The Madras Mail

I wanted to comment on my friend’s latest blog post, but realized that it would get very long in the comments section.

Firstly, ‘God’ is concept that was invented to maintain order in society and was used as the answer for every question that was unanswerable by Man. So, this means that God changes over time, this is pretty evident. The Vatican has produced the ‘New 7 deadly Sins’, Hinduism, in its extreme birth as the RSS, is training people to be killing machines who deny alcohol but somehow feel that blood is a better fucking substitute and so forth.

I had an interesting conversation about a month ago, what if the present generation completely obliterated the idea of God, destroyed all references to God, and did not pass on the idea of God to the future generation. So, the future generation knows nothing about God. Is this better?

Religion was a way of living and lays down rules for a safe and healthy life. The religions Islam, Christianity and Judaism have the same lineage of God, it’s pretty obvious why. They were born in pretty much the same place. Moses received the 10 Commandments in Egypt and led the tribes to Israel, the Prophet formalized Islam in Mecca, and Jesus pretty much led most of his life in Galilee, Israel. So, it obviously follows that they follow very similar ideas. Newer religions are formed by certain sects of people who reject the religion of their fathers and decide that they would follow their own set of rules loosely based on the religion they were following. Rarely are religions completely lack of anything in common, unless they were separated geographically. They have their own rituals and festivals, which try to be different than the other religions, for the most obvious and important reason. They wanted to be identified as something different and ‘better’ than the existing religions, so it would make complete sense to have newer festivals and newer rituals. But the integral ideas are the same, respect humanity, eat healthy, stay healthy, and lead a ‘good’ life. The Prophet banned alcohol for a very good reason; he could see its effects in the desert, and the complete lack of control it brought about. Religion is very locally defined. For example, in Hinduism, every Veda has reference to the ‘Bharatavarsha’, the kingdom of Bharata, which is the subcontinent. So reciting the Vedas in the USA or Australia is seemingly pointless as it’s expected to be recited in India, and crossing the seas is considered to be a sin. The concept of Heaven and Hell is also very interesting; almost all the major religions have it. For example in Hinduism, the Karma theory says, ‘if you fuck up, you are fucked, irrespective of the saint you’ve been the rest of the time’. The ‘good’ doesn’t balance out with the ‘bad’; you get fucked for the ‘bad’ and get fed grapes by beautiful, naked virgins for the ‘good’. Gujarat does not allow the sale if liquor, because it is not allowed by Hinduism, supposedly. In the ManuSmriti (Manu is the Eastern version of Noah), it is very clearly said that only the Brahmins are not allowed to drink alcohol, the other CAN!!! And even if a Brahmin did drink alcohol, he would just rot in hell; it’s a personal choice really. But the fuckers there don’t seem to think so.

‘God is in the interpretation’, quite an ironic statement really. Lol. Every version of any religion we know is an interpretation of a ‘scholar’ who was purported to be the authority on it. Quite funny. For example, there is a show running on TV, Ramayan, Rama is decked out with half the gold that a small country would have as reserves. It would be impossible to wear so much of gold; it would weigh 100 fucking kilos. Every recording of the past is never completely literal, most of it is filled with figures of speech that are taken literally by the purported scholars and give a completely skewed view of the truth.

My point here, religion and God and blah blah are all good as long as it assures a peaceful existence to humanity and the environment. That is all that is required, I really don’t give a fuck about anything else.

It’s been quite a while since I left the blogging scene, four months actually, and these months have been quite eventful I might add, from a very questionably gay friend of mine who gets drunk on what can only be referred to as ‘engine-oil’, to the arrival of Yankee Bitch No.1, Koshal P Thirumalai, to a rather brave trip to Goa in an Alto, which deserves a separate post to itself, to my birthday to the arrival of Yankee Bitch No.2, Arvind Venkatraman, to New Year’s and RC, to MBA Examinations, to the interviews and finally, to the highly vetti afternoon yesterday.

Life is getting interesting. Work is actually causing most of my brain cells to die. I keep staring at the monitor for 9 hours straight reading news and what-not, oh did I mention, I actually get paid to do all this. It should get interesting in a few weeks, people have gotten wind of the fact that there is a guy who gets paid to log on to reddit.com everyday. But I doubt it would make too much of a difference, since what most of them are doing can’t be quite termed as ‘productive’.

I came back yesterday after spending a day at Kumbakonam, a small town in Central Tamil Nadu. My parents figured that it would be a good idea to go and say ‘Wazzup!!!’ to Mr. Murugan at Swamimalai (who happens to be my ‘kuladaivam‘, transalates to God of our Clan, I think) and perform a rather dubious activity of bribing him (archanai) with a couple of old bananas and a very questionable coconut and pray for the general welfare of all mankind. My good friend wrote a post, ‘Karma’s a B***H’, a few days back, and that’s when I started thinking about what my idea of ‘God’ was. It would definitely not be the androgynous, smirking God my friend seems to believe. The concept of ‘God’ as a person still seems kinda messed up for me.

‘God’, in this post, henceforth refers to the idol in the temple, unless told otherwise. This does not in any way explain my position on idolatry, a discussion which I have no intention of getting into. When I was in Kumbakonam, I went to about 6 temples, and started thinking. Here is a God, who is sitting on real estate that would be worth millions in Chennai (these temples are f***ing huge, trust me), adorned with jewels that will be worth some more millions, collecting donations and offerings (add a couple more millions), and people seem to think that their paltry coconuts and bananas will be enough to convince God to listen to their prayers. Okay, maybe God is not concerned about the ‘value’ per se, but actually the ‘conviction’ in the prayer. This again leads to questions like, a poor man who is dying will probably have a very high ‘conviction quotient’ in praying for money and he most probably will not get rich. It can be argued that he is a sinner and all his past sins, which were accumulated in the ‘Bank of Sins & Punniyams’, work against him and he is destined to lead a pretty f***ed life. This whole concept of Karma escapes me and I wouldn’t want to get into a further discussion on that either.

I don’t think am any closer to answering the question ‘Who is God to me?’, but I did check out some amazing works of architecture that are still standing after 1500 years (while the constructions by our college-educated civil engineers break apart after 5), had some very good filter-kaapi, ate at a place called ‘Maami’s Mess’, which makes the best dosas I’ve have ever eaten, and made my parents happy by accompanying them to all these temples.