prateekshac

An interesting thing happened today.
A colleague of mine, whom I’ve never met before, dropped into my cube to ask me if I could think of any workaround to a request by the Belgium Consulate for a personal interview, in response to a tourist visa that he and his fiancée had applied for. Given the recession, have I gotten into the business of handing out friendly advices and travel tips you ask? Most definitely not. Though I can’t imagine why it might not in fact be a lucrative venture. I should probably think about it. I know now that there is demand for it.
Take this case for example. The person in question is planning on a honeymoon in Switzerland. Not surprisingly, he wants to do it right after his wedding. That means that he has to have their passports stamped well in advance, unless he wants to spend his wedding day waiting by the door for the courier. Our chap does what seems quite reasonable; gets in touch with an agent who tells him to pick Belgium as his port of entry, plans out his trip, makes all the necessary bookings, puts together photographs from their engagement and invitation cards of the wedding; and applies for the visa.
Now,inspite of the fact that he applied to the Belgium consulate which according to his agent is the most lenient one of all, our man gets a call from the consulate for a personal interview. Enter problems. Traditional Indian values and culture dictate that one must not indulge in any interaction whatsoever with members of one’s opposite sex, leave along an out station trip, until a sacred black beaded string has not been tied around the lady’s neck by the gentleman. This partially has also to do with the fact that there are not too many Indian movies in which unwed characters take off on trips and return without astounding reproductive feats that would put even the best infertility clinic to shame.
I suggested to our friend that he make the trip along with the lady and her mom, or probably his mom, or potentially even the entire family. After all, such a thing as a visit to the Belgium consulate in Mumbai for the approval of a honeymoon visa does need the entire family to be present. My heart went out to him when he said that even that was frowned upon in his culture.
The only feasible option, he felt, was to postpone all his bookings and to reapply for the visa after the sacred string had been tied. I can vouch for the loss he is going to incur in terms of unbelievably heavy cancellation fees, leave alone the headache of re planning the entire thing.
Really.. Was all of this necessary? How much are we really paying for the stringent rules we follow in the name of culture? How many opportunities are we losing out on?
Like I said, if our minds got any narrower, they might vanish.. poof!

I feel quite like a hypocrite living a religious life while at heart being a staunch atheist. Penning down this is perhaps a way to reduce my guilt.

I was born into a quasi religious family who; though were God fearing, were not religious. They believed in the existence of God as a creator; more for the lack of another theory, than anything else. However it was believed in our family that religion was nothing more than a set of man made organizations intended to bring some tangibility into the vague concept of God and to establish practices which would enable us to display faith in God in ways that would not come across as utterly obnoxious and insane to the surrounding community. To drive home that point, imagine there was no religion and people wanted to believe in God. How in the wide world would they express it? Would they all evolve different ways to express themselves? In which case, would it not look ridiculous to one person the weird ways in which his neighbor chose to express his affection for God, because after all any way you choose to acknowledge an invisible intangible being is unnatural and funny, much like how kids speak to their invisible friends and dolls. And being the social beings that we are, would we be able to live with this absence of consensus? Hence evolved religion.

In short, while it is impossible for someone who is religious to not believe in God, it is perfectly possible for someone who does believe in God to not be religious. And we belonged to the latter class.

Life was peaceful with no interference from religious differences while I was growing up, mainly because we lived many many miles away from most of our relatives; as a result of which we were never present at any of our pujas and rituals. On the other hand, we in fact lived amongst Christians, attended their masses and prayed to their God. I should mention at this point that I am technically a Hindu in that I was born to Hindu parents, in that my parents were born to HIndu parents, in that my grandparents were born to HIndu parents.. and so on. I often wonder where it all started. Which one of my ancestors, on one fine day, woke up and decided to be a Hindu. Well, getting back to my point, when I was growing up, if one had asked me which religion I belonged to, I had to say that I was as much Christian or Muslim or any other religion as I was Hindu. I spent the first two decades of my life in this state.

Then Science happened. Science is wonderful in that it strives to ask questions and provide explanations. It exercises your mind by making you think and reason rather than memorize and adopt. It encourages rational thinking and is not afraid of being questioned. When Science happened, it beat all the other ideologies in my life downright. And while doing so, it provided the most elegant and beautiful explanation to various questions I had had growing up as to who created us and how we all came into being. Science provided the answers that the theory of God could not.
When a child hangs a sock out on the eve of Christmas, and finds his much anticipated toy in it the next morning, one can reason it out in the following two ways. You can believe that a jolly old fat man in red with a white beard driving a cart drawn by rein deers flew in, picked from his sack the goodie that the kid had prayed for, and put it in there; OR you can believe that your pretty young dad in pajamas , possibly clean shaven, went to the store, bought it the previous night, wrapped it with love and put it in there. Up to the age of five or ten maybe, the first theory is highly fanciful; after which it increases in its ridiculousness quotient so rapidly that by the age of fifteen, if you still believe in Santa Claus, you will be harassed out of your wits by your peers.
If you spend even five mins thinking about the above example(maybe fifteen for the highly religious), it becomes impossible to deny that it sounds suspiciously similar to the God versus Science explanations we have for nature, and how we all came to be.

Getting back, it was fairly easy for me to be seduced by Science given that the God theory was getting weaker and weaker in my mind, owing to the fact that it had not an ounce of evidence to support, nor any reason why we should believe something that had no evidence to support it whatsoever. And quite rapidly I moved on to being an Atheist. I should at this point accept that there was a short period in time when I claimed to be agnostic for the fear of coming out into the open. I believed that it is simply easier to ignore the entire issue rather than go up against family members and friends with years and years of conditioning.

However, after I got married, a bunch of questions arose in my mind, which jolted me out of my comfortable position as an Agnostic. Given that my extended family was highly religious and performed every single puja without fail, these questions arose in my mind with higher frequencies. The most important of those questions was, What stand am I going to take with my child (if and when I have one) when he/she asks me what I think about the God that his grandparents and friends worship. Do I believe in it?

I know now that when my child asks me that, I will answer in the negative. I will say ” I do not believe in God dear. And I have a reason for it. The earth is flat. We breathe air. Sugar is sweet. Killing is Bad. There is no SantaClaus and there is not God.”