On religion

I was a believer, then an agnostic, and now I am an atheist. Atheism makes more sense to me, in particular when I see that the roots of many current political conflicts lie in religious differences, or in the way religious differences have been manipulated and hyped. Eclesiastical religion rarely offers women any space in its formal hierarchy, another reason why I will always feel an outsider to any religion. Religion, when it does offer women any space, only does so in symbolic roles, in 'non-threatening' roles like that of a mother or the 'virgin' mary. Religion abhors female sexuality.

I will not totally agree with Dawkin's strict atheism. I have a father who is religious, but not orthodox, and having heard the 'Gita' from him, I know that the Gita contains useful philosophical insights, and I have found them to be practical. I know religion has helped many people, such as my father, in coming to terms with the vagaries of life at a philosophical level. At the material level, though, religion is not the solution to address injustices. It only helps the powerful to delude the meek into believing that "the meek will inherit the earth".

The poet William Blake was perhaps one of the few who successfully used religion, or the figure of Christ, to try to address the material inequalities of life. Check out his poetry and his artwork.

That aside, religion has been the site for the contest of power, money, and politics. It has spewed many evils, the caste system in India being one among them. And increasingly, in today's globalised world, religion has become the site for contesting identity politics. Certain strands of Christianity seek to deny women the basic reproductive right of abortion (I do not know about the stand on abortion in other religions), and if the ongoing pro-life, pro-choice debates in America are any evidence, religion continues to make women's bodies the site for enforcing religious and cultural labels.

Sociological theories (Auguste Comte's being the first) have argued that societies progress in 'evolutionary' stages. Belief in the theological, in the powers of ghosts, spirits, and natural phenomenon like thunder, lightning, marks the first 'metaphysical' stage, according to Comte. The belief in a God or 'gods', a higher power, comes next, and this phase is characterised by a formal religious structure with priests and other godmen working as intermediaries. This is the religious stage, which is then followed by the final stage of a lack of belief in a higher power, i.e. the 'positivist' or the scientific stage. This last stage highlights rationalism and man as a rational animal. This is only a sociological theory, and other theories talk of different means of 'evolution'.

I know that a discussion on religion tends to be heated because people can get defensive and aggressive with their respective takes on religion. The easiest way to dismiss a debate on religion is to say that it is a matter of personal choice, that it belongs to the realm of the personal. Yet, religion has entered the political space like never before. The emergence of Hindutva politics in India, and the debate surrounding abortion in the US are two glaring examples of this.

Why am I writing about religion? The debate on religion is something I have always thought about. Over the years, I have seen myself drift from being a believer (due to my parent's influence), to questioning the existence of God (agnosticism), and to finally cheerfully resigning myself to the belief that 'There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.' (from the Atheist bus campaign. Read more about it here). Also, a friend's recent blogpost on religious zealots (saintelmosfire.wordpress.com), and another friend's response to Dawkin's 'The God Delusion' (noopalvia.blogspot.com) spurred me to put pen to paper and jot down my thoughts.

I was fascinated by Nieztche's "God is dead", as I was with Marx's take on religion as the "opiate of the masses". I can relate the latter to the ritualistic aspect of organised religion, which at some level discourages critical questioning, instead focuses on giving oneself up to a higher power. I know some people find rituals comforting and reassuring. I think this is because rituals signify some kind of continuity, a thread linking the past to the present. It is probably also a feeling of having 'let go' that seems to define the comfort derived from rituals. Also, it is indeed reassuring think that there is a higher power, a father like figure somewhere up there who is looking after us. Yet, once again it irks me that the first image that comes to one's mind when one hears the word 'God' is that of inevitably a male figure, an old patriarch like figure.

I believe in tolerance. If it helps someone to believe that there is someone up there to take care of them, so be it. What bothers me is the way religion has become the site for power politics, and the fight over 'my god is better than yours'.

