Gods and Godmen of India (2 page)
Many of my questions remain unanswered. However, I have to concede that I found Brahma Kumaris and Kumars more at peace with their environment than members of any of the other cults I have encountered. I bade them farewell with their own greeting:
‘Om Shanti’.
22/2/1986
I
went to Patiala to speak in a seminar on the Religious Heritage of Punjab. They could not have found a more unsuitable guest speaker as I have never made a secret of my Russelite rejection of religion. Vice Chancellor Bhagat Singh said so in the introductory speech when he quoted a friend’s remark: “If you and K.S. are going to speak on it, then God help our religion!” That was a little unfair as despite my avowed agnosticism I continue to be obsessed by religion, get emotionally moved by
Keertan,
spend my spare time translating passages from the
Adi Granth.
My state of confusion is that of the Allama:
Dhoondta phirta hoon main as Iqbal apney aap ko;
Aap hee goya musafir aap hee manzil hoon main.
(O Iqbal! I go about looking for myself; As if I were the traveller as well as his destination.)
However, in the Patiala assemblage of theologians I was like a cat in a pigeon-loft. My address printed beforehand was deliberately held back till the last moment by the Director of the Department of Religion, Dr Wazir Singh, lest it cause a general walk out before I began. Mercifully they heard me to the last without booing me. What did I say? Nothing very novel. Only that every thinking man must make up his own religion; no rational person can subscribe to theories of the origin of life or to conjectures of life hereafter put out by different religious systems; he should content himself in making his own code of conduct for his years in the world; Iqbal has prescribed many such principles which could become the basis of a new ‘religion’ viz. take nothing for granted but question every statement (
Yaqeen kam kun, giifitar-i-shak-i-bash
)
;
the best way to spend your life on earth is to create something worthwhile which may live after you; nothing of lasting worth can be created except by ceaseless striving triggered off by an ever-active
talatum
mind. (Hence reject
in toto
the practice of Yoga to still the mind.) Only that which is earned by the sweat of your brow is
halal
(legitimate) – all that comes through inheritance or by chance is
haram.
Above all once you are convinced of the righteousness of your cause, pursue it to the bitter end without fear or concern of consequences.
We can extract all this Iqbalism from the Gita and other scriptures. Why then waste your time speculating whether or not God exists?
12/12/1981
A
runa Kapur of Kolkata has sent me a delightful little piece of an imaginary interview with God entitled ‘High On Waves’. I would like to share it with my readers:
I dreamed I had an interview with God. “Come in,” God said, “So you would like to interview Me?”
“If you have the time,” I said. God smiled and said, “My time is eternity and is enough to do everything; what questions do you have in mind to ask me?”
“What surprises you most about mankind?” I asked.
God answered: “That they get bored with being children; are in rush to grow up, and then long to be children again. That they lose their health to make money and then lose their money to restore their health; That by thinking anxiously about their future, they forget the present, such that they live neither for the present nor for the future. That they live as if they will never die, and they die as if they had never lived…”
God’s hands shook and we were silent for a while. Then I asked … “As a parent, what are some of life’s lessons you want your children to learn?”
God replied with a smile, “To learn that they cannot make anyone love them; what they can do is to let themselves be loved. To learn that what is most valuable is not what they have in their lives, but who they have in their lives. To learn that it is not good to compare themselves to others.
“All will be judged individually on their own merits, not as a group on a comparison basis! To learn that a rich person is not the one who has the most, but is one who needs the least. To learn that it only takes a few seconds to open profound wounds in persons we love and that it takes many years to heal them.
“To learn that there are persons who love them dearly, but simply do not know how to express or show their feelings. To learn that money can buy everything but happiness. To learn that two people can look at the same thing and see it totally differently. To learn that a true friend is someone who knows everything about them … and likes them anyway. To learn that it is not always enough that they be forgiven by others, but that they have to forgive themselves.”
I sat there for a while enjoying the moment. I thanked Him for His time and for all that He has done for me and my family. He replied: “I’m here twenty-four hours a day. All you have to do is to ask for me and I’ll answer.”
People will forget what you said,
People will forget what you did,
But people will never forget
How you made them feel.
17/11/2002
W
hile attending a seminar on religion and politics in Hyderabad I was curious to know how religious or otherwise the seminarists were themselves. Of the thirty round the table, two declared themselves atheists and three agnostics. The remaining 25 being Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Parsi did not think it necessary to say anything about their personal beliefs. Surprisingly, the only participants who somewhat aggressively asserted their religiosity were the four Christians. Two being foreign missionaries did not merit much attention; but the other two who were from Kerala and the youngest of the group went out of their way to proclaim their adherence to the church.
One of them, Babu Joseph, presented all seminarists a copy of his book entitled
Failure of Marxism: Victory of Jesus.
Joseph who looked to be still in his twenties is a professor and convenor of the Christian Liberation Movement. What they seek liberation from I could only make out from a quotation from Saint Jude at the beginning of the book: “For some godless men have slipped in unnoticed among us, who distort the message about the grace of our God, to excuse their immoral ways and reject Jesus Christ, our only Master and Lord.”
He was evidently after the Marxists. But to describe the godless as immoral is a gratuitous falsehood. Most men and women who deny God are to my knowledge more truthful, helpful, kinder and more considerate in their dealings with others than men of religion. What surprised me most was that the youngest and the comeliest of the participants, Thangam Jacob, was also immersed in Christianity. I decided to question her on the quiet during a coffee break. After I did so, she exposed me in front of the full assembly causing me much embarrassment. Of that later.
