The body as a temple*

She wants to get a tattoo too, but she wants it in Mandarin script**. Why? Because in Arabic, it sounds too...'obvious'. I ask her what she wants it to say – her answer, "The divine is." In Arabic, that would be Allah hu.

Of late, I've become increasingly wary of religious people. This isn't religion-specific – almost all of them spook me out now. There's a certain I-am-right-and-you-are-wrong-ness that apparently comes with the territory.

But I can't help feeling a little sad for her. She has faith, but she cannot declare it in the language of that faith. Because it would be too 'obvious'.

The world is a weird, sad place.


*Or denomination-specific house of worship of your choice***.

**Does anyone know the name of this script? Does it have one?

***A question to the believers; have any of you actually chosen your religion? Have you ever thought of switching?

Why I am not religious*

: There is this girl I know.
: Yes?
: from TIS. (or she was at TIS, she quit before I did)
: She annoys the *hell* out of me!
: And that's a bad thing?
: Oh don't YOU start now!
: She's a Brahmakumari
: I notice your respectful capitalisation.
: Oh shut up!
: So why does she annoy you, this Brahmakumari (see? I'm playing along)?
: I don't know if it's annoyance, as much as disappointment.
: Explain.
: Well initially, I thought she was rather intelligent. As in, we'd had a couple of conversations and she seemed…well, I don't know, like a sane religious person!
: And you fell for that.
: But she DID sound sane! She actually said stuff like, "The reason most religions fail is because most of them insist on restricted brain-usage"
: Well, not exactly in those words, but that was the gist of it.
: And you fell for it.
: Would you stop saying that?
: My poor, gullible peanut, didn't you notice her clever use of the word 'most'?
: (which obviously implied all religions EXCEPTING her own?)
: No, I did NOT. And *must* you rub it in?
: Yes. (evil grin)
: Look, how many times do you have to have this conversation before you realise it's pointless? You're flogging a dead horse.
: :(
: And DON'T use that face with me.
: I can't help it, that's my default disappointed-in-people face.
: You mean your disappointed-in-RELIGIOUS-people face. People, in general, aren't too bad.
: There's room for improvement, but then, there always is.
: So what (specifically) did she do to annoy you?
: She said I was 'oversexed'.
: HAHAHAHAAAA!
: (glares)
: HAHAHAHHAHAAA!!
: Oh shut up!
: No, I'm sorry, this is hilarious!
: (muffled guffaws)
: Don't make me come over there. (rolls up sleeves)
: Okay wait. (puts on straight face)
: NOW tell me.
: So how did this girl arrive at this remarkably perspicacious conclusion?
: (You didn't get drunk and hit on her did you?!)
: I did NOT.
: I had a conversation with her wrt (a lot of) religions' warped attitude towards sex.
: Like bramhakumari-ism's. As in, they're anti sex.
: I'd asked her what they had against it and she gave me the crappiest reason I'd ever heard!
: And I've heard a LOT of those.
: Being of hyper-vaishnav stock. Yes, I know.
: Tsk! Not hyper-vaishnav stock. Vaishnavism happened to the family later. Just hyper-religious stock.
: (and vaishnavism isn’t really anti-sex. Mostly they just pretend it doesn’t exist.)
: (unless of course, it’s baby-making sex)
: (which is understandably legitimate)
: (the patter of little vaishnav feet and all)
: (which mean greater attendance at little vaishnav temples)
: (and more money in the BIG vaishnav temple-coffers)
: But yes, do you know what her reasoning was??
: Do tell.
: She said, and I quote "We are all the children of one cosmic soul. Which makes us all brothers and sisters, and you wouldn't have sex with your siblings, would you?"
: You're kidding me.
: Nope!
: And you managed to resist the urge to slap her silly?
: I did.
: Pity. You know, sometimes, you should just follow your instincts.
: Especially when faced with such high calibre idiots.
: I know. I'm regretting it now.
: But I also asked her, "So by that logic, your parents committed incest as well?"
: I am pleasantly surprised. YOU followed up a (potentially) confrontational line of questioning? Not bad at all.
: "And EVEN if they did, considering that you are a product of that incestuous coupling, is it necessarily bad?"
: Bravo!
: She was NOT pleased! :D
: I shouldn't think so. :D
: So what did she have to say to that?
: She gave me the standard religious-person's-cop-out speech.
: "You won't understand this now. Tum is raaste pe chalogi, to tumhe samajh mein aayega. Spritually, you're still a child. "
: Ah, THAT old chestnut.
: That only.
: So you're a sex-fiend because you asked her why her religion is anti-sex?
: Apparently.
: (although I also asked her what they had against eating meat)
: (but THAT, she chose to ignore! Hmmph!)
: Also, there was a copy of Summer of '42 on my desk.
: And the blurb said something about Hermie being, 'sixteen, confused and obsessed with sex'.
: And she picked it up, read the blurb and said, "arre! ye to bilkul tere jaisa hai!"
: Dumb bitch.
: Ooh! Invective! She really got to you, didn't she?
: But I can't get over the idea of YOU as a sex-fiend. HAHAHAHAHAAA!
: I know! It's the most idiotic thing ever!
: It's weird you know.
: I don't *want* to be an atheist fundamentalist.
: I don't *want* to think that all religious people are touched in the head.
: But every time I start giving them the benefit of doubt, thinking that maybe they're not all delusional, I meet another moron like this.
: So these people put you off religion.
: Yes.
: And essentially, stop you from becoming a moron.
: I don't like where you're going with this.
: (smug grin)
: You know I'm right.
: I know no such thing.

