Rushing for Blessings
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| 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-Ã -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.
X
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).
ReplyDeleteStagemanaged design, bureaucratic apathy... They're all there, I agree. Quickfix approach too on the part of the believers. I'd be interested in knowing your view on whether the situation is also a creation - largely, in my opinion - of the sociopolitical system which is founded on fraudulence. No people can be greater than their leader!
DeleteSocio-political system, as the infrastructure alters our approach to the suprastructure, basically the Marxian analysis. Of course, for him, the infrastructure will be more primordially, the economic. Nehruvn socialist ifeals and secularism is given the go-bye, giving way to religio-cultural nationalism is explained by that. Idealism has given way to overpragmaric consumeism.
DeletePeople are searching for meaning. One avenue is religion. Some will find meaning there. Others find emptiness, so they go searching elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteReligion does give meaning to a lot of people. But what kind of meaning is what I'm now wondering.
DeleteFully in agreement with you, Tomi.
ReplyDeleteOnly the other day I was discussing with a friend, how religiosity and spirituality are just a show. There is a huge dichotomy between one's so-called religious practices and their behaviour outside of it.
Just notice people coming out of a place of worship. They are back to their wicked ways.
Like you said, if people's spirituality index was any indication, India, and the world in general, would have been such a lovely place.
It's not our knowledge in virtues that we lack. We have it in abundance. What's lacking is the practice.
Have we created a system (sociopolitical) which demands more show than practice?
DeleteHari Om
ReplyDeletePaying 'lip service' to any doctrine is not necessarily a new phenomenon, but now it is at scale and led from the top. As you say, performative rather than productive on the part of the one claiming the spirituality. One cannot help but be transformed if one truly adheres to the teachings - but that is beyond most. Instead, shortcuts and external conformation are used to 'please teacher'. YAM xx