Category: religion

Festivals and memes

We don’t normally celebrate festivals. We don’t particularly enjoy them. The only festival we celebrate to some degree is Dasara, when we set up dolls and invite people home to view the dolls. Of course, the last couple of years it’s been similar arrangements and there hasn’t been much innovation in what we do, but we enjoy it as a process and hence take forward the festival. Last year, we even got some fireworks during Deepavali and burst them. Again – it was a fun element. We aren’t too enthused by rituals and since most other festivals are little more than rituals we don’t celebrate them.

The wife, however, sometimes have existential doubts. “There must be a reason that our ancestors celebrated these festivals”, she pops up from time to time, “so it may not be correct on our part to simply stop celebrating. We should take forward the tradition”. This is question that comes up each time we don’t celebrate a festival (which you might guess is fairly often). Before today I hadn’t been able to give a convincing reply either way – whether it makes sense to follow our instinct or if it’s a cultural duty to take forward the tradition.

Towards the end of his classic book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins introduces the concept of the meme.  In fact it was Dawkins who “invented” the concept of the meme. It is meant to be a cultural analogy to the gene, and it’s a “cultural’ concept that propagates like biological concepts are taken forward through the generations via genes. Given the multitude of so-called memes that keep popping up every other day, I’m sure all of you know what meme means. I’m just providing the context here since my argument depends on the original Dawkinsian definition of the meme.

Let us say that there is a genetic attribute I inherited from my father, let’s say it’s my height (my father was 5 feet 10 inches, and I’m an inch taller than that). Now, it is not necessary that this particular gene is passed on to my progeny. It is not even necessary that the corresponding gene from my wife gets passed on – there might be a mutation there and despite the wife and I being fairly tall (by Indian standards) we cannot rule out producing a short child. The point I’m trying to make is that while genes propagate, not every trait needs to pass on from you to your offspring. Only a few traits (chosen more or less at random when your and your gene-propagating partner’s genes undergo meiosis) get passed on. Yet, through the network of you and your siblings and cousins and extended family, the family’s genetic code gets passed on.

Now, festivals and other cultural practices can be described as memes. We in the Indian society have a set of memes, which are called “Ganesh Chaturthi”, “Deepavali”, etc. That these memes have survived through the generations shows their strength – who knows about festivals that had been invented but didn’t survive. Now, the fact that we have inherited this meme doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to propagate it. Unlike genetics, the choice here is not random combination – it is our personal choice (we can’t decide what genes our offspring inherits from either of us or through a mutation).

So, just like every genetic trait doesn’t need to be propagated from a parent to an offspring, not every cultural trait needs to be passed on. If I were to pass on every cultural trait I inherit irrespective of whether it is desirable, even when circumstances change, undesirable cultural traits continue to exist. This is not efficient. As a society, we have bandwidth only for a certain number of cultural traits, and if traits are passed on without much thought, the bad ones won’t die. And will crowd out the good ones.

So if you were to look at it in terms of responsibility to society, you need to propagate only those cultural traits that you deem to be relevant and important. “So what if everyone stops celebrating Ganesh Chaturthi?” you may ask. If that would happen that would simply mean a vote of no confidence for the festival and an indication that the festival needs to be phased out. If everyone were to propagate only those cultural traits they find useful, traits that a significant proportion of society finds significant will continue to survive and thrive. For Ganesh Chaturthi to exist 30 years hence, it isn’t necessary for ALL families that have inherited it to celebrate it now. As long as a critical mass of families celebrate it, the festival will survive. If not, it probably doesn’t need to exist.

(the choice of Ganesh Chaturthi for illustration is purely driven by the fact that the festival is today).

Ants and God

Two days back I had polished off a plateful of pancakes (made by the wife, of course) with maple syrup and left the plate in the sink. Unlike usual, I had not bothered to run water over the plate before I put it in the sink. I happened to return to the sink half an hour later (to deposit my coffee cup) and noticed a swarm of ants over my pancake plate, trying to feed on whatever maple syrup was still stuck to the plate.

The more compassionate among you might argue that I should have left them alone. After all, they were eating what I had not eaten, and who was I to grudge that? But I’m not one who tolerates arthropodes of any kind in my house, and I decided to wreak havoc on the ants. It is not often that you find so many ants in one place that you can destroy. So I (belatedly) ran water over the plate. Historically, this event might go down among one section of the ants as “the great flood”. Yes, a few ants managed to scurry away to tell the tale.

