Skip to main content

Did you choose your religion?


Two little kids were playing in a kiddie swimming pool. One of them was a Hindu and the other – you guessed it – a Muslim. The children were also conscious of their being incompatible with each other. This incompatibility awareness is in the DNA of people. We all want to prove that we are better than the others. So we make systems like caste, gender, religion, political parties… Blacks and Whites and Brownies… Chinkies and Pinkies and Cookies…

The kids in the DLF Paradise Apartment kiddie pool also carried in their veins the inescapable DNA inherited from their parents as well as a nationalism that had gone juvenile just when they were being conceived – not too later than 2014.

It was purely by chance that the shorts of one of the kids slipped. Wardrobe malfunction, you could call it. But that malfunction led to an enlightenment for the kids. The other kid lowered its shorts too to say that there’s something wrong. Something different, it was. But children don’t understand differences. Variety is for adults. Children love uniformity. Homogeneity. Like One Nation One Religion and so on.

With their knickers down from where they should have been, the children saw life from an enlightened perspective. This is the difference between a Hindu and a Muslim.

They are children. We can forgive the immaturity of their enlightenment. What about us, adults?

You are an adult, aren’t’ you? Where did you get your religion from? Just the same source as your gender, right? You were born with a gender and a religion. You didn’t choose your religion any more than you did your gender.

Your religion is an imposition on you. As much as your gender is.

I’m kidding.

Because I’m writing this for

Indispire Edition 464

 

A little boy and a little girl, one Hindu and the other Muslim, are in a children's pool where they happen to see each other's genitals quite by chance. Oh! This is the Hindu- Muslim difference! #Learning

Comments

  1. But you aren't really kidding are you? Facts are facts😂

    ReplyDelete
  2. You are effortlessly funny.Bet you got lot of admirers back in your young days.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Not really. People always belonged to one sect or another. And i didn't know where i belonged. So i was kinda syupid 😊

      Delete
  3. Religion is something you're born with? Wow. No wonder I'm doing it wrong.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Haha... Yeah, Liz, some of us just don't get it right.

      Delete
  4. Satirical, Yet Awesome 😊

    ReplyDelete
  5. That was the basis on which so many lost their lives! With their shorts down!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Religions are man made but gender is not. In the matter of faith we can move either or more sides. Although religions have so many draw backs I feel it is an inevitable matter in the society. So let it be.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I let it be. But they don't let others be. That's the problem.

      Delete
  7. I often think that The Creator is up there lamenting the fact they spend so long to give us Brains that we have no intention of using!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Or as Nietzsche said, the Creator must have died laughing at what we are doing.

      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

Being Christian in BJP’s India

A moment of triumph for India’s women’s cricket team turned unexpectedly into a controversy about religious faith and expression, thanks to some right-wing footsloggers. After her stellar performance in the semi-final of the Wormen’s World Cup (2025), Jemimah Rodrigues thanked Jesus for her achievement. “Jesus fought for me,” she said quoting the Bible: “Stand still and God will fight for you” [1 Samuel 12:16]. Some BJP leaders and their mindless followers took strong exception to that and roiled the religious fervour of the bourgeoning right wing with acerbic remarks. If Ms Rodrigues were a Hindu, she would have thanked her deity: Ram or Hanuman or whoever. Since she is a Christian, she thanked Jesus. What’s wrong in that? If she was a nonbeliever like me, God wouldn’t have topped the list of her benefactors. Religion is a talisman for a lot of people. There’s nothing wrong in imagining that some god sitting in some heaven is taking care of you. In fact, it gives a lot of psychologic...

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 wisdom of the Mahabharata

Illustration by Gemini AI “Krishna touches my hand. If you can call it a hand, these pinpricks of light that are newly coalescing into the shape of fingers and palm. At his touch something breaks, a chain that was tied to the woman-shape crumpled on the snow below. I am buoyant and expansive and uncontainable – but I always was so, only I never knew it! I am beyond the name and gender and the imprisoning patterns of ego. And yet, for the first time, I’m truly Panchali. I reach with my other hand for Karna – how surprisingly solid his clasp! Above us our palace waits, the only one I’ve ever needed. Its walls are space, its floor is sky, its center everywhere. We rise; the shapes cluster around us in welcome, dissolving and forming and dissolving again like fireflies in a summer evening.” What is quoted above is the final paragraph of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel The Palace of Illusions which I reread in the last few days merely because I had time on my hands and this book hap...

Hollow Leaders

A century ago, T S Eliot wrote about the hollowness of his countrymen in a poem titled The Hollow Men . The World War I had led to a lot of disillusionment with the collapse of powerful empires and the savagery of the war itself which unleashed barbaric slaughter. The generation that survived was known as the “Lost Generation.” Before the war, Western civilisation was sustained by certain values and principles given by religion, the Enlightenment, and Victorian morality. The war showed that science and technology, which could improve life, had actually produced machine guns, gas warfare, and mass death. Religion became hollow. People became hollow. “We are the hollow men,” Eliot’s poem began. The civilisation looked sophisticated from outside, but it was empty inside. There is a lot of religion today in the world. My country has allegedly become so religious that it decides what you will eat, wear, which god you will pray to, and even the language for communication. The ultimat...