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Deliver us from religion, Amen!

It was a nice breezy evening, an invitation to a relatives house didn't seem like the best thing to be doing but what the hell, I am here to stay so might as well start getting used to this phase of life. A few appetizers down the tummy started a conversation I am not particularly fond of. The quintessential NRIs and a couple of visiting deshvasis' chatting about how we should make an effort in preserving the Hindu in us through the gentle touch of shringar kumkum on our foreheads. It started with the reprimanding of an innocent 12yr old for not doing so. My eyes started to roll involuntarily.

There was a gentleman who taught the Indians of the world about Hindutva
There was a gentleman who taught Indians of the world about karma and dharma
and there was the gentleman who also didn't bother to take care of his papa and mumma
so, enlighten me now what is the jazz of teaching about Hindutva?

An article I read some where once said 'Indian values are a red herring.' I couldn't agree with this more but in a more positive light that the beauty of Hindutva is that it is not a religion, a philosophy. Why would you waste your breath in trying to turn this beauty into a cult? As a 'religion' it provides you the flexibility to evolve. While I say this, I don't intend to dismiss the good things christianity or Islam or any other religion carries.

I strongly believe in everything having a good and bad side. Like everything else, religion has a good and bad side to it. The strength/lack of it in religion lies in what you want to get out of it. Some support rituals with scientific causes and some diss them as old practices that do nothing but cause discomfort.

Three of us were passionately talking about god and our relation to him - a skeptic, a believer, and a hopeful. While we had our constant differences about why religion is good or bad, we definitely agreed on the fact that as illogical as it can be at times or always as an atheist would claim, it's definitely something that provides that inner strength that few can muster to gather in testing times. As cliched as it sounds, the rays called god give you that hope.

I didn't discover my relationship with god and what I thought I ought to do till I read a book which was my moment of epiphany to answer all questions about karma & dharma. How do people get off putting a structure around that? Lets give our relationship to god its share of magic and sense of supreme by making it unstructured.






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