God's Pimps.

Disclaimer: This is a rant. It is not my fault if you read it and get offended. But if you do, you know perfectly why.

It is festival season here. Or so, I suppose. There is no other logical explanation to what I have been witnessing the past couple of weeks, with every wild mushroom of a temple having its own pongala and ear deafening speakers at every turn of the locality, not to mention the door-to-door fund collection. I am not a tolerant person when it comes to religious nonsense. As far as I am concerned, people can pray, have their faith and indulge in all their rituals as long as they don’t cause noise pollution and irritation. But the past few days, that is precisely what has been happening. Starting from the local lower caste temple, which was taken up by the Saffron brigade so as to ‘bring all the Hindus together’, to the big temples which have even larger number of devotees willing to die at their god’s feet, they are in constant competition with each other to outdo the potential of miracles the deities could perform.

Let me start by recounting the day which annoyed me enough to write about it. I hate traffic jams. So sitting in an auto at an intersection, listening to some devotional song being blasted at high volume was the starting point. People seem to have this inane notion that only film songs are noisy. Somehow devotional songs escape the noise radar no matter how destabilizing it could be. There is a reason people don’t like loud noises, why babies wake up screaming at sudden sounds and why Govt has set specific time and decibel limitations on the loud speakers; acoustic trauma.  It did not help that the local boys/men/semi goons would stand across the street at every bend, stopping each and every vehicle asking them for financial contribution. Never bother that the passengers don’t want to give money, which we know, mostly goes into the box labeling ‘midnight debaucheries’. They behave as though it is their god given right (pun intended) and since we are all god’s children and the streets are in god’s name, to run amok on them. Never mind that no god lay the roads, no god asked them to collect money forcefully. So, instead of respecting the Constitution of India, public infrastructure and others’ rights, the temple horde decided to worship their god. One must conclude that god rewards disrespect, inconsideration and aggression. 

I also assumed, rather ignorantly on hindsight, that festivities conclude when people go to sleep. Little did I know that devotion is a 24x7 occupation, as I passed a very long and tedious religious procession, with horses, elephants, small children with drooping eyelids holding thaalapoli and the paraphernalia and lots of bright theyyangal and kaavadi. The time was one o’clock at night. They had noise, drunken devotees waving the cars along, neglecting the very fact that there is congestion because they are spread all over the road. 

I feel a cultural alienation. Perhaps because of Kerala’s high developmental indices, which makes one hope that the people question such religious bullying. Perhaps because no one I know closely would be among those crowds of recklessness and primal idiocy that began before the age of wisdom. Indeed, a majority of my loved ones are believers, the kind which go to temples, visit lots of astrologers and who contribute financially when the temple people come knocking, but not one of them would engage in what I have seen the past couple of weeks. But, I feel a cultural alienation, mostly, because this is not culture, neither tradition nor piety. This is about the vulgar and debased intrusion of money, inseminating the sheep with hybrid seeds of mob psych, contributing to the cause of marketing of the particular temple. It seems hollow that the great citizens of our nation, who hate any political procession, groan at having to wait in traffic jams, shout about the destruction of public property and smirk at the causes of different protests, would comply with this ‘culture’ so eagerly and so wantonly. The typical person who is a part of such a culture exudes no individuality and furnishes the mind with worthless obedience to those who espouse the deceptive cause of unifying Hindus and bringing glory.

I am pretty sure that the number and intensity of these festivals and loudspeakers and what not will increase in the coming future. There is nothing I can do except hold them in contempt, feel ashamed at my fellow social beings and hope that the number decreases as more and more people understand the vanity of this neo-liberal incarnation of their gods and the only ones who benefit are the ascetic wolves in cotton mundu.