Now, these ants had no clue about my existence. All they knew was that there was the plate with maple syrup stuck to it, which they could feed on. And they were going about their business when an external entity who they were not aware of created a flood, drowning most of them. As far as the ants were concerned, I was like an external “greater power”. Someone who had the ability to destroy. And destroy I did.

Note for a moment that this was not a predator-prey relationship. If I were their predator (a spider perhaps) they would have been aware of me. However, here I was, of a species that doesn’t normally interact with ants, much much bigger than the world they know, destroying so many of them.

Like me to the ants, some people like to argue, there is a “greater unknown being” who controls all our lives. This greater unknown being (commonly nicknamed “God”) is in control of our lives, they say. And so, we need to pay obeisance to him and do things that keep him happy. We are all at the mercy of this greater being, they say, and hence we must pray. Pray that this greater being is kind to us. Pray that in the flood that he unleashes from time to time we are among the lucky few that manage to scurry away and live to tell the tale. Pray that he doesn’t cause the flood at all.

While the Ant:Man::Man:God analogy might make sense in terms of the larger creature being significantly superior than the smaller one who is not aware of him, it still does not explain why one needs to pray or do any rituals or even make any attempts to make the larger creature take pity on you.

Ants have no way of communicating with me. Maybe they think there exist creatures such as humans, who should be prayed to so that they are now flooded. I’m sure they might have tried, as they saw me stand over their plate of maple syrup with my hand on the tap. It didn’t make a difference to me. I opened the tap anyway, and unleashed the flood. By a similar analogy, that the “greater creature” will even bother to take cognizance of you and try and understand you and do as you please is a massive leap of faith.

Religion, yet again

I think religion is an exercise in finding loopholes. Religious people I think will make great tax consultants.

So this evening I was at an uncle’s place where he had organized a Vedic recital. Some fifty or more people from the Vedic school he goes to (after having retired after an outstanding career as a space scientist) were there and they were chanting the Vedas. Now, today is a Saturday in the Hindu month of Shraavan (bastardized as Saavan), and the devout are supposed to keep fast (which I discovered only this evening) . However, given that it is not nice to not serve food to people whom you’ve invited home, my uncle had arranged for what people in Bombay term as an “upvaas feast”.

It absolutely beats me how rice is considered to be “food” while avalakki or “beaten rice” (which, as the name suggests, is made from rice), is not! No, I’m not joking. So this evening I learnt that as long as you don’t eat rice, your fast is still maintained! So you had the rather devout gurus of the Vedic school who were supposed to keep fast tonight gorging on Bisibelebhath and Kesari Bhath (among a rather long list of items) – just because the former wasn’t made out of rice, and the latter doesn’t contain rice anyway.

I’m reminded of the time some six years ago. My father had just died and (much against my will) I was being forced to perform a hundred post death ceremonies. Now, protocol for these death ceremonies is that you do it on an empty stomach. You only eat once that day, and that is a rather late lunch after you’ve offered the pinDa (cooked rice mixed with milk and curd and black sesame seed), first to your departed ancestors and then to crows and cows. However, during the course of time, people have made exceptions. Apparently you are now allowed to have coffee or milk in the morning before you perform the ceremony. And over the course of time that has come to be understood as “milk with additives”. And so I was fed cereal with milk (lest I revolt on an empty stomach) as I made my way every day for five days to one dirty “tithi hotel” to supposedly ensure my father’s soul went to heaven, and was tied to those of his ancestors.

Oh, and needless to say, that “only one meal in the day” rule for death ceremonies has been relaxed, too, in the course of time. Now you’re allowed to have dinner also, as long as (surprise, surprise!!) you don’t eat rice!

Then there is the concept of maDi or ritual cleanliness. This evening, my uncle took pains to announce to his guests that the food had been cooked under “strict maDi conditions”. Yet, when I happened to walk in to the kitchen, it was hard for me to walk any more as the floor was insanely sticky, with spilled food, I would guess. Ritual cleanliness I think doesn’t really imply real cleanliness. More significantly, maintaining the conditions or ritual cleanliness gives you an illusion of cleanliness and since you’ve followed the rituals you don’t see any need to keep your kitchen actually clean. It reminds me of what a friend maintains – that the religious are less likely to be moral than the irreligious.

