silver linings

So, everytime the world starts seeming like to depressing a place to live in, it turns around and shines back at me.

We seem to be talking about religion a lot nowadays. How much do you practice? Do you follow religion? Do you think this is OK? Does God exist? Do you believe in Him? Is it a Him or a Her?

Then there are debates on fundamentalism. Religion taken too far. Wars and killing and intolerance. Morality and standards. Hurting moral sentiments. Licences and liberties once so freely taken are constrained now. People die for preaching what they believe in. People preach hate. A Muslim can't walk down alone down a Hindu street. Indira Gandhi's killers are declared martyrs. I really don't want to go on.

But then, there are days like today. Watch the Republic Day parade, and feel float-y. Maybe at least in symbols and decorations and uniform, our country is united. Maybe at least for a day, the concept of my country united in diversity has some meaning, some pride, some 'patriotism' left.

Grand gestures, and grand achievements and performances and showoffs. How far we have come. Divide and Rule to, well... whatever kind of divisions there are today. Maybe they've always been there. Maybe it's just me, I realise these divisions now that I have lenses to look at them with.

But then, today, a peaceful holiday with weak sunlight in my sleepy residential colony. A Sikh family has organised a reading of the Guru Granth Sahib for a deceased relative, so the strains of the chants float around the streets on the cold afternoon. At 12 30, the nearby mosque starts up the afternoon namaaz prayers. I can't quite capture it in words, I wish there was a way to capture the sound of it, the two voices, the two calls to a faceless formless God, almighty and all powerful.

And then a mobile ringtone outside our window, perhaps a driver or a watchman, starts up, 'Om bhur bhuvasvaha, tatsah viturvarenyam!...'

My world. There is freedom to exist in it, still. And our strengths are such that we do, we keep existing, side by side, ignoring each other, tolerating each other, whatever. There are killings and murders and hate all around us, but sometimes, our voices mingle and we pray together in our different tongues to the different names we worship. On a sleepy afternoon in my suburban colony, maybe there is hope for religion still, in the lives of ordinary people who pray in the morning before going to work and come home in the evening as their children play in the park nearby, laughing and unmindful.