To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Wednesday, October 02, 2013
 
For those wondering where I have got to… even if nobody is, let me carry this train of thought J … I have been very much alive and kicking. So kicking in fact, that I haven’t had a chance to sit me down and rest my legs. L The funny thing is, and I am vaguely sure I have said this before, there is a niggling thing in my brain when I don’t write on the blog for a long time, even if only a filler post.

Yesterday, while walking back from the train station, I heard a seller of Godly goods (small idols of Ganesha, Buddha and other Gods), shout out, “Irade naek, toh sabka malik ek.” For those who don’t understand Hindi, this broadly translates to, “If you have good intentions, all Gods are one”. Sounds like a simple statement but at heart quite profound, and I was struck also by the fact that a presumably uneducated and poor person, was crying out these words to sell religious artifacts! What is surprising to me about the description of this person is that the uneducated or poor are usually deemed to have a very narrow perspective of God. They also don’t tend to have liberal views about other Gods. Usually God is what is written in the religious scriptures and there are no philosophical interpretations to understanding God, as far as I have understood of how this section of our population perceives God. I guess my perception is based on limited interactions with this community, such as our maid, or newspapers where certain tragic things occur because people have a limited vision of who God is and what faith means. Even the fights among religious communities is a result of people not being able to think beyond their own version of God and religion, and accept the idea of something universal, that is based on universal good intentions and not on good within a specific community. This simple fellow’s chanting of these words on a sidewalk of a muddy street on a rainy evening with throngs of commuters flitting around with hardly a second to spare in the maddening rush—made me wonder: what if everyone took this chant home with them in their heart? It also gave me a bit of hope for the world: If even an uneducated person with no claim to high philosophy could believe in good intentions and one God, maybe the day wouldn’t be far when many in this country would, and religion would cease to be a label of which God you were affiliated to.

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 11:21 am 4 comments
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