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

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

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af

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

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