Skip to main content

Dancing to Armageddon


Three Muslim girls wearing the hijab and dancing in a public place kicked up too much unsavoury controversy in Kerala.  The irony is that until a few days ago these same men from the Muslim community in the state were vociferously supporting a girl who converted from Hinduism to Islam in order to marry a Muslim youth whose personal credentials are allegedly tainted with IS connections.  When Akhila became Hadiya, the Muslim community called it personal freedom.  When three Muslim girls danced as part of an AIDS day awareness programme, it became a sign of the Armageddon. 

Such double standards make religion absurd.  If you advocate personal freedom when someone leaves her religion and joins yours, why can’t you permit the same personal freedom to girls of your own religion who dance for a social cause?

Why would three girls dancing bring the Armageddon on the earth?  The plain answer is that the menfolk want their women to hide themselves behind the veil, behind the burqa, and live lives without even an identity.  It is not about the Armageddon; it is about imposing the patriarchal order on women. 

A few girls dancing on the street may not bring about any miraculous changes vis-à-vis AIDS.  Perhaps, the girls did not intend to bring about any such miracles either.  Perhaps, they were asserting their personal freedom.  Perhaps, they were demanding certain rights.  The leaders should try to understand the feelings and aspirations of the girls.  Instead of suppressing simple human aspirations, the leaders should see how life can be made more meaningful and fulfilling for the new generation. 

One of the biggest mistakes of religion is to keep going back to ancient rules and regulations and thus making life obsolete and ossified.  Religion should update itself and make itself meaningful in the present day.  Music and dance have their relevance in religion too.  What is life without music and dance?


Comments

  1. Pranju chakrapaniDecember 4, 2017 at 8:44 PM

    I am glad that you brought up this issue. What is life without music and dance and female empowerment? Well, simply put, life is what the holy books command and anything beyond that is a blasphemy. I don't think that a conventional religion will ever be a religion if it gets updated. And don't you think that science and arts as a religion would fit better with the dynamics of human understanding and appreciations?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 4, 2017 at 8:56 PM

      Do we need a conventional religion or a relevant one? Yes, updating religion will alter its nature. Yet there's something called aggiornamento in Catholic church which sought to make the church more relevant in the modern world. The process was not successful because religious leaders are not interested in such renewals. Vested interests and power games. All religions seem to suffer from the same fate.

      I would rather have science and arts as religion. But people need gods!

      Delete
  2. Shrinidhi HandeDecember 5, 2017 at 4:34 AM

    Hope they don't face any trouble

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 5, 2017 at 6:07 AM

      I too. That religion doesn't forgive easily.

      Delete
    2. जितेन्द्र माथुरDecember 5, 2017 at 4:02 PM

      That religion (and many other religions too) doesn't forgive easily when those aimed at are actually not guilty. The real guilty is the religion itself. However the herd of blind followers makes the religions (or their self-proclaimed representatives) mighty. And finally, MIGHT IS RIGHT.

      Delete
  3. Datta GhoshDecember 5, 2017 at 12:36 PM

    That is what religion was meant to do. Stop individualism so that people could build a civilisation. It was a guiding force in the beginning governed by fear that allowed humans to settle and form a society. With science, arts and commerce, the entire conception of religion is redundant. The concept of religion has served its purpose and now is outdated (Religion is different from spirituality)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 5, 2017 at 7:49 PM

      Yes, there was a time when religion made sense or at least helped people to make sense of the world and the cosmos. But now? Even as you say, when we have much better lights such as science and reason, religion is redundant. Again yes, spirituality is quite a different matter.

      Delete
  4. Goutami NewsDecember 5, 2017 at 9:56 PM

    Religion is getting more blind as time goes by..than ever before.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Jyotirmoy SarkarDecember 6, 2017 at 8:12 AM

    Very logically written.
    Religion has lost it real meaning and has became the orders of the dictators...
    Best of luck for the girls.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 6, 2017 at 9:04 AM

      My wishes are with them too. And with all people who want to make their religion more sensible.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand
6 comments
Read more

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation
4 comments
Read more

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv
10 comments
Read more

Hate Politics

Illustration by Copilot Hatred is what dominates the social media in India. It has been going on for many years now. A lot of violence is perpetrated by the ruling party’s own men. One of the most recent instances of venom spewed out by none other than Mithun Chakraborty would shake any sensible person. But the right wing of India is celebrating it. Seventy-four-year-old Chakraborty threatened to chop the people of a particular minority community into pieces. The Home Minister Amit Shah was sitting on the stage with a smile when the threat was issued openly. A few days back, a video clip showing a right-winger denying food to a Muslim woman because she refused to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’ dominated the social media. What kind of charity is it that is founded on hatred? If you go through the social media for a while, you will be astounded by the surfeit of hatred there. Why do a people who form the vast majority of a country hate a small minority so much? Hatred usually comes from some
8 comments
Read more