Recently it was Dr. Ambedkar’s 116th birth anniversary and they published a photograph in the newspaper showing a long queue of people waiting to pay homage in front of his large statue. It was surely not a political assemblage: there were women and children too standing there holding flowers. Something in the photograph moved me. People similarly go to Mahatma Gandhi’s samadhi on his birth and death anniversaries. I was just wondering, these days when most of us don’t get time even to go see our neighbors, how do people find time to go pay homage to their ideals?
This thought came to me because recently at home we were discussing why people throng at religious discourses and why nobody shows up when some constructive work like repairing the roads, maintaining a park or building a small school needs to be done. After all it’s not easy to go pay a homage or listen to a satsang (religious discourse). Why is religion, or faith, stronger than our daily basic, but necessary needs.
Alka often talks about an incident that took place in Gorakhpur. Those days they used to show The Ramyana on Doordarshan (the state-run TV broadcasting agency). Almost the entire Hindi-speaking India used to come to a halt at that time. One day the serial was being broadcast and a power-cut happened in Gorakhpur. Having missed the episode, the residents were so enraged that they burned down the bijli ghar (the place from where the electricity is locally distributed). Now, this is a place where the electricity goes almost daily and most often, even during the board exams the students those days had to study in candle-light (those days they didn’t have inverters and generators). How come religion becomes more important than education? Although some might say they could study in candle-light but the episode was lost altogether, this is not the point.
In the case of paying homage to an august person like Dr. Ambedkar I can understand the faith factor: you want to thank a person that did so much for you. But I don’t understand the religious part. By our deeds we don’t manifest religious feelings: we cheat, we are cruel, given a chance we are violent, we exploit and suppress the weak. So why are we so passionately religious? Why are most of us always ready to kill and die for religion? It doesn’t make sense. I’ll delve more into it.
