Reminiscences

When you are 60+ years & retire from “active life”, so to say, you notice that you have so much to share from your reminiscences. Well, some say that no one is willing to listen to an old man. I am not sure about that yet.

From my memory, I recall two incidents in my life when I was confronted on Hindu religion & its beliefs. Not that I was only confronted twice, but these two were challenges in which I could have faced a checkmate. That would not have been a happy situation for me & for the religion in which I was born, which I follow in my own liberal manner & of which I am very proud. In any case liberalism is the core of Hinduism. Hinduism does not believe in a regimented society. There is nothing like going to prayers, in Hinduism, let us say, on every Tuesday. Concept of One God is the core of the religion but you are free to worship any of its formations & creations. That is why the phrase “Aatma is Paramatma”

Coming back to the reminiscences of the two incidents, the first one was in Kullu & the second one was in Jammu.

Here I will conclude my first incident & follow it up with a second one later.

I was posted in Kullu for closer to a year with the assignment of acquiring land for an electric substation so that evacuation of power from Parbati projects was enabled. It was not an easy task as for the past three years or so; no one from our organization was allowed to inspect or visit the land, by a very vociferous section of villagers. Land was to be acquired through a process called ‘land acquisition’ under a legal frame work. In this process the Deputy Commissioner, Additional Commissioner & staff of his office were involved. As such regular interaction with them was a part of my job.

One day a meeting was fixed by the Collectors office & I reached the office at the scheduled time. I did not find the Collector in his office however the Additional DC & his staff were already there. I walked into the chamber of the Additional Commissioner where some people were already seated. I asked about the availability of the Collector & I was told that he shall be available in a few minutes. In a continued process of ‘dissipation of information’ the Additional DC told me that the Collector was a God fearing man & he would go to a particular temple before coming to the office. In the same breath he told me that he himself did not believe in idol worship & also ‘inferred loudly’ that me being a ‘Brahmin’ too I would also be an idol worshiper. The gentleman himself was a Hindu.

All of a sudden the environment took a very different turn & I was in a fix. I was not expecting a question like this at the office of the collector in my wildest dreams.  I was also in a fix as to whether I should reply him or leave the issue & confine myself to the ‘higher goal’ of ‘land acquisition’ sheepishly. Since the statement was made in public, to the amusement of many, I thought it prudent to make my point. I told the Additional Collector that since the forum in which we were sitting was not an appropriate one to discuss this issue so I would reserve my right to reply & would reply to his ‘loud thinking’ surely & certainly.

Soon after the DC came & the meeting started & the ADC was told by the DC to visit the site where we intended to construct the substation.

The ADC told me to join him in his car & no sooner did I take my seat beside him he asked me to spell out what was on my mind about ‘idol worship’& the question he had asked me in his office.

My mind immediately scanned Hinduism for a while. I was not sure as to what should he be told as the  ADC’s annoyance could jeopardise my project as he was a very critical link in the ‘acquisition process of land’ for the substation. This is, generally, how Hindus start thinking once faced with a tricky situation. I told him that I was a ‘Brahmin’ by birth but not actually a ‘Brahmin’ in the actual sense of the word as my job profile had nothing ‘Brahmanical’ about it. I told him that the same was true of every other Hindu in the world today. However, I asked him as to how he considered Hinduism to be rooted in such a narrow & restricted concept that worshiping an idol or not would be considered as a pass or fail test for Hindus, or how this could be considered to be a touchstone of faith for a practising Hindus.

My mind raced over millions of humans who call themselves Hindus in a very broad sense of the word & yet follow their own path to realize the Ultimate without wearing any visible sign of Hinduism on them. They may wear a holy thread or not, may keep a ‘choti’ or not, wear a ‘tilak’ in so many varied designs & colours or may not, may wear a ‘pugri (turban)’, cap (both of varied designs) or not or may generally remain bare headed, may wear a beard & moustache or not, could be vegetarians or meat eaters or may be vegetarian on certain days & non vegetarian on others, burn their dead or may be bury them. They could worship nature, trees, plants, animals, rivers, oceans, mountains, clouds or any other creation of God. They could even worship humans in whom they would find similarities with God, as conceptualized by them over a period of time, since their birth. They could pray to God with their eyes closed or may be open, squatting on floor, sitting in a chair, dancing joyously or in any other way which they thought fit for accessing the Ultimate. Obviously they worship idols & some of them don’t. These concepts might have taken root from the stories they might have heard from their parents, grand-parents and friends or by simply reading books & probably, in recent times, watching serials on TV channels & information provided by inter net & social networking sites. They might even worship every human as His manifestation without batting an eyelid.

They are still Hindus irrespective of whether they go to temples, mosques, ‘dargahs’, ‘peer babas’, gurudwaras or churches. Today you see more Hindu’s in attendance at the ‘mazars’ of ‘peer babas’ on every Thursday than Muslims, for example. They would go to all these religious places with the same reverence as they would go to their own Hindu temples. However they would stick to the basic precepts of Hinduism.

And all of them are Hindus.

