Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label religion

Kabir the Guru – 2

Read Part 1 of thi s here . K abir lived in the 15 th century. But his poems and songs are still valued. Being illiterate, he didn’t write them. They were passed on orally until they were collected by certain enthusiasts into books. Vipul Rikhi’s book, Drunk on Love: The Life, Vision and Songs of Kabir , not only brings the songs and poems together in one volume but also seeks to impart the very spirit of Kabir to the reader. Kabir is not just a name, the book informs us somewhere in the beginning. Kabir is a tradition. He is a legend, a philosophy, poetry and music. I would add that Kabir was a mystic. Most of his songs have something to do with spirituality. They strive to convey the deep meaning of reality. They also question the ordinary person’s practice of religion. They criticise the religious leaders such as pandits and mullahs. Though a Muslim, Kabir was immensely taken up by Ram, the Hindu god, for reasons known only to him perhaps. Most of the songs are about the gr

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 differ

A Church and some History

St Mary's is always spick and span Maggie and I had to travel pretty much today for various reasons. Holidays are reserved for such travels and fulfilment of certain obligations to ourselves as well as others. Sometimes the fatiguing demands of a regular working day seem far more accommodatable than these holiday trips. It was a long day, in short, and I needed to take a washroom break. Years of drives in Kerala have taught me that the easily available as well as clean toilets are in the Christian church compounds. So, as we approached the St Mary’s Church in Manarcad (near Kottayam), I asked Maggie, “Don’t you want to pray at this famous pilgrimage centre?” I knew what the answer would be. That is how Maggie and I found ourselves in the sacred precincts of St Mary’s Cathedral church whose history goes back to a thousand years. I don’t want to bore you with the history. If you’re interested, please go to the official website of the church here and read the history. The churc

Callousness

One of those old wells in Kerala [Pic from Mathrubhumi weekly, 7 Jan 2024] The Bombay Samachar dated 19 Dec 1936 reported a tragic event from Kalady [birthplace of Adi Sankara], Kerala. The report was about the child of a young mother that fell into a well. The hapless mother cried for help but no one rendered any assistance. Wells were not very common in those days especially because Kerala had a large number of natural water bodies such as rivers and lakes. The few wells that did exist were not accessible to everyone. Most of the wells belonged to the high caste people. The low caste people were not even allowed to go anywhere near the wells, even the public ones. If they did, the water would become polluted. Then there would be a whole lot of rituals to cleanse the well. The Bombay Samachar reported that a stranger happened to pass by and he readily got down into the well and saved the child. The man was appreciated and congratulated for his goodness and courage. But soon his

Tenderness

The only possession that Swami Gangadhar priced as precious was his copy of the Bhagavad Gita . His mornings began and evenings ended with meditations on randomly chosen shlokas of the Gita. But one day he lost the Gita. It was missing. He searched everywhere in his simple, ascetic room, where there wasn’t much space to search. He had no doubt that the Gita was missing. Only one person had entered his room that day, his favourite disciple Venkateswar. Swami Gangadhar smiled to himself. Venkateswar had mentioned the other day that he needed some money to help his mother. The shopkeeper from the neighbourhood came to meet Swami Gangadhar. He needed a small help. “Can you look at this book and tell me how much it is worth? Somebody wants to sell it and I’m not sure how much I should pay.” Swami Gangadhar smiled again. It was his copy of the Gita. “I’m willing to pay Rs 100 for it,” Swami Gangadhar said looking at the tattered book. He got his beloved holy book back. And his disc

Christmas at Bethlehem

From the Washington Post Bethlehem, the place of Jesus’ birth, is not celebrating Christmas this time, says the Washington Post . The only scene related to Christmas is Jesus entering the world amid a pile of Gazan rubble. Christmas is a festival of joy, peace, magnanimity – goodness, in general. It is a terrible irony that the very place of Jesus’ birth is marked by the opposite of all what Christmas stands for. What meaning will a Christmas carol like Joy to the World have in Bethlehem today? What would Jesus say about the kind of religions that we have today? Isn’t religion the cause of all the strife in Bethlehem and many other places in the world? The Hamas who attacked Israel were motivated by religion. Israel is a nation founded on the bricks of a particular religion. It is another irony that Jesus was born in that religion. Did Jesus found a new religion? I would hesitate to say ‘Yes’ to that question. His intention was to reform Judaism, his religion, not establish a

A Thousand Cuts

Book Review Title: A Thousand Cuts: An innocent question and deadly answers Author: T J Joseph Translator: Nandakumar K Having read the Malayalam original of this book, I turned to my mobile phone to catch up with the latest news. The first headline that Google gave me is: Darul Huda Islamic University comes out against Literature Festival in Kerala . This book is written by a college professor whose palm was chopped off with a hatchet in 2010 by a group of young Muslim terrorists. He was attacked brutally while he was returning from Sunday church service. He was stabbed in many places and some of the wounds were near-fatal. His palm was chopped off and thrown away. This book, written originally in Malayalam, tells us why the professor was attacked so inhumanly and how it changed his life quite radically. What provoked the terrorists was a particular question that the professor had set in the Malayalam question paper for the undergraduates of his college. It was an internal