And then I have mentioned on this blog earlier about how during religious functions hosts don’t really bother with serving lunch/dinner on time. For the record, this evening’s dinner was at 9:30, which I’m not sure is a particularly healthy practice (and which is probably I’m still awake).

So the net effect of this is that every time I attend a religious function I get further repulsed by religion. That people don’t answer my questions doesn’t help (I must mention that I’ve stopped asking questions, for I seldom get satisfactory answers. The only person who I still bombard with questions on religion is my mother-in-law who makes a patient and honest attempt at answering them more often than not). It is probably due to my upbringing (I might have mentioned here earlier that my father was atheist. I do one better than him in that I regularly wear my sacred thread, though I probably over-compensate for it by eating meat), but sometimes it actually amazes me that people believe in the kind of things they believe in.

I must consider myself lucky that my long-term gene-propagating partner is quite okay with my lack of religiosity (huge sigh of relief considering that on our first date she had demanded to examine my sacred thread), though occasionally she suddenly declares that we must resurrect our lives and we should “start praying”. Nothing concrete usually comes out of this.

Oh, and this evening my uncle castigated me for serving food while wearing jeans (as the wife remarked later, it was a good thing I was wearing jeans. Wearing a dhoti would have exposed the risk of my dhoti falling into people’s leaf plates). 

And I’m still amazed that despite the advent of writing and recordings, people still choose to expend their valuable mental bandwidth in rote learning the Vedas, rather than trying to understand the philosophy behind them.

PS: Here is a post on why I don’t do my parents’ death ceremonies any more

Want a nightlife? Build temples!

First of all, I’m serious. Second of all, this is not the first time I’m writing on Bangalore’s nightlife (or the lack of it). The last time I wrote about this topic, I had argued that most people in Bangalore are fundamentally illiberal and opposed to extended night life, and official response was just an embodiment of this sentiment. This post is more positive.

I think I have hit upon a solution to create a night life in Bangalore. This is based on my experiences at Amritsar and Ajmer. Both of them were extremely spiritual experiences (no, not that spirit. Alcohol is banned in the vicinity of the main shrines in both  these places). Both places offered fantastic food (again, vegetarian food only in the vicinity of the Golden Temple – but bloody brilliant; and brilliant mutton biryani near the Dargah of HKGN in Ajmer). And most importantly, both towns had a vibrant night life.

I’m not sure if I’ve touched upon this topic earlier, but the fundamental problem with Bangalore not having a night life is that it has never had one. Half of it was a traditional Indian city, and the other half was a rather sleepy cantonment town – which had its share of bars and discotheques, but most of which closed at eight in the evening (even twenty years ago, most of MG Road and Brigade Road would close at eight in the evening). Consequently, the city never did have a lifestyle. Even if you argue that the cantonment side had one, that the “city” side became more dominant after independence meant that whatever night life was there never really developed.

Fundamentally, a town gets a night life if people have some business being outdoors at night. Bombay had its textile mills that ran round the clock. New York was a busy trading port. Pick any city with a reasonable night life and you will find that sometime in its history there would have been a solid reason for people to remain outdoors late in the night. And yes, I’m talking about a solid business reason, not just partying.

The simple fact of the matter is that Bangalore has never had one (for reasons explained above). The situation is slowly changing of course, with many of Bangalore’s BPO and IT shops open through the night to service customers in the new world. Unfortunately, most such companies have insulated themselves from the rest of the city and built their own facilities for food, transportation, etc. Thanks to this, workers in such establishment (no doubt there are several) do not really contribute to the general nocturnal economy of the city. And so the administration can get away with downing shutters at bars and restaurants at 11 pm.

So what needs to be done? As the title of the post suggests, we need to build temples. We need “udbhava murtis” (idols that have sprung up from the ground) to magically spring up in several places in the city (not in the middle of roads of course). Then we need our religious leaders to declare that such murtis are the greatest to have ever existed, and to create a discourse that visiting one such murti will cure one of all past sins (or any such thing that will bring in crowds in large numbers). This needs to be a concerted effort, such that the demand for “darshan” at these murtis become humongous. The demand to see the murtis will be so humongous that the temples that are likely to spring up around them will need to be open round the clock!

And so we will have people visiting these temples late in the night, in the wee hours of the morning. Lots of people at the temple means an  enterprising chaat wallah will find it profitable to set up shop outside these temples. They will be followed by a chai wallah, and then dosa carts will begin to appear. Police will want to read the rule book to these businessmen, but their removal will lead to incurring the wrath of thousands of hungry pilgrims. The police will quietly extract their commissions and let the establishments stay. Then, people will need to get to the temples at wee hours of the morning, so we will have buses running through the night. More people moving around will mean greater “liquidity” in the auto rickshaw market and they will become more affordable at these times.