* And also, why I need friends who are less smug.

It's over, and my eardrums rejoice!

Hindu gods are deaf as posts.

No, think about it. You have the Easters, the Ids, the Christmases, the assorted Guru Purabs, but do you ever, ever hear them make such an infernal racket the likes of which the Hindus do?

(And you’re not religionist if you’re bitching about your own religion. Or the one you were born into, at any rate)

A festival (and we goddamn NEVER run out of those) just has to peek around the corner, and we’re at it. Bhajans at fucking full volume, fireworks – at ear-splitting decibel-levels, processions that block traffic for miles around.

What is it with us? WHY must our all our celebrations entail behavior the barbarians would have frowned upon? Come on people, thirty-three-million gods – surely ALL of them can’t be deaf??

***

It’s…let me see, sixteen days since diwali and this weekend, this is the first weekend since the goddamn beginning of November, that I have been able to sleep.

And sleep deprivation does not a happy Chronic Skeptic make. I mope, I jump at loud noises (and since there are so many of those, I’m pretty much jumping every five minutes), and when I can’t take it any more, I lean out of my window, shake my fist and yell at the sons of Satan. Of course, since there’s no chance they can hear me from eight floors up, I’m just shaking my fists and screaming into the night. Which does nothing except worry the neighbours. There’s a reason why their children shrink away from me if I happen to meet them in the elevator.

I hate most Hindu festivals. I hate them in the bitchiest, most horrible, the-bloody-natives-are-at-it-again way. But diwali, now there’s something special. I hate the noise, I hate the pollution and there haven't been religious reasons for a long time now. Lakshmi - the moolah, the dough, cashola - has always come and gone as she liked and Ram, Mr. Maryada Purushottam himself, was too much of an asshole to have his return celebrated.

The sweets are too sweet (and there are too many of them), you have to smile at complete strangers and your goddamn inbox overflows with mass-forwarded diwali greetings (there are few things that piss me off more than mass-forwarded greetings. Honestly, is there a better way of telling me you couldn’t care less if you tried?).

Bombay, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Calcutta...it doesn't matter where you go, It's hell everywhere.

But I remember a couple of diwalis spent in Delhi. Oh they started off just the same. The kids would start lighting their phuljadis at around seven, and then the adults would join in, getting progressively noisier, drunker and more competetive as the night wore on.

"Achcha? Unhone do-hazaar-ki-ladi lagayi hai?? Hum paanch hazaar ki lagayenge!"

And they'd go off to collect all the ladis from the neighbouring houses, twist them into one massive string, and then light the fuse.

It would go on forever. The noise, like machine-gun fire.

But sometimes, if you stayed up long enough, till they ran out of their hazaaron-ki-ladiyan, and bombs and fizzy rockets. Till their savage children tired and trooped back into their houses, leaving the streets looking like a war zone. Till the silence slowly settled along with the fog and the smoke, you'd see what was the beginning of winter. You'd see it as it breathed into the night, cold, soft, misty around the edges. Sharp in your lungs, a slight sting your nostrils as you breathed in. You'd see it surround the diyas, the candles or the fairy lights - the ones on your balcony in sharp focus, the rest, fading into smaller and smaller circles of downy soft light.

Jab bhagwaan deta hai...

...chhappar phaad ke deta hai.

