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Rushing for Blessings

Pilgrims at Sabarimala


Millions of devotees are praying in India’s temples every day. The rush increases year after year and becomes stampedes occasionally. Something similar is happening in the religious places of other faiths too: Christianity and Islam, particularly. It appears that Indians are becoming more and more religious or spiritual. Are they really? If all this religious faith is genuine, why do crimes keep increasing at an incredible rate? Why do people hate each other more and more? Isn’t something wrong seriously?

This is the pilgrimage season in Kerala’s Sabarimala temple. Pilgrims are forced to leave the temple without getting a darshan (spiritual view) of the deity due to the rush. Kerala High Court has capped the permitted number of pilgrims there at 75,000 a day. Looking at the serpentine queues of devotees in scanty clothing under the hot sun of Kerala, one would think that India is becoming a land of ascetics and renouncers.

If religion were a vaccine against social decay, India should have been a utopia by now. The headlines, however, scream a different story – of lynchings, corruption, misogyny, communal hatred, and a moral decline that even the Aghori babas of Varanasi would struggle to comprehend.

Why is it so?

First of all, religion has become performance rather than spirituality. Much of today’s religiosity is spectacle, mere show. Temples have become arenas for public display: Instagram darshan, political processions, televised rituals. People are religious, not spiritual. Religion is a political badge, not a transformative impetus.

Traditional spirituality demanded introspection. Know yourself, conquer the ego, serve others… Who bothers about those teachings anymore? Now religiosity is externalised in rituals, temple visits, donations, public displays. When faith is externalised, morality is externalised too. Evil becomes what others do. Ethics stops being measured by how one behaves and starts being measured by one’s religious affiliations. Evil is always out there, in the other community.

Religious nationalism is India’s greatest bane today. Temples are now makers of collective identity and political victory. Being religious in India today means asserting a cultural identity, not seeking inner growth. Spirituality made you feel humble till a few years back; today religion makes you feel proud of your nation and in turn hateful towards people of other creeds. For example, hate speech increased 500% from 2014 to 2018 in India, The New York Times reported in 2019. No one seems to keep such stats anymore!

The hollowing out of institutions is perhaps the biggest evil in today’s India vis-à-vis spirituality. The apex court of justice today is probably the greatest sham in the country. When you know you can’t get justice from the judiciary, truth from academia, security from the police, you cease expecting goodness from gods.

Is there any room for hope?

Maybe.

We can redeem ourselves, at least, if we understand the real meaning and purpose of religion.

If religion does not become a personal journey rather than a public (political) spectacle, there will be no hope. 

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  1. Jose D. MaliekalNovember 25, 2025 at 5:32 AM

    Yourc paragraph entitled, " Hollowing out of Institutions"... And cannot get justice from judiciary, truth from academia, security from the police... and goodness from gods" tell it all. Everything is outsourced for money. The corners are cut. God's do not cause stampede. The humans, either by stage-mansged design or lackslustre bureaucratic apathy and indolence cause them. So too, the plethora of rail accidents and the volvo infernos on the roads. The boomeraning of Quickfix culture. The rush to gods is also part of this quickfix culture. Like Plan B, standby. In the process, Evil is banalised (Arendt).

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