It will take a while (no good things come easily). But soon the bustling economies around these 24-hour temples will mean that the city will be alive through the night. Laws will have to change, and soon shops will be open through the night. As will be restaurants, and in the course of time bars (no promise on that one; Till very recently even in London bars had to shut at 11pm). And the city will have a night life!

Of course, the road to this liberal utopia is through a religious process. But then, don’t ends sometimes justify the means? And who is to say that an all-powerful deity does not add value to society at large? It will take concerted effort though (these idols need to magically appear in strategic locations, and we need the support of religious leaders to bless such idols – this is easier said than done), but it can be done.

PS: After writing this I realize that I’d written something similar on the Broad Mind a few months ago. Apologies for re-hashing the same idea. But don’t tell me this is not more positive.

Religion and Probability

If only people were better at mathematics in general and probability in particular, we may not have had religion

Last month I was showing my mother-in-law the video of the meteor that fell in Russia causing much havoc, and soon the conversation drifted to why the meteor fell where it did. “It is simple mathematics that the meteor fell in Russia”, I declared, trying to show off my knowledge of geography and probability, arguing that Russia’s large landmass made it the most probable country for the meteor to fall in. My mother-in-law, however, wasn’t convinced. “It’s all god’s choice”, she said.

Recently I realized the fallacy in my argument. While it was probabilistically most likely that the meteor would fall in Russia than in any other country, there was no good scientific reason to explain why it fell at the exact place it did. It could have just as likely fallen in any other place. It was just a matter of chance that it fell where it did.

Falling meteors are not the only events in life that happen with a certain degree of randomness. There are way too many things that are beyond our control which happen when they happen and the way they happen for no good reason. And the kicker is that it all just doesn’t average out. Think about the meteor itself for example. A meteor falling is such a rare event that it is unlikely to happen (at least with this kind of impact) again in most people’s lifetimes. This can be quite confounding for most people.

Every time I’ve studied probability (be it in school or engineering college or business school), I’ve noticed that most people have much trouble understanding it. I might be generalizing based on my cohort but I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch to say that probability is not the easiest of subjects to grasp for most people. Which is a real tragedy given the amount of randomness that is a fixture in everyone’s lives.

Because of the randomness inherent in everyone’s lives, and because most of these random events don’t really average out in people’s lifetimes, people find the need to call upon an external entity to explain these events. And once the existence of one such entity is established, it is only natural to attribute every random event to the actions of this entity.

And then there is the oldest mistake in statistics – assuming that if two events happen simultaneously or one after another, one of the events is the cause for the other. (I’m writing this post while watching football) Back in 2008-09, the last time Liverpool FC presented a good challenge for the English Premier League, I noticed a pattern over a month where Liverpool won all the games that I happened to watch live (on TV) and either drew or lost the others. Being rather superstitious, I immediately came to the conclusion that my watching a game actually led to a Liverpool victory. And every time that didn’t happen (that 2-2 draw at Hull comes to mind) I would try to rationalize that by attributing it to a factor I had hitherto left out of “my model” (like I was seated on the wrong chair or that my phone was ringing when a goal went in or something).

So you have a number of events which happen the way they happen randomly, and for no particular reason. Then, you have pairs of events that for random reasons happen in conjunction with one another, and the human mind that doesn’t like un-explainable events quickly draws a conclusion that one led to the other. And then when the pattern breaks, the model gets extended in random directions.

Randomness leads you to believe in an external entity who is possibly choreographing the world. When enough of you believe in one such entity, you come up with a name for the entity, for example “God”. Then people come up with their own ways of appeasing this “God”, in the hope that it will lead to “God” choreographing events in their favour. Certain ways of appeasement happen simultaneously with events favourable to the people who appeased. These ways of appeasement are then recognized as legitimate methods to appease “God”. And everyone starts following them.

Of course, the experiment is not repeatable – for the results were purely random. So people carry out activities to appease “God” and yet experience events that are unfavourable to them. This is where model extension kicks in. Over time, certain ways of model extension have proved to be more convincing than others, the most common one (at least in India) being ‘”God” is doing this to me because he/she wants to test me”. Sometimes these model extensions also fail to convince. However, the person has so much faith in the model (it has after all been handed over to him/her by his/her ancestors, and a wrong model could definitely not have propagated?) that he/she is not willing to question the model, and tries instead to further extend it in another random direction.

