Life or Religion?

Every time I go into a discussion with someone on the kind of things (read blasts) happening in our country, I come out frustrated. People talk about how the members of a community should be out of this country, how they are better off in Pakistan and how they are meant to do things like that, because their religion is like that only. How true! And what about us? We hindus? We are a great bunch of people, peace loving, unharming. Isn’t it? What about Babri Masjid and Godhra carnage, where either with full state support or with state turning a blind eye, thousands of innocent people were murdered in broad daylight? I know we have a torn and painful history, but leaving aside the incidents during the partition of India, how many blasts took place in independent India carried out by the members of the other community before the Babri Masjid and Mumbai riots?

If with state support we kill people who are already marginalized, have less access to education and are fewer in number, what do you think the reaction would be? It is there for all of us to see. While terrorism can never be justified, what needs to be understood is its causes and reasons. I have no doubt that Hindus are primarily responsible. And now it seems that some of our spiritual leaders have left pursuing the spirit and started collecting RDX instead. Does the path to God lead via RDX?

Now let’s talk about Hinduism a bit. You see Hinduism is, without a speck of doubt, the greatest religion the world has ever produced. We are a bunch of peace-loving, unharming people who grew up on Bhagawat Gita and the valiant deeds of Ram and Krishna. Valiant they were, because they represented the prevail of good over evil. And how? Since our childhoods, We have been fed on the minutest details of how the good vanquished the evil…the gorier it is, the better is the prevalence of good, probably. The blood dripping arm of Dushasan - severed by the brute force of Bhima - wetting the untied hair of Draupadi, Krishna splitting the body of Jarasandha into two, ripping him from his groin to head by pulling apart his legs, A lion-faced Narsimha laying flat Hiranyakashipu on his laps and tearing apart his heart in his lion-nails…the victory of Good marches on. And I am not even talking about the extremely trivial instances of beheading the evil incarnations or killing them in some other way that doesn’t involve too much of their evil blood.

So what? You may ask. Those were mythical instances of driving the message home…that after all good pervades. Perfect, only except the fact that for us mere mortals, differentiating between the Good and Evil may not be such an easy answer after all. And the moment you think someone (or rather some community) to be the Evil, then there is no one stopping you. Because from our Mythology, we know of all the nice, justified and apt methods to finish off the bloody evil (human beings in our case)

You see, we are a religion that believes in Karma and again..may I ask…how? Oh, by dividing the human race (read Hindu race) is so many castes and sub-castes (based on their Karma, right?), super and sub-sub-castes that those who are out there to find the constituent of an atom by breaking it up in an automatic hedron collider would be put to absolute shame. What a belief in Karma!

The intention of my article is not to bash my own community. It’s meant for some introspection. Just because we are a majority, we needn’t always be right. Just because we ourselves belong to a religion, it need not be the best thing the world has ever produced.