Look around you. Breath in your surrounding. Focus. Listen. See and observe. These are desperate times and the sickness is everywhere around us. People of the mighty land of India are misled, drowning in the endless pit of irrationality. This is the Great Indian Sickness!
India has had a history of close proximity with spirituality. We have always had the overarching guidance of great saints and we have always believed in engaging with the metaphysical. But how is that presently, every once in a while one of our chosen spiritual leaders is being accused of grave blasphemous acts?
Where are we going wrong? Who are we following? what is being preached to us?
These are questions that must be asked before we casually disregard the actions of the followers of the likes of Ram Rahim Singh as stupid and outrageous.
Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh claims to have followers in a figure of millions. People are outraged and are attempting to violence for him. Wait, What? Isn’t he the messenger of God, the messiah of people who spreads the message of peace?
But, he is also accused of Rape and profanity. My thoughts may not appear very coherent but excuse me if nothing makes sense here.
What has this man been preaching that makes a section of our society interfere with our justice system without giving it a second thought? After all, we are discussing an issue of violating a woman’s dignity, violating a human’s dignity.
Has he failed as a spiritual guru or this is the kind of popular support base which gives him access to the immense power, always his goal? Have people failed and allowed themselves to be disillusioned by a cheat?
I am a 20-year-old individual, I live in the modern present times and my moral roots go back to several generations. My idea of spirituality is closely connected to selflessness, detachment to the material world, serving the helpless and spreading love and good virtues.
I was in a convenient disillusion that my country shares a common understanding of what spirituality is and where should it lead us. Which brings us to accept similar leadership in that direction.
But today India stands bewildered, divided under weird religious cults that are somehow taking us away from the concern for larger good and making us more sensitive and violent to any kind of opposition.
Schools and colleges are being closed, strict measures like sec 144 are being imposed, life and property are being destroyed, institutions of police are on an alert, national resources are being wasted – what for?
All this in the name of a cult leader who is accused of rape?!
Let’s say he is innocent. Even then why are people so volatile and insecure about subjecting their apparently pious and pure messenger of God to a mere human made justice system?
DSS- Dera Saccha Sauda preaches truth and non-violence among other things. Did the followers fail to grab the teachings or did the preacher has been taming them into blind followers of ‘the unvirtuous, corrupt and impious’ hiding beneath the veil of righteousness?
It is hard to say really because all these self-acclaimed messengers of God-knows-which-God start by spreading the basic message of love, peace, and non-violence and then cash out on the distress and discontent of the vulnerable audience.
We are just hosts for these parasitic personalities who suck out the reason from us until the time we forget that this man was once saying he is only a messenger and now he stands on a higher pedestal somehow pretending to be God himself.
Religion is there to guide us all and guidance is what has been sought by masses since time immemorial. There is nothing wrong in the following someone. The flaw lies in giving up critical perspective and surrendering into an absolute agreement to some leader.
Our leaders might be an enlightened persona/ incarnation of God himself but what we do need to remember is that humans have but limited rationality.
Our rationality is subject to the resources that we have access to, our environment and immediate circumstances. We never take the best decision, rather we take the best decision possible at a given point of time.
So, even a God by virtue of being in a human body is subject to limited rationality. Call it the curse of human limitation. Doesn’t that hold true of Ram, Shiv, and all other avatars of God on Earth? We have the consensus that they were gods but we are equally aware of the scope of criticism that they can be subjected to.
Our scriptures talk about aesthetics often engaging in debates on dharma, right, wrong, morality etc. This was a rather celebrated ordeal and was organized by kings themselves in a lavish manner where they themselves sat in the audience and deemed themselves blessed to be a part of an intellectual engagement.
Questioning the prevailing ideas was encouraged and entertained.
India could never get over its ties with religion so, I dare say we might as well learn something of value from it. Religion was never meant to give you riches -in terms of occupation, property or the like, it was supposed to show you the path to righteousness.
So, the people who have attained your support on the sole basis of conducting acts of material welfare for you are no different than politicians who practice appeasement policy.
Religion was supposed to make you self-sufficient in your judgment of right and wrong and not depend on some leader to babysit you for the rest of your lives.
You were not supposed to feel fatherless when your leader has been snatched away from you because religious teachings were meant to tell you that only God is your father and he is within you.
And by all means every leader no matter how great goes through the test of truth and we the followers need to have faith and wait out for the natural judgment.
If your leader is uncorrupt, your God will save him because your God stands for truth and fair judgment. He looks out for all of us. Here I am tapping out on the logic of all who believe in some kind of religious guidance.
I do make sense and I would go on to make an appeal to all of the victims sickened by the Great Indian sickness of irrationality and Ignorance.
We need to take the medicine of retrospection, of reason and sense three times a day as prescribed by the need of the hour!