In different parts of the world, different methods of appeasement to “God” happened in conjunction with events favourable to the appeasers, and so this led to different religions. Some people whose appeasements were correlated with favourable events had greater political power (or negotiation skills) than others, so the methods of appeasement favoured by the former grew dominant in that particular society. Over time, mostly due to political and military superiority, some of these methods of appeasement grew disproportionately, and others lost their way. And we had what are now known as “major religions”. I don’t need to continue this story.

So going back, it all once again boils down to the median man’s poor understanding of concepts of probability and randomness, and the desire to explain all possible events. Had human understanding of probability and randomness been superior, it is possible that religion didn’t exist at all!

Bhakti Hinduism versus Sanatana Dharma

Around the turn of the last millennium, the Sanatana Dharma found itself under threat, and not for the first time. The previous threats had been dealt with cleverly and skilfully, with the most masterful stroke having been the co-option of the Buddha as an avatar of Vishnu. Jainism had been similarly dealt with and reduced to margins of the subcontinent.

The new threat, however, was of a different kind. Unlike the philosophy-heavy religions of the subcontinent, the Abrahamic religions were much simplified in their message. Having been stripped off concepts such as rebirth and multiple gods, they had a simple message, based on the concept of an Armageddon. They also came with a handy “with us or against us” message, with evangelists of these faiths not hesitating from putting to sword people who refused to obey them.

Not to be outdone by faiths that were significantly more simplistic, religious leaders of the day figured that the only response was to simplify their own religion, and thus was born what has now come to be known as the “Bhakti movement”. At this point, it is important to keep in mind that the Bhakti movement as not one movement but a collection of a large number of independent movements all of which were in a similar direction.

So how did the Bhakti saints counter the monotheistic simple Abrahamic religions? They each chose a single God from among the pantheon, and professed worship towards this particular God. Tulasidas chose Rama, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu chose Krishna and so forth. More importantly, the divine aspect of Gods who were hitherto human avatars (such as Rama and Krishna) was amplified, and the more “human” grey areas of the epics and scriptures were played down. In retelling of the epics from this time onward, Ramayana became a story of the “ideal king” Rama. Mahabharata was cast as the story of Krishna, rather than that of a battle between cousins over property. The Bhagavad Gita part of the Mahabharata, which receives scant importance in the earlier texts (source: Irawati Karve’s Yuganta) got played up.

In the space of a few centuries, as the Bhakti movement (decentralized, still – remember) took shape across different parts of the country, the very nature of the religion underwent a massive change. Gone was the worship of the general pantheon, its place now taken up by worship towards a single God/Goddess. The latter would even be interpreted as a particular idol of a particular God/Goddess, as now the Venkataramana of Tirupati was now supposed to have a lot more “mahime” than the idol of the same deity at say Devagiri in Banashankari, Bangalore. Out went the philosophical underpinnings of a religious education. In came a list of dos and don’ts. Debate was replaced by obeisance towards the guru.

The Bhakti period had been immediately preceded by a period of immense development of Hindu philosophy, by the likes of Shankaracharya, Ramanujacharya and Madhwacharya. The importance of that was suddenly lost, as the devotion to a particular God took precedence over understanding of a philosophy. I’m supposed to be a Smartha, and am from a priestly family (my greatgrandfather was a priest). None of my religious education, however (mostly received from grandfather and uncles) consisted of anything of Shankara’s Advaitha philosophy – the foundation of the Smartha sect.

Behind my house in Jayanagar is this hall called Shankara Krupa (set up, incidentally, by my grand-uncle), which plays host to lectures of a religious nature every evening. During the day the hall is let out for other functions, typically of a religious nature, and I’ve hosted and attended several events there. There is a podium on stage, from where the speakers deliver their lectures every evening. And on the podium is a large sign, in bold letters in both English and Kannada. “Please do not disturb the lectures by asking questions or engaging in debate”.

This signboard at a place called “Shankara Krupa” sums up where the Bhakti movement has taken the great Sanatana Dharma.

Pinda

I had written this as a note on facebook a long time back, in an introduction to another of my blogposts. It went largely unnoticed – I claim it is because it made way too many people uncomfortable. For posterity’s sake, I thought it needs to go somewhere more permanent – like this blog, so reprising it here. 

