So, here I am sitting in the computer centre of the "Worlds Second Best Medical College" with absolutely no idea as to what I want to write about. Shall it be a serious treatise on the crash of the worlds economy? A wild and crazy rant about the dangers of communism? A funny story about a dog with one leg? Or a humorless and dry article about the prevalence of potholes on the streets of Vellore? What shall it be..what shall it be?Maybe I should talk about small towns, small communities, enclosed campuses and walls with ears. About monopoly, mommas boys and frightened administrators...castrated administrations and spineless students. I would like to construct a new world, never minds its name. But it exists and lives in the recesses of every small community, every small town and actually manifests as pure ignorant badness.
More than poverty, more than anger, more than war and the desire to find out whats cooking in your neighbours kitchen Self righteousness is, i feel, the true plague of mankind. It can spread like a cancer among the masses, words being its only vehicle. It is transferred through thoughts, dreams and visions. It maybe manifested as a burning bush for some, the saffron colour of war for others and the crescent moon for a third. It comes cloaked in various disguises but it is not very difficult to recognise once you realise how it works.
Hitler was dangerous not because of his evil, but because he was so convinced that he was right. The crusades did not wage for so many years and take a toll on the lives of countless millions because they were a petty war between two sister religions but because they were fought in the firm conviction that the other side had no just cause to stand upon.
Maybe I am making the actual issue, far reaching and much larger than it may seem at first sight but I disagree. All these momentous events in the history of mankind, these bloodied pages of the story of the earth bear witness to one fact, that the belief that you are right, in exclusion to the views of all other people has led to more hardships and problems than pure greed.
So what relation does it have to the state of events in the smalled walled community that I live in? Everything.
I shall mention no names. I shall name no events and I shall point no fingers. I shall construct scenarios out of my own imagination and work it out from there.
If self righteousness is one bane for a community, insecurity is another and comes second in my list of human evils. Religion is something personal. Everyone hears this platitude repeated endlessly like the mantras repeated with prayer beads. I agree with it but what does it mean?
It means this - A man establishes his connection with god in his own personal way - it may be a simple smile in the direction of a neighbouring temple every morning prior to work. It may be a bowed head over his daily meals, a thank you. It may be a fast made in honour of his gods, broken with great rejoicing, it may be candles, frankincense and myrrh. It maybe chaos, pandemonium, drums and dances, colours and lights...crackers and brilliant sparkles jabbing away the darkness of the night. Whatever it is, I feel that everyone moves towards religion in their own manner and this movement is very much akin to the migration of birds in winter. We humans do it purely as creatures of instinct.
So, if a person feels no peace worshipping in a particular manner, I believe he has every right to move over to something else. But then, insecurity will not allow him to.
The problem with putting my theory into practical use is that a religion is more like a club in these troubled times. We all gang together in the attempt to assess our own mortality, our relationship with the almighty and our opinion of the unexplained universe. This stems from the universal truth that there is comfort in numbers. When these numbers that were once so numerous start to decline:- anger, rage, disbelief ensues. This may not be because of the actual fact of the desertion but because people may think this 'Is what I have been following the wrong method? Is God accessible through this path or through the other, is nirvana attainable only to those of the other religions, are we to be abandoned?' Insecurity. This manifests as denial and leads to large scale conflicts.
But I feel, that the truth is much simpler and have already laid it out for you to agree or disagree to it. People must worship in whatever way gives them a modicum of peace. If you find yourself distressed by your religion, change it.
So what am I building up to? Tolerance.
Walled Communities are a safe area to witness the small ripples in the current that lead to the whirlpool of national affairs. They are the small scale models of butterflies flapping their wings to produce a vortex half a world away. They denote and intensify the small problems in our world that lead to the large scale conflicts. I recommend them to sociologists as places where they can identify the causes for most of the problems that plague us.
I have come across several discriminative insecurities in the past three years of my life. Deepavali the festival of light is always a source of anger. It is not a festival that encompasses all religions, it is not a festival that other religions can enjoy, it is pagan... these are the actual issues that people have. But they are masked...the resistance comes in the form of statements like 'the noise disturbs the staff, we were planning another function at that particular time...' Sometimes another religious icon may be planted in the field where the event is supposed to be held to discourage any activity. Small subtle hints that maybe we are not wanted, that we are tolerated only because they have to and that our customs have no respect.
Let us set aside this issue for a minute. To deny leave to someone so that they can celebrate their own festival comes to me as a surprise. Festivals are times to connect with family and your community back home...to deny this to someone is tantamount to curbing their freedom.
I am not asking Hindus to worship in Churches or for Muslims to break coconuts at the steps of temples, I am not asking Christians to dress in Saffron and dance around 20 foot idols of the Lord Ganesha. That would be too much to ask, and such open mindedness is not possible for everyone though it would be ideal. Respect....observe and realise this, if your faith is strong and your convictions are in the right place, God is just a breath away. Too much time is spent in putting barricades around your religion, too much effort spent in criticising the other religions and too much thought is given to your own superiority.
I am not a very religious man. I do not pray daily and have a disdain for a lot of Hindu Practices though I am one myself. But when I look at the various miracles that faith can perform, I sometimes wonder at its redeeming nature. A christian Missionary can serve a community endlessly , without proper housing, food or sanitation, secure in the belief that he is doing Gods work. A Sufi mystic can render advice to all who come to him, renounce his home and family and live a life of service to society, in the same vein a Hindu can construct centres of medicine like the ones seen in Whitefield and Puttaparthi that serves the community free of cost...
What I have listed is a bare framework that serves only to highlight the fact that faith speaks for itself and needs no connection to any religious movement. In conclusion, I shall say that this quote from Louis de Bernieres' BIRDS WITHOUT WINGS should serve to sum things up and summarises my thoughts excellently -
"Where does it all begin? History has no beginnings, for everything that happens becomes the cause or pretext for what occurs afterwards, and this chain of cause and pretext stretches back to the Palaeolithic age, when the first Cain of one tribe murdered the first Abel of another. All war is fratricide, and there is therefore an infinite chain of blame that winds its circuitous route back and forth across the path and under the feet of every people and every nation, so that a people who are the victims of one time become the victimisers a generation later, and newly liberated nations resort immediately to the means of their former oppressors. The triple contagions of nationalism, utopianism and religious absolutism effervesce together into an acid that corrodes the moral metal of a race, and it shamelessly and even proudly performs deeds that it would deem vile if they were done by any other."
Louis de Bernieres.
