*** Where have I heard this before :-)?
ON THE SPOT Everything has Become a Ritual
Tavleen Singh
While interviewing Sir Vidya Naipaul I once asked him why a country as obsessed with religion and purity as ours could not understand the importance of keeping at least its sacred rivers clean. His answer was that it was because everything we did had become a 'ritual', a gesture without significance or utility. Last week on a visit to Pali to listen to Gujarat's telegenic preacher, Kirit Bhai, I felt as if I had walked into a living illustration of Naipaul's words.
Kirit Bhai is a popular television preacher and more than twenty thousand people had come to listen to his ten-day katha on the Bhagwad Gita but neither the devotees nor Kirit Bhai appeared to notice the incongruity between the idyllic Hindu stage set from which he preached and the cesspool called Pali that lay on the edge of the white shamiana. Kirit Bhai sat under a fake banyan tree in a fake village square of serene beauty�mud huts, decorated earthen pots, parrots and peacocks calling and masses of plastic flowers dangling everywhere. The sort of village that makers of mythical films get from central casting when they are shooting scenes of Rama, Lakshman and Sita in the forest.
To get to this idyllic setting, I drove through Pali town and this is what it looks like. I passed a bazaar in which there was so much rotting garbage on the sidewalks that the local pigs, thriving on it, were the size of mules. They jostled shoppers aside to get close to fruit vendors who seemed not to mind these unpaid customers. The bazaar led to a residential area of windowless hovels built on a drain so clogged with rotting garbage that it had solidified. It was amid this hideous vision of the 'real' India that Kirit Bhai preached the profundities of Krishna's eternal message.
At the gathering were members of Pali's gentry and when Kirit Bhai finished for the day we repaired to a grand, old guest house that belonged to a local textile magnate. Vast courtyards, pillared verandahs, high-ceiling rooms in which ladies in chiffon saris sat drinking tea on shiny white mattresses, but even here Indian reality intervened: the toilet was a hole in the ground cleaned only by the faintest drizzle of water.
Ritual sanitation. Ritual purity, ritual religion, religion spirituality and yet a Shankaracharya gets arrested and thousands of supposedly holy men are ready to fight in the streets and fast unto death unless he is released.
As someone who has had a longish acquaintance with the Shankaracharya of Kancheepuram let me say here that putting him in jail is wrong. In his own words, "Am I Veerappan?" If there are serious criminal charges against him he could have been charged and released immediately.
He is one of our more enlightened religious teachers and on a visit to Kancheepuram, I asked him if he had noticed that the waters of the Ganga were filthy. He said he had and agreed instantly to issue a statement saying that believing Hindus who contributed through their actions to making the river more polluted were violating the tenets of their religion.
There is almost no Hindu religious ceremony in which gangajal is not used and yet only a handful of believing Hindus have noticed that the river will become a sewer unless those who rule us listen to men like Veerbhadra Misra, the Mahant of the Sankatmochan Temple in Varanasi, and one of the few priests who has spent years fighting to divert the sewage of this city away from the Ganga. He lives on its banks and bathes in its waters every day despite the pollution.
More than Rs 200 crore have been spent on a Ganga Action Plan that sought to clean the sewage water instead of diverting it. The plan failed and the municipality of Varanasi agreed to allow the Mahant to go ahead with his plan to divert the sewage to a cesspit and water purifying plant outside the city but cussed bureaucrats in the State and Central Government took the matter to court where it has rotted for ten years. With decades taken for cases to be decided it could almost be said that our law courts dispense a kind of ritual justice, but now I have said this, I fear that I might be dragged off to court yet again. A few years ago I criticized the justice system for its unwieldy procedures and slow motion justice, and a lawyer in Ujjain dragged me off to court.
The case has just been thrown out but with the backlog that exists you would think judges would be more careful about admitting relatively frivolous cases in the first place. When I said this recently to a judge, he said this could not happen because every citizen had the right to "knock on the doors of justice." He felt he was doing service to the country by admitting every case that came his way.
Our problem is that there are so many people trying to serve the country that this has become a ritual in itself. Last week Dainik Bhaskar reported that Rahul Gandhi speaking in Shillong said he was not in politics to become prime minister but to do service to the country. When a reporter asked if he saw himself as India's future prime minister he said, "It is not my aim to become prime minister, my aim is only to serve the people of this country."
Every politician I have ever interviewed has told me this in almost exactly these words and yet we have the worst governance in the world. It takes so long to get the simplest things done in India that our officials seem never to have time to do important things like ensuring that children do not die of hunger in villages because the public distribution system has collapsed. Or ensuring that our sacred rivers are cleaned, that the towns we live in are properly planned so that they do not all look like Pali, or ensuring that Indians are provided with basic services like healthcare and schools.
This is the week after Diwali when Indians spent more money than they have ever in a festival season so money is not the problem. The problem is that almost everything we do has been reduced to merely going through the motions. As that most observant of observers, Vidya Naipaul puts it, "Everything has become a ritual."
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