One of the several post-death rituals in the Sanatana Dharma is called “sapinDikaraNa” – in which the “pinda” (departed soul) of the deceased is “tied” to the pindas of their ancestors. This is apparently done to make sure that the pinda doesn’t end up as a free radical and come back to haunt its descendants.

I don’t know why I’m thinking about this today, but the way they “connect” the pindas is quite funny. They just tell the gotra and given name of the deceased, and then the given names of the deceased’s father, father’s father and father’s father’s father (for women it is mother-in-law, mother-in-law’s mother-in-law and mother-in-law’s mother-in-law’s mother-in-law).

I think this is a rather poor addressing system, and not one designed for today’s populations. Maybe back in the days when this was invented, not more than one person belonging to a particular gotra had the same name. So this system of addressing worked (like in villages and small towns, houses don’t have door numbers – the postman knows everyone by name). Why is it that the system hasn’t been changed even though there are possibly thousands of people with the same given names and gotras?

If religion truly ever worked, its working would have broken down through the ages when its addressing system became obsolete. Why then, do so many people still “religiously” believe in it?

It’s all pinda wonly, I must say.

More on religion

According to the Hindu calendar today is three years since my mother passed away. If I were religious, or if I were to bow to pressures from religious relatives, I would have performed a “shraadhha/tithi” today. Instead, I’m home, leading a rather normal life. In spite of it being a Sunday today, I’m actually working (I coordinate schedules with my wife, and for some reason she chose to take off this Friday and go to work on Sunday, so I followed). I’ve eaten breakfast and a very normal lunch.

Every year, twice a year (it’s remarkable that my parents’ death anniversaries have a phase difference of about six months), I begin to get requests from relatives – mostly uncles and aunts but also from the wife – that I need to “do my religious duties” and perform the shraadhhas. The last few occasions, I complied. However, as I’ve explained in this post, I’ve gotten disgusted with the general quality of priests around and decided that it’s not worth my while to enrich that community just because someone tells me it might help my parents attain salvation in their afterlives.

Since I flatly refused to do the shraadhha this time, the last few weeks have had more than their fair share of religious discussions compared to earlier. I’ve been asked how I know that priests mis-pronounce. When I say that my limited knowledge of Sanskrit is enough to identify the mispronunciations, they suggest that I try different priests. I then talk about the number of different priests I’ve encountered over various Shraadhhas over the last few years, and about how not one has really said the mantras well (except for the family priest who conducts weddings, etc. but shraadhhas are too small-time for him).

Then comes the clinching argument from my relatives – that even otherwise irreligious people like my father did their ancestors’ shraaddhas without fail. And it is at that time that I start questioning the whole purpose of the Shraadhha and trying to ascribe a believable reason for it. I argue that if the intention is to remember the deceased, I don’t need one day a year to do that since my parents come in my dreams practically every other day. The intention might have been to get all the descendants of the deceased together, but then I’m the only descendant of my parents and I’m “together with myself” all the time.

Then they try and convince me to perform what I can classify as “lesser evils” – such as giving raw rice and vegetables to a priest. I’ve done that once before and considered it to be such an unpleasant experience that I don’t want to do it again. And then I question how it will help. And the argument goes on.

So for today, finally I submitted that I’ll put food out for the crows before I eat, since in the Sanatana Dharma crows are supposed to represent your ancestors. After much haggling, this seemed like an acceptable compromise.

Later in the evening yesterday, my wife and I had a long conversation about what it is to be a Brahmin and why Brahmins are traditionally vegetarian.

Sometimes, when I don’t think enough I think it is ok to admit to the whims and fancies of other people just so that I don’t piss them off. But then when I do think about it, I find it ridiculous that saying a certain set of songs with certain pronunciation and intonation will have some bearing on my life. I find it incredible that feeding some random so-called Brahmins will help provide peace to my deceased parents.

Growing up with an ultra-religious mother and an atheist father, I never really “got” religion, I must say. In fact, the first time when I thought about religion was when I read about parts of America not believing in evolution (this was some 4 years back) – it was incredible that some people were so deluded that they didn’t accept something so fundamental. It was around the same time that I read The God Delusion (not a great book I must say – could’ve been written in < 20 pages), and the beliefs of the devout, as it described, shocked me.

