Skip to main content

Ram and Rahim

The Malayalam poem which inspired this post


A poem that I read in a Malayalam journal yesterday continues to haunt me up to this moment. A very short poem, just 16 short lines, it is titled Rahim and Ram. Unable to catch sleep, Ram is wriggling convulsively in his new temple. From beneath the temple’s sanctum sanctorum rises the adhan in the fractured voice of a mosque’s debris. Rahim apologises to Ram and says, ‘This is the Kali Yug. Its humans don’t know that we are merely characters created by poets.’

This afternoon a young friend sent me a query on WhatsApp. “Is objective truth the same as objective reality?” My response: The Ram Temple in Ayodhya is objective reality. But is it objective truth?

The first prime minister of India asserted vehemently that India did not need more gods and temples. He said dams were modern India’s temples and went on to construct the Nagarjuna Sagar, the Hirakud, the Damodar Valley dams, etc. When some malicious person infiltrated the Babri Masjid soon after Independence and placed an idol of Ram Lalla inside to stake a claim to the mosque, Nehru asked the police to throw the idol into the Sarayu and be done with it.

Three quarters of a century later, Nehru’s successor, who had installed himself as the Maharaja of Bharat by ceremoniously carrying a sceptre to the new palatial parliament building, spent a royal sum of Rs1800 crore on a temple for Lord Ram who had abandoned his own palace to live in exile in wildernesses for the sake of keeping his stepmother happy. This Maharaja-PM defied the rubrics of the consecration ceremony for various reasons all of which ultimately boil down to his megalomania and self-aggrandizement.

Is Lord Ram wriggling in this palatial temple consecrated by a royal thespian? Is he there inside that temple at all?

I am reminded of a parable.

A man known for his many transgressions was excommunicated from the church. He took his woes to God. “They won’t let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner,” he said to his God. “What are you complaining about?” God asked. “They won’t let me in either.”

“Open your eyes and see your God is not before you!” Rabindranath Tagore tells the worshipper in the temple. All your chanting and singing and telling the beads are useless. Your God is not sitting in this lonely dark corner of your temple. God is out there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground, where the path-maker is breaking stones…

How far back have we been taken from Tagore and Nehru by the Maharaja-PM. Tagore and Nehru were visionaries, Nehru’s current successor is a reactionary who changes costumes too often.

Labels:

Comments

  1. Rama KashyapFebruary 9, 2024 at 10:54 PM

    Hard hitting!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 10, 2024 at 3:33 AM

      A lot of people are concerned about tha temple politics. See this, for instance: https://m.thewire.in/article/rights/ex-civil-servants-express-deep-disquiet-over-states-involvement-in-ram-temple-consecration/amp

      Delete
  2. Yamini MacLeanFebruary 10, 2024 at 12:32 AM

    Hari OM
    Eloquent hiss and spit! Again I fold my hands and sing pranaams for your insight. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  3. Liz A.February 10, 2024 at 12:49 AM

    What is truth? What is reality? I don't think I can get my head around this on a Friday. It's too much for me.

    ReplyDelete
  4. peppylady (Dora)February 10, 2024 at 6:33 AM

    I love your parable.

    ReplyDelete
  5. magiceyeFebruary 10, 2024 at 11:49 AM

    Will change the constitution too not only costumes!

    ReplyDelete

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
47 comments
Read more

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. ...
16 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more

My Experiments with Hindi

M y knowledge of Hindi is remarkably deficient despite my living in the northern parts of India for three whole decades. The language never appealed to me. Rather, my Hindi teachers at school, without exception, were the coarsest people I ever met in that period of my life and they created my aversion to Hindi. Someone told me later that those who took up Hindi as their academic major in Kerala were people who failed to secure admission to any other course. That is, if you’re good for nothing else, then go for Hindi. And so they end up as disgruntled people. We students became the victims of that discontent. I don’t know if this theory is correct, however. Though I studied Hindi as my third language (there was no other option) at school for six years, I couldn’t speak one good sentence in that language when I turned my back on school happily and with immense relief after the tenth grade. Of course, I could manage some simple sentences like में लड़का हू। [I am a boy.] A few line...
8 comments
Read more