This shall be another rambling post that no one will read :)

Gone are the good days when I would only post poetry or prose that I had worked hard at chiseling. I am still proud of two or three of my poems that i wrote in my final year of college. But final year was an amazing time. It was a difficult time, but it was also a time when I made friends in hostel (I am still in touch with them), when I channeled my angst into writing, when Manju's workshop happened...

I am digressing here, but I met her niece at a book launch the other day. Himani Dalmia just launched her debut novel 'Life is Perfect'. Its a good read, and I would recommend it. At 200 bucks, it is also easy on the pocket (I was quite surprised to see the book so reasonably priced). I enjoyed the book launch, though the arm-chair discussion by the Hyderabad page three elements pissed me off a bit. I expected something more intellectual, more academic. But I was most shocked to find that Himani was so pretty, she looked like a model. Perhaps it runs in the family, Taru Dalmia is quite a hottie :)

But where was I? Swati, Debarchana, if you are reading this, then thanks for making my last year in hostel a memorable one. It helped that my laptop was there. I will remember our post-movie discussions that stretched into 3-4 in the night. I will remember you guys knocking at my door for tuck at wee hours of the morning. I will remember myself seeking refuge in your room whenever I felt lonely or needed someone to talk to, which happened very often, I know, and I am sorry if I annoyed you guys (I know I did!). Lashili, thanks for literally dragging me out of my shell. I am really proud of you for making it to IR in JNU, and for being so good that they had to put you into the general quota. You haven't answered my last few calls, and I wonder if something is wrong. I hope you are all right

But enough for now. I am sleepy. I wish I had posted some poetry or something that I had worked on a bit. I do still attempt a bit of verse. But its much lesser now, with time being at a premium and with me being occupied with other stuff. But hopefully, after five-six years, I should be able to sort out the mess in my head and sit down and write. As of now, I am still confused as to what I should do for bread and butter for the rest of my life. You know, what is euphemistically termed as 'a career'. Sigh.

If I could write novels and poetry for a living, then I would start doing it today. But something tells me I have to see and learn much more of human nature and the world-at-large before I can get down to doing that well. At the back of my head, there is still this concern that I haven't seen enough, do not know enough, that I have to learn a lot, lot more in order to write something insightful.

To my readers (I still have readers, right?), goodnight and enjoy the Friday and the weekend! To my peers, good luck with all the bread-and-butter issues. If you need any help, or you want to talk, do call me ( or comment on my blog!). Its a tough time, and the recession doesn't help.

Kiran, my lovely new flatmate, you have to comment on this post. And you too, Mr. lovely-new-flatmate's boyfriend!

Naina, all the best for the next innings (You are getting married, aren't you? :P). You will do very well, and yes, we can swap husbands (kidding!)

Harpreet, I am pissed with you (You figure out why, I am not telling you), but yes, you have to comment on my blog too.

Amit, Sumit, wake up, you are celebrities! Your humble names have found mention on my starry blog! Yes, wake up, and pay your pretty new neighbours (where are you looking, I meant us!) a visit, now!

Those of you who voted, how was your first time? Do tell me about it.

Sayonara!

Random musings

It seems the months have flown by. I last wrote something on blogger nearly three months back. Maybe that happens when you start working. Maybe I have just been too lazy, perhaps a little too tired.

As much as we embrace change or try to walk into territories new, I think there must always be a part of us that wants to dearly cling onto familiarity, even when we know that evolution is essential to our growth. My need to overcome my social phobia has seen me push myself into socializing, or attempting to socialize. Like the other day when I attended a speed networking event in office, and where I was told about a trick or a nuance of social interaction, namely the 'hook and the spin" theory. The 'hook' is a topic, a common ground that the two strangers share, and once you find the hook, you should 'spin' the rest of your conversation around that. The rationale behind this idea is that it is not necessary to squeeze one's entire life story in an introductory conversation, but rather that it is more fruitful if the two people discuss something that they share in common.