It was around this time that I realized that some (nay, most) people actually take it seriously that if you pray for something it increases your chances of getting it. It shocked me to believe that some people believe that chanting a certain set of songs (mantras are just that, in Vedic language) will improve your life without any other effort on your part. It shocked me that people actually believe in afterlife and rebirth. By this time, my father had passed away, and this wasn’t a topic about which I could have a rational discussion with my mother, so I let it be.

Some temples (of various religions) make me feel calm and peaceful, and I love visiting them. There are temples which look so good I think they need to be preserved, and I make reasonably generous offerings there. There are festivals that I consider fun, and I celebrate them enthusiastically. We had a fairly large doll display at home this Navaratri. We burst fireworks and ate lots of sweets this Diwali. Last year we hosted a Christmas party. With some friends, I raided the kebap stalls in Fraser Town during Ramzan. We set up a little mandap at home for Ganesh Chaturthi, and displayed my collection of Ganesh idols.

But the concept of before-lives and after-lives and rebirth? That of prayers sans effort making a difference? That you need to feed some so-called Brahmins who can’t recite mantras for nuts just so that your parents attain peace in the afterlife? I find it all absolutely ridiculous.

I didn’t put food out for crows – I find no reason to believe that my mother has transformed into one of them, and that that particular crow will come looking for food today. I haven’t worn back my sacred thread as promised yesterday. I think my cook had put onion and garlic in my lunch today. And life goes on..

Tam Brahms and Nirvana

A Tam Brahm friend who got married recently used to claim back in college that Tam Brahms are the highest possible form of life, and that it is the last birth before one achieves Nirvana. Contrary to that, I argue here that Tam Brahms are are condemned to an eternal cycle of death and rebirth. It’s because they are #kogul.

I’ve talked about #kogulness several times before on this blog, including the first ever post (speaking of which, at the wedding last week they actually served “Gopi Fry”) . The sad thing is that back then Twitter wasn’t invented, and consequently the term “#kogul” wasn’t invented, so I wasn’t able to expound as much as I wanted to on this topic. Every blog post on the topic then had to spend half its length describing the phenomenon of kogulness. Thanks to twitter and hashtagging, that is no longer required.

Coming back to the point, Fritz Staal in his classic book Discovering the Vedas talks about mantras being similar to songs of birds, in the sense that pronunciation and intonation need to be exact. In order to argue this, Staal points out that for ages together, the learning of the Vedas simply involved learning them by rote, both the words and the intonation, and there was little emphasis on the actual meaning of the words. In fact, analyzing some of the Rig-Vedic texts now, it is understood that they have been composed in some form of proto-Sanskrit, and the meaning of several of the words used have been lost for ever. Now, if the “value” in the vedic mantras was about the meanings, and the words, these words wouldn’t have been allowed to be lost. Instead, this emphasis on learning by rote and intonation only seeks to affirm Staal’s hypothesis (btw the last time I spoke about Staal’s hypothesis on this blog, some right wing bloggers really blew up in the comments section).

Again returning from the digression, the point is that the whole point about Vedic mantras is about pronunciation and intonation. There is little in the words or in the meanings that will get you divine retribution, but if you can repeat the mantras the way they were composed it will put you on the path to nirvana (again, the assumption of this post is a belief in the Sanaatana Dharma). If you were to dismiss Staal as a “foreign imperialist” (which he was not, RIP), several Hindu Vedic scholars also talk about the importance of pronunciation, and the Gayatri mantra is known to improve one’s pronunciation and reduce stammer (I realized this why the other day when I was singing it rather loudly. The number of Mahapraana consonants in that mantra helps make your tongue more flexible. Ok don’t get dirty thoughts now. And that was around the same time I got material for this post).

So, if you have been born a Brahmin and seek to attain nirvana the vedic way, the way to proceed would be to learn the Vedas properly and sing them with accurate pronunciation and intonation. Where does that leave a Tamil Brahmin? I bet most of you would have heard of Tamilian Carnatic Singers singing “magaa gaNabathim.. “. Tams, having learnt their simplified alphabet, are incorrigible #koguls. For starters they just don’t get the concept of mahaapraaNa. All mahaapraaNa consonants are suitably suppressed in their speech and song. Do you imagine it being better when they were to sing the Vedas?

