A
teacher narrated her woe to me today. There are two girls in her class who
belong to a particular religion and wear the headgear that the religion has
draped them with. They now wish to participate in a dance that the class is putting
up for a function. The girls offered themselves for the dance and the teacher was
in a dilemma. She had a bad experience when she asked the girls to remove their
headgear for a particular programme in which all participating girls had to
wear the same uniform dress. The girls not only refused to do what the teacher
asked but also brought their parents the next morning to squabble about their
religious rights and privileges.
“How
do I convince them either to wear the dress required for the dance which
implies they remove their headgear or to stay away from the dance?” The teacher
asked me.
I
was helpless. The country
has become so viciously communalised that it is impossible to convince people
that their religion is not their headgear or some such trivial symbol.
People
belonging to a particular religion in India today have become very defensive
(and offensive at the same time – defence and offence are two sides of the same
coin) because of insecurity feelings. I don’t deny that they have been
unnecessarily aggressive for most part of their religious history. It is
probably that aggressiveness and concomitant ferocity that brought upon them
the present backlash from the majority community in the country.
Savagery
is not the prerogative of any particular religion, however. People have fought
in the name of their gods irrespective of religions. Religion seems to make
people aggressive necessarily. Religion belongs to the savage side of human
nature. Religion is a mask put on that savage side.
There
is no way anyone can cure that savagery. Except to counsel people to get rid of
their religion, or to treat it as just another social meme, a fad, or something
that has to be endured. We can’t
obviously give such counsel to young students. Youngsters should go through the
inevitable process of growing up into maturity by being part of certain
familial and social systems before they accept or reject any of those systems.
Religion is one such system.
“Why
don’t you give the girls some roles in the dance where the headgear becomes
part of the roles?” I asked. I suggested that in the given situation today it
is better to let the headgear be. If you touch it, fire and brimstone will
descend from the supernatural realms of scriptures and strictures.
The
headgear is just another of the masks that today’s savage religions have
imposed on people. There are plenty of them masks that all the “jerks” put on [to use
a term employed by Salman Rushdie in his latest novel Quichotte
for today’s people who have compromised their goodness and virtue].
Jerks,
that’s who we live with today. Don’t touch their masks.
PS.
I had a girl student a few years back who used to remove her headgear the
moment she stepped into the security of the school campus and put it back on
the moment she stepped out. She was a rebel. She wrote amazingly deep poems.
She inspired one of my short stories: Shahina
lets her hair down.
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