Vacationing In Tirupati, And What I Like & Dislike About Organised Religion

I’m wary of crowded places, hot weather and long queues.

Add ill-mannered security guards. And priests who’d make Atilla blush. Blend them, and you get Tirupati.

Yet I had to go. Family tradition. It’s something we do after marriage.

I kept pushing it away for two years. And then, the trip materialised and our family headed for the seven hills.

It was my sixth trip to the place. I don’t remember going to another holiday spot – religious or otherwise – as many times.

At first, there’s much to like about the place: the climate’s pleasant, the locales are clean and green, there’s spicy, piping hot, slurpacious Andhra food. And the datacard works too.

Then, the darshans happened.

There are several types of darshans you can make at Tirupati.

The cheapest option will leave you standing in queues several kilometres long. The slow, painful barefooted drag to the lord’s chamber takes many hours, sometimes more than a day.

Then, there’s the VIP queue, where you have to pay a higher-than-usual ticket price. But you are spared the queue and taken straight to the sanctum sanctorum.

Right before they reach the business end of the darshan, all these queues merge. Then, another wave from this sea of skinheads prepares to hit the lord’s chamber.

There, just as the devotees reach the chamber and get a second’s worth of his glimpse, they’re pushed away by the security – swiftly, rudely – to keep the queue moving.

All those hours in the sun.

For one second’s worth of darshan.

Two seconds, if you’re lucky.

Three, if you hold your ground and don’t let them push you.

It doesn’t stop there.

After this, people queue up again to make donations to the ginormous Tirupati hundi.

This queue is much shorter. But one thing doesn’t change: right after you’re done dropping your money in the hundi, the guard – probably fully aware that your donation helps pay his salary – pushes you away. All over again.

After this, you pass a gallery where overweight priests sit behind a glass wall with currency notes strewn around, waiting to be counted, or be pinched.

I’m an atheist. But what I truly like about organised religion is that it’s a fantastic, recession-proof, all-weather business model.

Its consumers fear abandoning it. Its proponents milk it for its dogmatic worth. And the product itself – The God – has irreproachable manners of pleasing or displeasing its followers.

My heated back-and-forth with some priests and guards would mean I’m not going back to any place of religion in a hurry.

However, if I can, I’m definitely going to set up a temple in every corner of the country.

My First Strand of Gray Hair

My Xth CBSE Hindi syllabus had this chapter about a middle-aged man expressing his bittersweet feelings after he noticed the first gray strand on his scalp.

His feelings got my goat. I was 15, and had already begun graying.

My first gray strand appeared when I was 14. The second didn’t take too long after that.

At the peak of my hormonal pandemonium, just when I was supposed to experience the highs of youth, I was dealing with my first sign of aging.

I don’t know — it was probably the hard water. Or my diet. Or maybe that I think too much. Way too much.

By 18, it was a full-blown epidemic. The temples, the scalp, the back of the head — the grays were gaining ground.

I might have been 19 when I had my grays coloured black — something I resorted to, once in a while.

What made matters worse that my hairline receded too. From worrying about premature graying, now I was thankful to have hair at all.

After college, I was admitted to a journalism school. Before I joined, I thought it’d be best to get my hair coloured to look my best for the first day.

A month after a joined, when the colour faded away, I realised half the class was gray.

That’s when I knew I was at the right place. And I never worried about my grays since.

What is the difference between Hamas and Hummus?

Just in case you’ve been confused like I was.

What are they?

Hamas: an acronym for Harakat al-Muqāwamat al-Islāmiyyah, meaning Islamic Resistance Movement.

Hummus: a spread made from minced chickpeas, seasame, lemon juice, salt, garlic and spices.

What is their origin?

Hamas: created in 1987 by a group of Palestinians to kick Jewish ass.

Hummus: has its origins in midieval or even ancient Middle East, though it’s not clear where or when.

What do they go well with?

Hamas: Islamist imperialism, Israel-bombing, Jew-hating, America-hating, terror-mongering, Gaza-capturing.

Hummus: bread, hard-boiled eggs, falafal, chips, crackers, salads and if your name is Zohan, you eat spoonfuls of it for no particular reason.

Who loves them?

Hamas: Arabs back them. Jews hate them. Canada and the US hate them. Even the Norwegians and Japs hate them.

Hummus: Jews love it. Arabs love it. Africans love it. Asians love it.

What do they look like?

Hamas:

Hummus:

No prizes for guessing which one I would prefer.

Regulating the Indian media

I have just one thing to say to those people who want the government to regulate the media: please throw away your cable connection and promise to watch Doordarshan for the rest of your life.

And A Word To Pankaj Kumar

Nitpicking today’s Inner Voice in the Hindustan Times.

When we begin to love God and follow the essential teachings of our religion, we fulfill the purpose for which we came to this planet.

What purpose? Why is it my purpose?

If we follow the core teachings and fulfill our duties, we need not have many worries, for God will take care of the rest.

Aren’t thousands of people doing God’s Work everyday when they get blown to bits by bombs, or get crushed during earthquakes, or get swept away by tsunamis or killed by grave diseases?

Faith and love of God or bhakti go together. Faith is not blind faith.

Faith, among other things, is believing in something you can’t see. That, to me, is very blind. Also, we put too much premium on ‘Enlightened Persons’ for humanity’s own good.

The human faculty of reasoning cannot provide answers to all the questions that life presents us. We have to rely on faith and intuition in such cases.

Exactly. For once, I agree. The question of Life, The Universe and Everything Else is too complicated for the human mind to fathom. But if you use God as the explanation, just how do you explain God?

For cultivating bhakti, we should try to keep our minds free from lust, anger, greed, attachment and pride.

Lust, anger, greed, attachment and pride go hand-in-hand with humanity. Show me a man free of these, and I will show you the elves in my sock drawer.

Reading spiritual books, prayer and japa help us to cultivate bhakti. We may not know the languages in which our scriptures were written or we may find that the modern translations are inaccurate.

This is why I choose not to read them.

Prayer is our effort to commune with the divine.

But if I pray to the elves living in my sock drawer, I’d be called a loon. Why? Because elves don’t exist?

We can tell our hopes and fears to God like a child and ask for guidance and support.

I’d rather consult the elves in my sock drawer. Oh wait. It’s the same thing. There’s an old joke which goes thus: when you talk to God, it is prayer; when God talks back, it is schizophrenia.

However, Buddhism suggests that we rely more on our own efforts and less on prayer. Christianity says that the 10 commandments can be summed up in one sentence: Love God and love your neighbour. Just so, the Hindu concept of bhakti or love of God encompasses the love of his creation.

Sometimes, I have nothing but contempt for creation - or whatever you might want to call it. To quote from the Hitchhiker’s Guide, “In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

All religions exhort us to have a friendly attitude towards our fellow humans. Hence, violence and murder are considered grievous sins.

So they are. Still, too many people kill in the name of religion. Why?

What about the possibility of a stage in our lives when we turn atheist? For atheists, the Dalai Lama said: “It does not matter whether you have religious faith or not. All that is required is that you should be a warm-hearted person.

It does not matter if you have faith. It doesn’t matter if you don’t. In the final analysis, it doesn’t matter. Nothing does.