Kochi's bomb and India's love

The explosions that shook Kochi yesterday morning brought a lot of messages and phone calls to me. Many of them were from friends of yesteryears, people who hadn’t contacted me for a long time. Their concern did touch me; it made me realise how much goodness there still is in our world. One such call was from Shillong, the place where I worked from 1986 to 2001. The person who called was my colleague for just one year, my first year in Shillong. His call yesterday evening struck me particularly because his concern was immensely palpable. It brought back a flood of memories – my walks with him through the narrow concrete paths of Shillong’s entrails. He knew all the shortcuts in the town and hills have plenty of time-saving shortcuts. He was my first guide in Shillong. Now, retired from government service, he is an active pastor. His concern reached out beyond me as an individual to whole communities as he discussed Kerala's demographics and the intricate relationships between commu

God is War

A Palestinian child whose dear ones were killed Pic from Malayalam weekly   They are killing each other because their gods are different. Each of the gods is a jealous entity. Yahweh, the God of the Jews, admitted his own jealousy. He told the Jews, his chosen race, “For you shall worship no other god, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God.” [Exodus 20:4] Allah of Islam makes no less claims. While Yahweh allows other gods to exist, Allah apparently isn’t as generous as that. La ilaha illallah. Both these gods together have caused endless misery on the earth. They have made their chosen people squeamishly narrowminded and incapable of living in harmony with others. Why on earth did anyone think of putting these two people together on a desert? Mahatma Gandhi was right. He was against the creation of Israel as a country for the Jews. He was not one who would give credence to fairy tales such as a race being God’s favourite and so on. “I am not moved by the argument that the Jews

Beloved and God

Let me start with a disclaimer. This is not a book review though I’m relying on Royston Lambert’s book , Beloved and God (1984) for most of the information contained in this post. The eponymous hero of the book is Antinous who died in his early 20s. Soon after his death he became a God in the Roman Empire because he was the beloved of Emperor Hadrian . What I wish to highlight is how a god can be created pretty easily and how the religion founded in his name can become popular too as easily. I think my country’s present leaders can take some lessons from here. Hadrian was quite a good emperor. A benevolent dictator, in the judgment of many historians. He did very many good things for the benefit of his people instead of going around conquering more territories. [China too can learn something.] One of those many things was giving the people a new god and religion. He did much better things earlier, of course. Antinous was an adolescent boy when Hadrian’s eyes fell on him first

Beyond the delights of belief

There are two worlds for each one of us. One where there is order, purpose, love, and joy. The plain truth is that this world of goodness is our own creation. We create the order, the purpose, and all the rest of it. Then there is the second world, a ruthless one which is beyond our control. The Goods and Services Tax (GST), the occasional floods and landslides, deadly viruses, and the Enforcement Directorate. And a lot more, of course. Confronted with the horrors and terrors of this second world, we seek solace and some sort of spiritual belief comes to our aid easily. It’s so facile to believe that there is a God sitting somewhere up there bringing this second world under some kind of control in response to our prayers. Mark Twain found this God too infantile to accommodate. In his book Letters from the Earth , Twain made Satan visit the earth. Twain’s Satan is astounded to find that humans think God is watching them. As if God has nothing else to do than watch some silly crea

Religion with a heart

Swami Agnivesh Religious people can be quite scary, especially nowadays. Swami Agnivesh was a religious person in the genuine sense of the term. He loved people. He stood for what was right. He gathered enemies because he was a good man. Today [Sep 11] is his third death anniversary. I met Swami Agnivesh personally only once. It was some 20 years ago when he visited the school where I was teaching in Delhi as the chief guest on the occasion of Independence Day or Republic Day. I had no idea what kind of a person he was until then. His speech on the occasion struck a chord with me. When words come from the heart, they are powerfully eloquent. Swami Agnivesh’s speech had the power to stir the depths within. Here was a man for whom religion was a matter of action rather than prayers and rituals. Swami Agnivesh was a champion of social justice and communal harmony. Ramachandra Guha described him as a man of “steely courage and enormous compassion.” That was the most apt description o

The Essence of Spirituality

BOOKS Title: The Journey Home: An Autobiography of an American Swami Author: Radhanath Swami What is spirituality? This is a question that has bothered me for a long time. It has obviously nothing much to do with religions since religions seem to forge believers into bigots and bombers. I bought this book, written by a man who was born a Jew in Chicago, left home in search of the meaning of life at the age of 19, and became a Hindu Swami at 21, because I thought it would give me some insights into the problem I face with spirituality. The book did enlighten me though in a limited way. Spirituality is a hunger, not of the body but very similar. The spirit, soul or whatever you may call it, is hungry. It is as Saint Augustine of the Catholic Church said, “Our heart is restless until it rests in you.” If there is God, then nothing less can satisfy us merely because nothing else can be as perfect and as delightful and as charming as God. Not everyone experiences such hunger, how