Why I think Hindutva 2.0 has way too many bugs
My name is Kaul and I am a Hindu. But my present condition can best be explained as chronic form of religious identity crisis. I am being bombarded with conflicting views and am feeling a bit out of dharmic sync. Is it time for an upgrade to Version 2015 of Hinduism. Any package I can partake of?
Kindly hold your thought if it has wandered to names like Yogi Adityanath, Sadhvi Prachi, or any other fire-spitting serpents, creeping their way into media airtime. My apologies as a person of average religious quotient, but I cannot afford their logic and intellect. Their enlightenment has already rendered many a Hindu, blind. I would rather keep my light.
Back to why I feel the need to upgrade. The new look Hinduism (at least the way it’s presented by the new protagonists) is actually the antithesis of the religious consciousness that I have collected over the years.
Let me begin with the story of my grandmother, who was a well-rounded Kashmiri Pandit woman, true to her religion, rituals and daily ablutions. But that is not what made her a Hindu for me. When I look back with baby eyes, she gave me my first lesson in Hinduism. She was cleaning some vegetables and one of the greens had a rather well-fed caterpillar crawling peacefully.
I had seen many adults in the house, keeping dishes of water in such cases to drown the worms and insects. But what my grandmother did was different. She lifted the tiny fellow and carried it to the kitchen garden in the backyard and placed it on the shrub with due respect. I watched in awe. “Was he your friend, grandma. Why care so much?” I asked eyeing what looked like an over-sized green monster to my tiny self.
“It is a life and must not be trampled. It is alive and I want it to remain so,” she told me.
That day, I learned the first axiom of what I see as the ethos of Hinduism - a life, however wriggly or wormy, needs to be respected.
This thought got re-enforced when my grandparents taught me to say Namaskar explaining to me, the spirit behind it. By bowing to the person in front of you, you bow to the God in him. Mutual respect!
To top it all, I grew up as a Shaivite and my next learning was “Shivoham” – I am Shiva, and the fact that Shiva resides in all of us.
All the religious stories narrated to us in childhood to inculcate the basic values as Hindus, were about tolerance and sacrifice of men and women through tap, sadhna, upwas and so on. Self-discipline, mutual respect and tolerance were the binding glue. I remember my husband telling me that every time an esteemed Maulvi visited their grandfather who was a very learner pundit, the children in the house were asked to touch his feet and seek blessings. Yes mutual respect!
Maybe that is how we grew up to have many Muslim friends. Incidentally, till date, what’s in their heart and mind interests us more than what is on their plates.
Ostensibly, now under the new ISIS equivalence of Hinduism, being prophesied, I will have to kill someone for eating out of his choice. It doesn’t matter if I condemn a real traitor or not, but I will necessarily have to dig my power teeth into a Muslim celeb who has a Khan or Ali to his name.
But before I start reinventing my Hindu self, these new merchants of the Hindu thought must confirm to me that the metamorphosis has been necessitated since God has long stopped being in every human, Shiva lives in me no more and the Hindu thought has finally been hijacked by ISIS philosophy.
If that is not the case, I refuse to politicise my religion and give nobody else the choice or the right to do that for me. And the form of Hinduism that I should like to pass on to my children is that our faith always manifests in the choices we make in life, not because of the scriptures we read.
One day when my teenage son, who is a vegan, looked with great interest at a KFC Chicken nugget meal poster, I held him by the hand and took him to KFC. My only parental guidance was: “If you are not convinced about being a vegan for whatever the reason, go ahead and order.”
He refused because he said, “he found the tiny chicks adorable while they were alive”. It is a choice that he makes and it has nothing to do with his being a Hindu.
Kill me for saying this if you like but I have seen most chaste Brahmins and Jains dig onto beef, pork and snails maybe more openly outside India. Just as I have known many Muslim friends who swear by vodka on the rocks. But that is not how I recognise them as true Hindus or Muslims. There is much more to religion than the palate. And my version of Hinduism is tolerant towards personal choices. Must I change?