Do you have to believe in God and religion to celebrate
festivals?
When I was a kid,
the sleepless nights would begin a week in advance. My paati would start preparing bhakshanams and the entire home would be
infused with the aroma of the savouries being prepared. On the day of Diwali, we
would begin celebrations at the crack of dawn and never really stopped. The
first day of school after Diwali was the worse. The only thing that comes close
to that feeling now are Monday mornings.
Now, I know Diwali
is close when I open the newspaper and see 3 consecutive full-page ads from
e-commerce sites, all shouting out offers that I really cannot differentiate.
There is a pre-Diwali sale, Diwali sale and post-Diwali depression sale. I
still enjoy festivals, but a lot of my beliefs have gone up in smoke in the
interim years.
We are all born
believers. I never grew up in an overtly religious family. My parents,
thankfully, didn't thrust any godman down our throats or make us wear our
religion on our sleeve. The concept of God and religion were always at odds
with me. Born and raised in a Tamil Brahmin house but schooled in a Catholic
institution, I thought nothing of eating the chicken that my catholic friends
brought in their tiffin boxes. And this was when I was in second standard.
I never understood
the significance of my thread ceremony because neither my dad or any of other
brahmin friends performed sandhya vandanam. If
you wore a poonal, the one thing that
people could deduce about you and be right in most cases was that you were
vegetarian. I would later learn the atrocities that brahmins heaped on
generations and why they are now reviled. At some point, I questioned the
concept of God or a force that is watching over us, a force that is just and
has our best interests in mind.
The journey from
belief to non-belief is a long and arduous one. Belief is instant, non-belief
isn't. Belief is like chocolate ice-cream, or Sachin Tendulkar, things you
don't question. There have been many instances but two incidents from my life
have had a very strong bearing on my arduous journey to non-belief.
In my first year
of college, one my school friends died in a road accident. He was an extremely
bright chap with cat eyes that sprung out at you. He was also the only child of
a single mother who worked hard to give her son the best life had to offer,
only to have it all taken away from her.
The second was a
cousin who was suffering from chronic pain and decided to end her life when her
two children were sleeping. When they woke up, they found their mother hanging
by her dupatta, barely a feet from the ground. I got the call when I was in
office.
Where was God
then? Tap dancing? Acting on someone else's reverent prayer?
Years ago, we had
visited Tirupati and I saw someone give the priest a 100 rupee note so he could
prostrate in front of the deity for 15 seconds more. In the ensuing years, my
dislike for organised religion only grew. I saw people spend lakhs on the final
rites of someone when they barely even took care of the person when they were
alive.
At some point in
our upbringing, religion got equated with morality. As you came to the age of
reason and got better versed with the ways of the world, you are subject to reading
about religious figures who molest and rape their followers in the name of God
and get away with it, fugitives from justice who don't pay salaries to their
employees but donate crores to a temple hoping to appease the Gods. You see VIP
queues in temples for people who already have more than they know what to do
with, while the lesser fortunate wait endlessly for their turn.
But I have an
admission to make - I love festivals. And I don't mind visiting temples as long
as I'm not pushed around like some stray dog.
My wife calls me a
fake atheist.
She's right.
I love festivals
unabashedly for three reasons:
a. The food. The food.
The food.
b. It's a holiday
c. It brings
people together
Festivals bring
families together under the pretext of some mythological story and during
festivals, god thankfully takes a back seat. I can do without the processions
that block traffic and smoke and sound from crackers that give me a
migraine.
In that sense,
festivals and religion aren't one and the same.
Religion divides,
festivals unite.
Of course I'll be
celebrating Diwali this year with an overdose of sweets and family.
I'm just not sure
I'll be celebrating God too.
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