827

-
Went to Crossword last evening. There, I happened to read the introduction of a book called 'Bol Bam' by Scharada Dubey. It's a compilation of essays on various pilgrims and pilgrimmages associated with Lord Shiva. There seemed to be a few pictures and I dipped into some pages in the middle of the book. Seemed insipid to me. But I was very curious about the author's life after reading the Introduction.

She had a quiet childhood, mingled with friends from other faiths, and was exposed to diverse ways of approaching religion through her parents' mindset. Her mother was fairly devout. Her father wasn't. Neither forced her to pray or follow any religious ceremonies. She picked up pieces of Hinduism as and when she could, mostly unknowingly. Then the scene in India changed - or actually, maybe it didn't change. It just got more vivid and there were the riots and the rise of Hindutva and the inexplicable shame of calling oneself a 'Hindu' - even though the rise of Hindutva itself came with a call, "Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain." (Say it with pride that we are Hindus.)

Then her first marriage fell apart and she married again. Her second husband is an atheist and he always asked her how she could believe in a religion that is so stratified and unjust. If you take into account the way widows were treated (a situation the author was familiar with because she saw her father's widow sister live out most her life in white saris and no real life outside her brother's home) or the caste system, you see this religion as just plain exploitative and unfair. She seemed to grapple with those questions herself. She had seen that side of it but she couldn't explain away that sense of deep connect and nourishment that her faith provided her. She had shopped around the spiritual market - done Vipassana and chanted the Buddhist chants. But she felt comfortable with the notion of a God you can see and touch and imagine when the eyes are shut. Somehow, none of that seemed to be the thing one admitted to in polite, secular company.

This book is, I think, is her trying to find answers through pilgrims and their journeys.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Check (the) mate

-
My cousin, who was born sixteen hours before me, got married recently. I am expected to follow her footsteps soon. Thankfully, I have been granted more than sixteen hours to do that. My father’s health has taken a turn for the worse. My mother is completely exhausted. Rationally, points 1, 2, and 3 would be distinct from each other. But in my family there is no such thing as ‘rationally’. Therefore all these points are inter-related. Strangely, here, we believe my marriage to be an antidote to mortality and fatigue. I happened to be sitting in my parents’ room while Ma looked through Papa’s blood reports. They didn’t look good. Ma was worried and Papa didn’t help matters much. He kept talking about Sourav Ganguly and why he deserved better. Ma got further agitated and after flinging the reports somewhere inconvenient to retrieve (I should know), she snapped, “So what? There are many like him.” Papa doesn’t believe that and would have no one in his family believe that either. He went to
Read more

Not the same, all the same - Rang de Basanti, being a Hindu, uniform civil code, and Hostage – in that unrelated sequence

-
I watched ‘Rang de basanti’. That, however, is not the point. Everyone now wants to go to Delhi and cruise around in jeeps at night. And that too is not the point. I need to say something. That, really, is the point. ‘Rang de…’ is a good movie but frankly, I’ve seen better. I’ve seen ‘Yuva’. It is creditable, though, that the movie could say what it did without using the ‘sage on the stage’ (as we say in Instructional Design) approach. The movie does have a couple of ideas that I have been besotted with for a long time now. One is the life of a story. There is the germ of an idea about men who go to their deaths cheerfully. There is fascination about what could inspire such courage in ordinary people. That story lays inside a diary for a long time. How long? Long enough for history to play itself out and begin the process of repeating itself. A nation goes the ‘Animal Farm’ way – humans out, pigs in. The story lays untouched – fermenting in latent vigor. Then someone discovers it. She
Read more

Save the Indian (male) child

-
This isn't exactly a feminist tirade, but this is written by a woman, and it is written in annoyance. You raise your girls to be sweet, strong, and independent. (Wise parents teach their children to listen to opinions and discard or heed accordingly. The other ones just teach their kids to bullshit everything that everyone says. Still others bring up girls to be on guard and forget that spine so that everyone thinks well of them. I am not sure which is worse, but I detest people shoving their opinions down other people's throats in a show of liberation, so I'll lean towards the former. But only slightly.) As the gender construct of being a 'female' is pushed even further, you teach your daughter complicated activities – driving, perhaps, sending them off away from home, wearing a sari (those freaking pleats!), cooking and de-veining prawns for added advantage. At the end of that, you have a person who genuinely dislikes blending into anything, doesn't like bei
Read more