Skip to main content

Satanic Saints

Let idealism live as long as it can!


A group of my students visited an industry today as part of their curricular activity. They returned looking very ebullient because the industrial complex looked perfect to them: immaculately clean, professionally managed, subsidised food in the canteen, a managing director who is not only highly religious but also an excellent motivational speaker, and so on. They were also given a gift hamper each which contained the religious publications of the organisation that runs the industry. One of the students thrust into my hand a book written by the owner of the industry and said, “Sir, please read this.” I turned a few pages. I am a rapid reader. Within seconds I understood that the book was of no use to me. I returned it to the student saying, “I don’t think this will serve any purpose for me.” The student refused to take it back. She said, “Read it, Sir, for my sake.” I accepted it. I read most of it in a few minutes during my free period which followed. It was entirely based on the Bible and the discourses were peppered with anecdotes about people who were converted to better spiritual and more fulfilling life by the writer through his religious preaching sessions.

After the school was over I mentioned to a colleague the book and the way I was forced to read it.

“Do you know anything about that man?” My colleague asked me.

“I have seen his photo on certain posters in my village. I know that he is a religious preacher and the posters advertised his religious sessions.”

“Yes,” my colleague said, “he is a preacher who earns in millions.”

“Religion is a good business nowadays,” I said indifferently.

“That’s fine. But do you know what he does with his employees in that industry which our students visited?”

I said the students were all electrified by the ideal conditions that prevailed there.

“The staff are paid a pittance there,” my colleague said. “Most of them work there because they have no better alternatives. They are treated like cattle. If they are late by a minute to report for their duty, they are penalised. They are exploited inhumanly.”

That shook me. “But the man is a religious preacher who apparently performs miracles!” I was aghast.

“His religion is a facade.”

I know, like my colleague, that we cannot tell that to our students. Let their exhilaration remain as long as it can. Let idealism live as long as it can in young minds. But I continue to be stunned, in spite of my awareness of all sorts of fraudulence practised by all sorts of religious people, by the disparity between what I had just read in that inspiring book and the reality behind it.


Featured post on IndiBlogger, the biggest community of Indian Bloggers

Comments

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

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...