyway, teaching yoga is fine, but preaching religion to 1000s of people through the medium of TV however I don’t think is such a good idea. Religion and mass media is a very dangerous combination.
In my previous post, I wrote about the absence of scientific temper in India and the need for those well informed, to voice their opinions against superstitions and customs that have chained our society.
India today seems completely at the mercy of ill-placed faith. Instead of individuals standing on the shoulders of faith and rising to a higher level, we find that it’s today working the other way round. As festivals, miracle babas and religious processions get bigger, they are further pulling down the person caught in it.
What’s worrying is that despite affluence and higher education getting to the cities, the queues outside temples on a so called auspicious day, just keep getting longer. Even youngsters are caught in this. What’s the sense in visiting temples on the day of an exam? Why would God be good to you only because you visited a certain temple on a certain supposedly auspicious day? Wouldn’t God find good deeds and behaviour, the only thing that mattered?
Astrology: The dates for most marriages are determined by astrology that has no logical or scientific basis. I unfortnately too complied with this and married on a day that was supposed to be auspicious. It wasn’t because I believed that marrying on that date and time would really make a difference, but more because I just played along with what the elders in the family decided.
I think that was a mistake and I should have refused to comply, as that would not only have helped me feel better about doing the right thing, but perhaps might have also built up some awareness at least amongst those close to me.
Vaastu Shastra: I saw a TV show about “Vaastu Shastra” (Art of Building) a few days back and the lady expert was confidently dishing out rubbish on live TV. If a person has come to a stage where he believes that the reason why his business is not doing well is that his toilets are facing in the wrong direction, then I think he needs immediate medical attention and not Vaastu Shastra.
