Skip to main content

Laughter of Nightmares

 

Image from https://www.silhouette.pics/73659/yogi-adityanath-silhouette.php

Religion has terrified me for the larger part of my life. The Christian crusades and the inquisitions of the medieval period, the endless Islamic jihads, and other historic atrocities are not the only causes. The present Hindutva versions of some of those atrocities are bigger nightmares for me since they happen in my own country – not in some distant land and ancient time. But even they are not the chief reasons why the very mention of religion sends shivers down my spine.

The most tragic things that happened in my personal life were all caused by certain religious people. First it was some Christian missionaries who took upon themselves the arduous mission of salvaging my soul from perdition. I managed to save myself from them after about five long years of hellish ordeals they put me through. A decade and a half after that came a Hindu cult with its unique style of subjecting a whole school to slow death out of sheer greed for land. This latter missionaries damaged my soul more than anyone else. They stifled the little trust I had in humanity’s potential for goodness.

What does religion mean to me today? A painful nightmare. Honestly, I’m more scared of religious people than any roguish politician or a street thug. I know what to expect from rogues and thugs. But I can never predict what the religious do-gooder is going to do.

Religion is like a breeze that caresses you softly but carries within it deadly toxins that are invisible and unpalpable. You recognise the damage done to you too late, much after the corrosion has eaten away some vital part of your soul.

This is written from my personal experience. I’m sure there are a lot of people for whom religion means totally something else. I have friends who are religious by profession – priests, for example. Most of them lead lives just like you and me except that they practise certain rituals at regular intervals. I’m not speaking about such people. They are harmless.

The harms come from those who arrogate to themselves the mission of salvaging amorphous things like souls, culture, national pride… When any individual or group sets up themselves as the redeemer of others, trouble begins. This tendency to be redeemers is irresistible to many religious people. The worst thing that can happen to a nation is when such people enter politics too. When politics and religion mingle, it is like swine stepping into slush. Just pay attention to the utterances of some of India’s contemporary politicians to understand better what I’m saying. For example, when the ruminants in other parts of the world release methane into the environment, in India they release oxygen, thanks to our religious politicians. That’s just one example. If you start observing India’s religious politicians seriously, you’ll die laughing.

That laughter is my nightmare nowadays. Once upon a time, the nightmare was a personal one: missionaries trying to redeem my soul. Then it was my school: a cult killing it slowly. Now it is my country. I have no escape from redeemers.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 395: What does religion mean to you? #ReligionForMe

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    True this is your own very personal view - but on one thing we most certainly can agree..."When politics and religion mingle, it is like swine stepping into slush." It is an abomination that has reigned in the Middle and Near East for centuries and now pervades India. What angers me to the degree you describe in this post is that such verminous characters have abused a noble faith and made of it an object of hate; it has to be remembered that whatever creed is spouted, it is men, egoistic, lustful men who carry out these acts or incite others to it. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's very saddening too that a great vision like advaita and fraternity of the world is being converted into such a parochial view merely for the sake of politics. The biggest tragedy may be that it will take decades now to heal the perversion of Indian minds.

      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

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Book Review Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Author: Manu S Pillai Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2024 Pages: 564 (about half of which consists of Notes) There never was any monolithic religion called Hinduism. Different parts of India practised Hinduism in its own ways, with its own gods and rituals and festivals. Some of these were even mutually opposed. For example, Vamana who is a revered incarnation of Vishnu in North India becomes a villain in Kerala’s Onam legends. What has become of this protean religion of infinite variety and diversity today in the hands of its ‘missionary’ political leaders? Manu S Pillai’s book ends with V D Savarkar’s contributions to the religion with a subtle hint that it is his legacy that is driving the present version of the religion in the name of Hindutva. The last lines of the book, leaving aside the Epilogue titled ‘What is Hinduism?’, are telltale. “Life did not give Savarkar all he...