Help me! I am a convert

I am a convert and since, as per latest info gleaned from the RSS and the VHP loudmouth sources, conversion is still not illegal in this country, I am free to claim, without fear of being lugged into jail, that I have been converted.

I must also categorically state Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, blessed Teresa of Calcutta, MC had no role to play in my conversion, though I confess that I did meet her once in my innocent youth. I met her as a starry-eyed representative of Bharat Scouts and Guides and I do so vividly remember the moment. She had smiled as I approached her, she had reached out her hand to pat me or maybe she had just reached out to steady herself, she was always very old and frail. She had drawn close to me and mumbled something in my ear but before I could understand her Albanian-accented English the guy next in line had pushed me off to take his stand in the limelight.

I don’t know if Mother Teresa was whispering, “Convert! Convert!” in my ears but even if she had her words would still have fallen on deaf ears. I had already converted before I met her. None of the other uniformed teenagers gawking at her presence did later own up to having been asked to convert. One chap who particularly understood Albanian English said that Mother Teresa had asked him his name and with a smile had repeated “very nice” twice, when he told him he was called Sambhu. The Mother, who as we know was also a lifelong missionary, possibly saw him as a potential convert.

Coming back to me being a "convert" - The question of what I converted from is of lesser importance than what I converted to and how. Those are the bigger issues and the ones I fear Mr Adityanath and ilk would take offence to. After all they are the pillars of the “save morality and culture” movement who protect the "Indianness" of each and every resident of this political entity designated Bharat, that is India.

I converted to a view that there is no God and in consequence that negated for me, the need for priests, sants, shankaracharyas, moulvis, saints, godmen and random other unnecessary add-ons of established religion. I became an atheist and that makes me doubly complicit in breaking Sangh-established and enforced rules.

In my early teens, I like other thinking animals, was confronted by existential questions of the "who-am-I-and-where-do-I-come-from" variety. At the end of some introspection and use of logic and intelligence I arrived at the conclusion that I am a momentary collection of chemical material and I am free to believe in my mortality without any recourse to divine insurance in the form of afterlife and heaven and the immortal soul nonsense.

My brain was the culprit and my intelligence or the sheer lack of it was the one to blame for taking the extreme step of denouncing my religio-moral inheritance. I converted myself by setting aside certain religious accoutrements that I had been fobbed with by my zealous kith and kin. This happened decades ago when free people in this country did not have to fear the wrath of the anti-conversionists.

Now in my dotty middle age, I fear the saffron clad upholders of "ghar wapsi" who might take umbrage at my ancient conversion – this is of course on the assumption that I was born in to a Hindu family. But what if I was born into a Christian or a Buddhist or a Jain one, or most sacrilegiously how about if my lineage is Mohammedan and I converted to being an atheist - would they still want me to go back home?

Oh! I forget, home is where the majority is and every one of us Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and particularly Muslims have to be sent HOME. What about Parsis? But they are foreigners since they are Persians and stuck to inbreeding despite the genetic risks involved. So we shall overlook them Zoroastrians - as it is, they are a mere 80,000 or something and there are millions to bring home - right?

Frankly speaking I am not worried about the Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Muslims, Zoroastrians, Tribals, Maoists, Nudists or Nature worshippers et tout… I am worried about the atheist me and I don’t wanna go home… I like it where I am and I am quite all right with the hot and cold settings of my current existence. I do not want to exchange it with the heat of a perceived hell or the pleasantness of a fictional heaven.

I don’t know what repressed meaning Dr Freud might have deduced but my nightmares these days are of bare bodied, well fed, pot-bellied, long-haired and unshaven men with ash smeared on their foreheads kicking down my flimsy double padlocked door and waving tridents at me, singing to the tune of "Saare jahan se achcha", these lines in Hindi which I have below translated to the best of my unpatriotic abilities…

Come back home in your kachchha,

Remember you are a Hindu bachcha,

Come back Home in your kachchha,

You are our bulbul in situ

Hindu situ not Gomorrah, Gomorrah

Come back home in your kachchha,

Or we will kick your arse achcha!

Come back Home in your kachchha.