Some of my attempts in socializing have worked out fine, some have backfired. Like, with men, I have found that being pally can be sometimes misconstrued as being flirtatious. This is more true when you take the initiative to get to know someone. It helps in such a case if you have good instincts, like my friend Naina, who can read body language and is good at handling such situations. I guess instincts and the ability to read people's body language is something that requires practice and takes time. She is better at it since she has always socialised more than me, having grown up in a boarding school. For my part, I think I need to be more observant and sensitive to what the other person is thinking or feeling or assuming. On the other hand, it has also happened that men have gotten friendly with me, and then distanced themselves when they realize that I do not have any intention of being anything more than friends. It has just seemed weird to me.

Part of the problem arises from the fact that I work in a 9 to 5 job in an office which has a very small percentage of women employees, about 24%. This means that I have to mostly interact with men. Being a fresher also means that most of them will be older than you. My friend Naina feels that the nuances are different when it comes to interacting with older people, even if they are just 4 or 5 years older. Often work requires me to stretch beyond the mandatory 8 hours. Adding that to 5 days a week, it means that my social circle gets further restricted to the workplace.

Nonetheless, I am trying to change and develop in different directions, or 'widen my horizons', as the cliche goes. Yet, part of me still sometimes wants to go back to my older, more inhibited self. I find this tendency most manifest in my dreams, where I often dream of school, or childhood, or people I knew when I was a kid and with whom I have lost touch. I do not know what this tendency of regression means. I know that I need to take steps to come out of my shell. I have been taking baby steps in this direction ever since I felt the need to evolve, and grow. The decision to change has been a concious one. Yet sometimes, I feel like curling up inside a cocoon, drawing my knees upto my chin in a foetal position. I feel small and I feel the need to retreat into a noiseless womb. But it is usually a temporary phase. Some minutes later I go out of my room, chat with my friends.

Poem on a series of bad dreams

"Awaking,

My dreams linger in the laburnum of my head,

My thoughts suspended by a thread of imagination..."

There is an insane country of dreams

That continually beckons me.

That like hands kneading dough, continually kneads

My cranial chaos to phantasms of pure bewilderment.

I try to avoid them, those hands.

I try to run away from that country.

Yet each morning that hangs

Cold over my waking body

Draws me back to that riot-realm,

The dream reduced to the stale taste of

Night in my mouth.

Madness

Racing like a train across the countryside,
Glimpsing the lights of estranged homes,
Mad mind of mine,
Meanders through hilly roads,
Searches in her dreams for your face.

Strumming a foreign lute,
Singing a song haunted,
Flickering like a pyre’s flame,
Mad mind of mine,
Burns up a somber evening.

The Moon and the Sun

“Come into my parlour”, said the spider to the fly

For many years the moon bloomed
Rooted to festering alluvial soil
That sprouted slick lazy snakes.
The moon spent its time
Trying and crying for the sun
To caress her and kiss her
Trying always to lock lips
With those yellow teeth
Those yellow, yellow eyes.

When people saw the moon’s scars
They thought they saw an old man.
They saw it all right, it was him
Of course. But no one knew
That old, old man.

The sun rose everyday.
Every morning that began with him
Made the moon hide beneath the soil,
Curled in the labyrinthine folds
Of snakes- those thick, thick
Umbilical cords.

The sun terrified her.
Without the sun, she wouldn’t shine.

It was a humiliated moon that rose at night
Waxing and waning every month
Disappearing into nothingness.
No such thing happened with the sun.
It went on shining dutifully
Uncaring and unaware of its heat
Burning scars onto her face.

The moon hid its shame
Amongst creatures that crawled with
Their bellies in the dust.
The moon rearranged its scars
To make a funny old man.
And still when it looked at itself
It saw his imprint, a slap, on her face.

Red streaks, white snow

15th December 2004*

Today in the evening, I saw a car go up in flames in front of my home. I asked daddy what happened. He told me it was an accident. I overheard the crowd of people gathered around the burning car saying it was an ULFA attack. A hand grenade had been flung at it by another car that drove past. That burning car belonged to my neighbours. They were driving to a party. They got burnt. I know their little boy. He is eight years old, three years younger than me. He wasn’t in the car. I heard him crying and I remembered a friend.