I was, I think, about 7 years old when I first heard this phrase. The mental images which came with it were fascinating because I hadn't a clue what a chhappar was and had promptly mentally substituted it with the similar sounding chappal. The picture in my head therefore, was that of a benevolent (if slightly batty) god, who stored a goonie-esque stash of loot in the soles of his giant Kolhapuris (they were thick-ish soles). On days when he was pleased, he'd rip the insole (upsole? what do you call the upper half of a Kolhapuri chappal?) in two and tip a cascade of treasure into your house from his giant slipper in the sky.

I remember finding this system a little odd, but who was I to argue? He was god, he moved in mysterious ways.

And that phrase (with the chappaR as opposed to the chappaL) pretty much sums up what all of October has been about.

So first, there was the Series of Mysterious Ailments in which a bunch of dastardly viruses decided to make my body their own personal island of fun. My temperature would zip from one end of the thermometer to another, leaving me struggling to either pull on three blankets, or weakly kick them off. Most annoying it was (although for a couple of delirious minutes, just before the shivering set in I'd think, "Ooh...winter! In Delhi!" and get all happy).

Then the fever came down and the deafness happened, only it wasn't real deafness* - just a sort of internal deafness which blanketed all outside sounds but magnified the inside-your-head noises ONE HUNDREDFOLD. To get an idea what I'm talking about, plug your ears with your fingers and chew on a piece of toast. I swear to you, you will never see toast in the same light again. I spent a good three days listening in wide-eyed wonder, to the sounds of my mastication (which, I know, sounds terribly dirty but isn't).

THEN there is employment. Full time, five days a week, with a pretty paycheck at the end of the month thank you very much. It is with a division of the Big Bawa Company (henceforth referred to as the BBC) and so far, after eight days of being an employee, I can say that it's been good. Day 1 went by mostly figuring out the most essential things: where the loos were, what kinda food the canteen served and how many cups of coffee I could drink before people would start looking worried and back away slowly when I started to talk to them (for the record, it's four), and the subsequent days have just been packed.

Employment has come with it's own bunch of insights which have, more or less, nothing to do with the job itself.

Insight 1: Andheri = Hell. Allow me to recount a conversation I had with an auto-walla, one rainy day in August. The autowalla, his auto and I were stuck in knee-deep water (this is 2007, mind you. NOT 2005), traffic hadn’t budged an inch in the last half an hour and horns were blaring all over the place.

Autowallah: (In a voice dripping with weariness) Madam, aapko maalum hai yeh jagah kya hai?
Me: Er...Andheri? Aapko nahin maalum kya??
Autowallah: Madam...yeh jagah...jahannum hai, JAHANNUM!!

(Fierce blowing of auto horn)

Insight 2: Your mother (by which I actually mean mine) was right when she told you to be picky about the boys you chose to play tonsil-hockey with. Because many years down the line, when you find yourself working with one such boy, while on the surface you may be discussing things like lesson plans and scripting and enterprise application training, the one thought running around in your head will be OH MY GOD THIS MAN'S TONGUE WAS ONCE IN MY MOUTH. Disconcerting, girls and boys, is the word we're looking for.

Insight 3: I have turned into my father. After making a career of being a directionless drifter, I have turned into one of those people who *thrive* under pressure and boy, is THAT a shock for MY system. In the last week and a half, I've had deadlines that would normally have me curled up on the floor crying, but the newly-employed me? She is calm and collected. She is going in to work early, making lists (the ailments have obviously affected a chromosomal mutation) and positively burning with a quiet efficiency.

You know you fight it. You're rebellious, you drink, you (try to) smoke, you get tattoos, piercings, and a collection of exes that make you cringe and still, one fine day you will wake up and find that you have turned into your parents. That life, she's got a sick sense of humour.

Oh and by the way god / giant slipper in the sky? Since this is officially the end of October (AKA the Month in which It All Happened at Once), you can go easy now. No, really, I wouldn't mind. NO. SERIOUSLY, STOP IT!

* And smartypants family shall refrain from commenting about how ‘You can’t lose what you ain’t got’. You're all deaf anyway. And maybe I'm not deaf, maybe you just all need to be more interesting? Y’ever think of that?

God is a Surly Cab Driver

Yesterday, after frantically running around in circles for a cab at Churchgate station, I find one, get into it and a little out of breath I ask the cab-driver:

Me: “Bhaiyya, aap Horniman Circle jaante ho?
Cab Driver: (in slow, deep, deadpan voice) “Main sab kuch jaanta hoon.”


There go my chances of ever getting into The Great Big Taxi in the Sky.