Tying all this together, the point is this. Tam Brahms are so #kogul that they can never get the pronunciation of the Vedic mantras right. Intonation they might, since several of them are excellent singers, but pronunciation they never can. For this reason, the Gods will never be pleased with their Vedic recitals, and they shall never attain Nirvana. They will instead be condemned to multiple births (likely all of them as #kogul Tam-Brahms) on this earth. And they will continue to fail to learn that it’s their #kogulness that’s holding them back from attaining salvation.

Tailpiece: Thengalai Iyengars seem to have figured out their problem. Having figured that they can never get their practitioners to sing the Vedas in a non-kogul way, they have done the next best thing. They have declared that the power of the Vedas are in the words, and in their meanings, and simply translated them into Tamil, thus preventing kogulness from being a hindrance. Of course, the assumption of power being in meanings is a huge one, so one doesn’t really know if this allows the Thengalais to attain salvation. However, they’ve at least tried.

Tailpiece 2: kogulness is not restricted to Tamil priests alone. The last few times I’ve organized my parents’ death ceremonies, I’ve noticed that the priests (most of them Gult) have been unfailingly #kogul, and being a believer in the power of the Vedic rituals being in pronunciation and intonation, I’m convinced that mantras uttered by these kogul priests have absolutely no impact on bringing upon salvation to my parents’ souls. In fact, given my sample size is rather large, I’ve given up all hopes of finding priests who will do the death ceremonies in the proper way, with proper pronunciation and intonation. For this reason, henceforth I’m not going to waste money on such priests, and will not try to observe my parents’ death ceremonies in a Vedic manner.

On age and experience and respecting elders

A lot of commentary about the financial crisis of 2008 spoke about there not being anyone around who had experienced the Great Depression of the 1930s. The American Economy was largely stable till the end of the 1970s, they had argued, because the memory of the Depression was fresh in the minds of most policy-makers, and they made sure not to repeat similar mistakes. With that cohort retiring, and dying, however, in the 1990s and 2000s there emerged a bunch of policy makers with absolutely no recollection of the depression (in the 1990s, most policy makers would have been born in the 1940s or later). And so they did not hedge themselves and the economy against the kind of risks that had brought America down to its knees in the 1930s.

Now, think back to a society which was far less networked than ours is, and there was little writing (“no writing” would take us too far back in time, but think of a time when it was fairly expensive to write and store written material). This meant, that there were no books, and little to understand and experience apart from what one directly experienced. For example, one would never know what a storm is if one had never directly experienced it. One wouldn’t know how to light a fire if one had never seen a fire being lit. You get the drift. Back in those days when societies were hardly networked and there wasn’t much writing, there was only one way in which one could have learnt things – by having experienced it.

I suspect that this whole concept of elders having to be unconditionally respected had its advent in one such age. Back then, the older you were, the more you had experienced (naturally!), and hence the more you knew! There was no other way in which one could accumulate knowledge or understanding. In places like India, even education didn’t help, for “education” back in those days consisted of little more than learning the scriptures by rote, and didn’t teach much in terms of real knowledge. So taking the advice of elders naturally meant taking the advice of someone who knew more. It is natural to assume that these people who knew more than the ones around were respected.

With the advent of books, and later (post Gutenburg) the advent of cheap books, all this began to change. It became possible for people to know without having experienced. It became possible for people to get more networked, and the direct impact of both of these was that it became possible to know more without having really experienced it. In this day of highly networked societies and wikipedia, it is even possible to know everything about something without even pretending to have experienced it (attend some high school seminars and you’ll know what I’m talking about). There is no connection at all now between age and how much you know.

Culture, however, doesn’t adapt itself so quickly. It didn’t help that “elders”, whose position as the “most knowledgeable” was being threatened thanks to writing and networking, were also the people in power. In any case, the real reason of respect for elders had probably been lost, so it was easier for them to extend their reign. And so it continues to extend.

Older people nowadays fail to recognize that younger people might know more than them, and get offended if the younger people tend to argue with them. Yes, experience is still a great teacher, but the correlation between experience and knowledge has long since been broken. As the pupils sang at the beginning of the Vishnuvardhan starrer Guru Shishyaru (the teacher and the pupils), “doDDavarellaa jaaNaralla, chikkavarellaa kONaralla, gurugaLu hELida maatugaLantoo endoo nijavallaa” (elders are not wise, youngsters are not buffaloes, what the teacher says is never true).

PS: As I was writing this, it struck me that this whole “respect for elders” paradigm is more prevalent in societies (such as India) where education was largely religious. Societies where education was more secular don’t seem to have this paradigm.