Around 3 years back in Kashmir, there was a little boy. Aasmaan, a word that in Urdu means heaven, was the name of his hometown. When I met him, he boasted that his dad’s dad and his dad’s dad and his dad’s dad (and so on) had been evangelists. I was a small girl then, so I didn’t know what this big word meant. He swelled up and told me that it meant they were preachers. They were preachers from Iran- Persia, land of gold, palaces, beautiful princesses, sheikhs, dervishes, fakirs… Those great-great-great granddads of his must have had long beards, worn long white robes, traveled for days across hot desert sands. Then they reached Kashmir. They settled down there and went about their business, spreading the word of Allah.

He would never have been born if his ancestors had stopped walking through the desert. He, a seed in some 13^th century Iranian preacher’s blood, had made that long precarious journey. So he loved his little legs. He didn’t have legs like those of a gazelle. He had short stubby legs. But he ran like that maniac runner Forrest Gump. He never missed a chance to show off the cups he had won in races in school. They stood proudly lined up on the shelf above his little blue study table, beside his Winnie the Pooh pen stand, crammed with multi-coloured pens, and a photograph of him with his parents on a trip to Srinagar. Walking back from school with his cousins, he always managed to leave them far behind, never bothering to listen to his Uncle’s admonitions to walk with them like a good elder brother. But he also sometimes patiently sat in a corner, his forehead creased, trying very hard to understand the story his Abbu was teaching the class X students, all the while dangling his legs, which were yet too short to reach the floor.

You might have heard that Kashmir is a very beautiful place, but it also happens to be a dangerous place. Aasmaan wasn’t spared. His mother’s younger brother, his uncle got shot. His mother’s family had come all the way from Afghanistan a long-long time ago. That particular great-great-great grandfather had fought many battles. Finally the King tired of it, made peace, and gave him land to settle down. That was ages ago, but perhaps, some of that hot blood still remained. Now his mama had been shot by militants. He was afraid that his uncle had become like those bullets ridden blood-stained bodies he had seen a year back. They had lain mangled on the snow in front of his colony gate. The white snow was stained- red streaks, red drops. After that, he avoided his favourite white cream pastries that had thin red jam lines running across the top.

He heard later that his uncle wasn’t hurt so badly. But all the same, it’s still very bad, isn’t it, to be shot in the leg? If you don’t have legs, how will you walk? How will you run? How will you stand on your feet? How could his great-great-great-grandfathers have ever reached Kashmir if they couldn’t have walked, if it hadn’t been for their legs? Camels alone would never have been sufficient.

Everyday, he heard his mother and father and close relatives talking in low voices late into the night in the drawing room. One night, he sneaked out of his bed, stood listening at the door, hiding behind the curtain. But his mother spotted him. She got up from her seat and picked him up in her arms.

“Beta, it’s so late. What are you doing hiding behind the curtain? You should have been asleep long time back. Why did you get up from your bed? And where is your sweater? Why aren’t you wearing it? Allah, I don’t want you catching cold in this bitter winter.” She said, stroking and smoothing his untidy mop of hair.

“Ammi how is uncle? When will I see him again? And where has he gone?” he asked

“Your uncle has gone with Shameem aunty and Rizwan uncle to Vellore for treatment,” she replied, carrying him off to his bedroom.

“Vellore? Where is that?” he asked.

“Vellore is at the opposite end of India, exactly opposite to Kashmir. India is a long country, you know. If Kashmir lies at the head, then Vellore would be at the tail”, she replied, putting him down on his bed.

“You mean India is like a lizard? And Vellore is at its tail?” he asked, faintly recalling the India map that hung beside the blackboard in his father’s classroom.

“Yes, it’s exactly like that.” she said.

“But uncle is so sick and it’s so cold. Why did they have to take him so far?” he asked.

“The doctors there are the best, darling. Your uncle’s case is a little serious. We don’t want his legs to be amputated”, she said, tucking the covers of his pastel purple coloured blanket with the Pokemon on it under his chin.