All these ideas were racing through my mind & than a thought of Lord Shiva, Shankar Mahadev, electrified my mind. Lord Shiva is one of those concepts of Hinduism which portrays Him to be so easy to please & at the same time so much full of anger.  He is angry when he feels that something has been vitiating the peaceful atmosphere & the environment. Happiness & anger for him are like ‘1’ & ‘0’, binaries, of the modern digital age. The Lord in His pristine glory has been visualized by the poets, painters, dancers & scholars, both Vedic & present, as a figure with long knotty dishevelled hair, with Ganga falling from the skies on to His head. He stands with his feet firmly apart & body fully balanced & anchored to the ground to be able to bear the thrust of a huge column of water falling on His head.  He is in rapt attention. He has poisonous snakes entwined to His neck & other parts of the body, a garland made up of ‘Rudraksh beads’, a new moon resting comfortably on His head as if unaware of the happenings. He has scorpions & leeches wandering around Him, but He is unmindful of all these. They are His playthings.

His throat is blue from the effect of the poison He drank to save mankind while the ‘oceans were being churned’ for their goodies. Under these stressful conditions His companion, the ‘Nandi Gan’, stands firmly with Him & does not want to leave the side of His Master. Lord Mahadev holds His trident in His one Hand & in the other is the “kamandal”, the signs of not taking things lying down & ‘tyag’ – foregoing everything that is worldly.

Well, is Lord Mahadeva, a physical form or manifestation of the Himalayas that provide & sustain life in the country called India? There doesn’t seem to be a dividing line & if at all there is one it is obscure & un-discernable.  The Himalayas carry the Ganges through the knotted growth of mighty trees, plants, foliage, herbs, shrubs & flora. Thousands of species of animal & plant life thrive on this creation of nature. Nandi, the bull, companion of the Lord, lives in the same jungles though it is one of the most vulnerable species of the forest. If these jungles were not there the eroded soil from the mountains because of Ganga & innumerable streams & rivers would have filled up the plains of India further down & converted them to virtual desert. Thus this creation of nature further impacts & controls the lives of people in a positive way that live in the plains of India. Moon, full or in any other phases of its periodic appearance, is most beautiful when viewed in the backdrop of the mighty Himalayas. It is unimaginable as to what India would have looked like if Himalayas were not there.

Hence, for Hindus, there is no distinction between the Himalayas & Lord Shankar Mahadev. Thus, how does it matter whether one prays to His image or to this mighty creation of Mother Nature? Both are splendid. That is why millions of Hindus throng the Himalayas, year after year, for having a ‘darshan’ of Lord Shiva at Amarnath, Kedarnath, Badrinath, Gangotri, Yamanotri & Kailash-Mansarovar. They carry water, in bottles or any other vessel at their disposal, from the Holy Ganga flowing through Gangotri, Varanasi, Haridwar & Allahabad to Rameshwaram, thousands of kilometres away, to be poured over the Shiva Lingam consecrated & installed by Lord Ram thousands of years ago.

This narrative to the ADC sitting beside me was enthralling. I told him that with this vastness & depth of the philosophy of Hinduism where does the question of praying to idols or not arise. It is a religion that comes very naturally to humans. There is an overwhelming overlap between Hinduism & nature, the creation of God.

I narrated to him a story of Kagbhushandi to him from the Ramayana.

Ramayana has a character named Kagbhushandi, a crow. He is considered to be narrating Ramayana to the animal world in the same way as Lord Shiva is narrating it to Parvati & Yagyavalik to a congregation of saints. Kagbhushandi was a naughty boy, in an earlier birth under the tutelage of a renowned & well-read teacher. The teacher was a ‘gyani’ in his own right. Kagbhushandi was very intelligent, but always thought that he had better understanding of scriptures & religion than the old & renowned teacher. He had, over a period of time developed contempt for his own ‘guru’.

One day Kagbhushandi was praying to Lord Shiva in a temple & was sitting in front of a Shiva Lingam when his teacher also entered this temple. Kagbhushandi, proud of his own self, did not greet the guru & in fact showed signs of contempt for him. Lord Shankar was annoyed. He was so furious that He repudiated Kagbhushandi to the hearing of the ‘guru’ & asked him as to what was the reason of his pride. How come, He said, you show such contempt for such a renowned & humble scholar who has all the love for you in spite of your misbehaviour. He cursed him that since you continued to sit like a cobra while your teacher entered the temple you should turn into a cobra for all your life.

On hearing the curse from Lord Shiva to his favourite, but naughty & haughty disciple, the ‘guru’ was shaken. He thought that the punishment handed over to Kagbhushandi was far in excess of his misdeed. But what could the guru do? He sat down with his folded hands, in the temple, in front of Shiva Lingam, an idol & went into deep prayers. He requested the Lord that the punishment be waived off from his pupil & the prayer came to be called ‘Rudrashtkam’.

Through this prayer the ‘guru’ beseeches Lord Shiva to excuse his student. Sitting in front of the ‘shiv lingam’, an idol in the temple, he prays that O Lord, who is omnipresent, the root cause of the universe, beyond comprehension & shapeless, without an alternative, all knowing, creator & destroyer kindly pardon the mistakes of my ‘shishya’.

What must be noted here is that the ‘guru’ is sitting in front of ‘shiva lingam’, an idol, but in his prayer speaks about the vastness & shapelessness of God, the omnipresent one. This is the greatness of Hinduism. This is the philosophy. It is surprising that we get into an unnecessary debate about idol worship or not. Unfortunately we get into so many other debates about Hinduism without really understanding it.

The prayer of the ‘guru’ is accepted by Lord Shiva & He says that the curse cannot be reversed, however Kagbhushandi shall have the choice of timing as to when he wants to forsake the existing form of his body & take whichever new shape he wanted with all knowledge of the previous births intact.

It is with this prayer that I closed my discussion with the ADC.

He stayed to be pretty helpful in my official duties & the land of the substation was eventually handed over to us after the due process of law.