In the discussion several suggestions were made about the kind of religion that people should have and the limits to its ritualistic observance so that it did not become an imposition on others. One suggestion which no one took very seriously at the time when it was made by environmentalist Zafar Futehally who described himself as nominally a Muslim. He said, somewhat feebly I thought, that the religion of the future must be concerned with ecology. But the more I thought about it later, the more convinced I was that there was a lot to what he was saying. If we go on destroying our forests, polluting our streams with noxious wastes and fouling our air with poisonous fumes of petrol and coal, we are in fact destroying all that has been given to us – by God or some yet undiscovered power. No amount of temple going, chanting mantras and recitations of scriptures is going to help us from committing mass hara-kiri.
We have had religious movements which, like the Secular Greens Movement in the west, were primarily concerned with the preservation of natural phenomenon but they did not make the kind of impact they should have made. The outstanding example are the Bishnois who are fiercely dedicated to saving trees and animal life. I have enormous respect for all Bishnois with the exception of Bhajan Lai, who I regard as the most mischievous politician of post-independent India. If the Bishnois could also include the preservation of human life (they have high incidence of crimes of violence among them), we would have a ecological religion going on a national scale.
Coming back to Thangam Jacob. As I said I conerzed her at a coffee-break and asked her: “How does a young and pretty girl like you get so deeply involved in the clap-trap of religion?” A few minutes later she announced to the whole assembly, “Mr Singh asked me why a young and beautiful girl like me had turned to religion. I told him that I was young and beautiful because my religion had made me so.” Moral: Never make a private pass at a girl who publicly proclaims her adherence to God.
3/9/1989
The Believer and the Agnostic: their Religion for Them, Our Doubts to Us
L
ast month I wrote an article on why I am an agnostic for the Weekly of the
Malayala Manorama
group of papers. I got much greater response than expected: we Indians have a consuming interest in matters of the spirit. Understandably, most of the letters refuted my contention that since we know nothing about God, belief or disbelief in his existence has little or no bearing on a person’s character. We should not waste time in prayer or worship. Of the innumerable letters, one written by N. Mahadevan living in retirement in a Senior Citizens’ Home near Kovalam impressed me with its lucidity and approach to the problem. He wrote:
“In the year 1938, one evening, I was going up a hill near Matunga in Bombay, sunk in thought, quite oblivious of the surroundings, with rain pouring on my head. There was a purple flower in a plant in a cleft in a rock: the eye registered it but the brain didn’t, being otherwise engaged. I sat on a rock and looked back at the flower.
“Why,” I pondered “does a plant have a flower?” The flower is the sexual part of the plant. Like some animals, flowers exude a powerful and seductive odour when ready for mating. This attracts a multitude of bees, birds and butterflies to join in a Saturnalian rite of fecundation. In case, the odour fails to attract, the flower also has a different colour and produces honey. That is, it tries every device to get itself fertilized. What beautiful patterns and variegated hues in the flowers! Flowers that remain unfertilized continue to emit a strong fragrance for as long as eight days: whereas once impregnated, the flower ceases to exude its fragrance.
“After fertilization, the flower ceases to exist. It drops off and in its place appears the green stage of the fruit. When the seed which contains the immortality of the plant is ready for propagation, the fruit which contains it undergoes a remarkable change. It changes colour, it emits a scent, and it has an inviting taste so that any of these qualities may attract a bird or beast to come to the fruit, pick it and eat it. The seed is enclosed in a hard shell and is often unpleasant to taste, so the eater of the fruit drops it. Down comes the rain, and from the seed comes a replica of the plant. The huge banyan tree is contained in a seed which can be packed thousands to an ounce. The blueprint is there in the tiny seed. And given the right conditions, the banyan has reproduced itself.
“Am I to understand that a plant that has neither brain nor a nervous system thought up or evolved this intricate system of propagating itself? No. Even a Nobel prize winning scientist cannot produce a leaf or a blade of grass in his laboratory. It is not the plant as we see it that is producing this marvel. A power beyond our comprehension is manifesting itself through the plant, through the bee that pollinates its flower, through the bird that eats the fruit and disperses the seed and as I the observer, who is overwhelmed at the sudden unexpected insight into the mystery of life.”
Agnostics will go along with Mahadevan upto this point. But no further. When he takes what he calls “the quantam leap beyond rationality” we prefer to stay back on firmer ground. Why should a thinking human being abandon the one thing that differentiates him from the animal world – his faculty of reasoning? Mahadevan quotes St Augustine:
“My mind in a swift flash of perception attained the Absolute Being, the Ultimate and One Reality. All that is. Then verily I saw and understood. I could not sustain the sight of Infinity and Eternal Reality. It was a glimpse, transcient, a second’s space.”
I agree with Mahadevan that reason and logic have their limitations and are unable to probe into the ultimate mystery of our existence. The Taittiriya Upanishad affirms that it is beyond the reach of speech and thought:
Yato vacho nivartante: sprapya manasa saha.
(From where speech returns: even the mind (thoughts) without reaching it.
We end up being where we were. Believers would have us fly across to God on the magic carpet of faith. We agnostics would like a solid, concrete bridge of reason to cross over from the known to the unknown. Till then their religion for them, our doubts to us.
3/9/89
N
o people in the world are more receptive towards irrational beliefs than we Indians. We already have astrology, horoscopy, palmistry,
Rahu Kalams
and ‘miracles’ like Ganapati drinking milk, godmen and godwomen producing
vibhuti,
wrist watches and figurines out of thin air; to add to the list we now have a revival of
Vastu,
alleged to be the ancient Science of Architecture. It lays down rules about the direction the entrance gate should face, where the kitchen should be located and whether the lavatory should be in the rear or front. You can see and hear smartly dressed young men and women extolling the ‘scientific’ basis of
Vastu
on TV channels as a sacred shastra.