“What is amputated?” he asked.

“When your limbs have been hurt very badly, when it has become incurable and the infection can spread to the rest of the body, then doctors perform an operation to remove that sick limb. That is amputated.”

Amputated, then, became a new word to mean something he already knew about. Amputated meant his neighbour Jaleel auntie’s eldest son who had lost his left hand, his classmates older brother in eighth standard who had lost both legs and needed a wheelchair, the neighbourhood grocery store shopkeeper’s nephew who had only one leg, but still kept store for his uncle. They had lost their limbs in bomb blasts. He didn’t want his uncle to become one of them. He didn’t want his uncle to become an amputated. What would happen to Shaukat and Ali? Who would pick all of them up from school everyday? Who would buy them those chocolate pastries, play cricket with them on Sundays, take them to the only video game parlour in the main town market? His own father never indulged him.

People without limbs are sometimes called crippled. Would his uncle become one? Like that beggar in the market near his school, who was called a cripple by everyone; even children. It was great fun to shout “Cripple!” at him and then shriek and run away when he started cursing. It had seemed a funny name. Now he was frightened to discover that cripple is an ugly word.

Saying his prayers before bed had seemed such a hateful chore. He said them only because he was afraid of his father’s strict eye. But now, his prayers lingered on over the minutes. He had dreams where he saw his uncle on a wheelchair trying to climb a mountain, failing and rolling down each time. Then he saw his house turning into a video game and men in fatigues with big guns chasing him, cornering him in his room. He would always wake up at this point. Those dreams got frequent and he had to sleep with the window open, so that he would remember in the dream to escape through the window. It was the coldest month of January. It was snowing. The trees in the park were bald, black. It wasn’t very sunny, just cold, wet.

February dawned. The skies cleared. The snow melted, revealing brown earth, green grass. News arrived that his uncle’s legs had been saved. The doctor was very competent. Everybody couldn’t thank her enough. Everybody was relieved. Everybody was grateful.

His uncle wouldn’t become an amputated. His uncle wouldn’t become a cripple. His uncle had been saved. He had to do something for the person who had caused this miracle. So he sat down on his table and wrote a letter to her. It was a simple letter. It didn’t say much. He wrote, in a careful big fat cursive- Thank you Dear Dr. Anita Valmiki for saving my uncle’s legs. He signed his name at the bottom. Then he carefully folded the letter and put it in a white envelope that he found lying on his father’s desk and asked his mother to post it. That was his first letter. Not really,

his first letter had been to the pretty girl in school who was a year older. At recess, he had sneaked it into her schoolbag left unattended. He was so scared, he forgot to write his name. But, that didn’t matter.

Assam, where I stay, is a far country from Aasmaan, but violence, like a serpentine river, runs through both places, through both of us. Its waters seep beneath our clothes, into our skins, underneath. Here where I live, there are bandhs, curfews. Sometimes there are police checks when we are driving. Dad keeps his documents in order. When we are driving in the countryside, we are driving behind Army trucks. Everyday in the newspaper there is something or the other. This is what all my elders talk about - ULFA, government, AASU, other groups, other names. It’s like the damp of the monsoons that soaks through my school shirt on a five minute wait for the bus.

Two months back, it was my best friend Barnali’s birthday. She lives in Machkhowa. There was a blast there, the day before her birthday. So her birthday party was postponed. We restricted our movements for the next few days. I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere, just school, and back.

The fire brigade has arrived. The flames, doused. The black smoke billows towards the sky, heaven, aasmaan.

* The ULFA claimed responsibility for the bombing in Guwahati, stating that it was in protest against the flushing out of their camps in Bhutan that had happened exactly a year back on December 15^th, 2003. It was the one year anniversary of a highly successful Operation ALL CLEAR carried out by the Bhutan government with the support of the Indian Army, where in total 13 ULFA camps, 12 NDFB, and 5 KLO camps were uprooted.