Faith in humanity

I write this while recovering from a bout of Covid that has left me weak and wobbly. Thankfully, this strain is not life-threatening and I did not have any other symptoms other than a persistent cough, body ache and a mild fever. In short, it was like a bad case of viral flu, which it is in reality. Experts say that each time the virus mutates, it becomes weaker until a kind of herd immunity inoculates the world naturally. Nevertheless, it leaves one listless, weak and mildly depressed. The worst is the isolation it forces. The lack of human company and most of all, the ban on domestic help is a challenge. Mercifully, we were inundated with food by neighbours and my son moved in to help out with the housework.

Enough of my woes, let us now turn to the world outside my little flat. Watching toxic debates and TV news of Ukraine, the unseemly choices for Rajya Sabha seats, the self-goal by the ruling party over the crass remarks about the Prophet have galvanised our media into a frenzy of activity. Even elsewhere, in the UK and the US, Boris Johnson and Joe Biden are battling to keep their head above water. And then, as if all this were not enough, there is the unremitting heatwave that has crossed all limits of endurance. If ever proof were needed of the perils of climate change, look no further.

It is difficult to keep one’s spirits afloat in such terrible times, yet we have to bear in mind that submitting to the lunacy of the age is to be avoided at all costs. We have to look within ourselves to seek the answers we want others to give us. Easy access to money and comfort, a disregard for the feelings of others and a hyper-sensitivity where one’s own religious sentiments are concerned — which one of us has not been guilty of these sins? My WhatsApp posts are full of mindlessly forwarded bigotry sent by people who never care to think of their consequences. I really cannot say where such mental violence will lead us but it will destroy whatever good there is in this world, just as heat melts our life-sustaining glaciers.

It would be naïve to say that this is the doing of one party or one set of people. We all have to share the blame for the sorry pass we have brought our civilisation to. Neglecting the rule of law and the imperatives of social morality over a period of time to create a world where religious sentiments have been mocked was a huge mistake. Add to this a disregard for those whose worldview follows a different cosmos was another folly in a country where religion and kinship ties have bound various communities together over millennia. Aping the ‘woke’ west, discouraging speech in any other language but English, promoting one kind of knowledge over traditional wisdom — have had a terrible effect on our self-worth and national pride. If the pendulum is now swinging in an opposite direction, one will have to let it find a balance that will restore order and peace among various sects, religions and communities. Their leaders will have to resume a dialogue that has been broken and skewed by political parties. I am convinced that outside the toxic world of TV debates, there is social harmony in small towns and villages, where people of disparate belief systems have a mutual and genuine respect for other faiths.

I grew up in a world where we got up to the sound of my mother’s puja bell, went to a school run by Catholic nuns where we prayed in a chapel and returned home as soon as we heard the evening azaan floating out of the local masjid. How natural it all appeared then! Is there any reason why this beautiful diurnal cycle must be forgotten to fight over whose god is worthy of greater respect? It is important to remember that the word ‘secular’ has no exact equivalent in our Indian languages: just as dharma does not stand just for religion. These concepts that came out of the cultural matrix of another society and in the wake of the European Enlightenment cannot be translated simply into a new word because our terms for describing tolerance and acceptance are worlds apart from dharma-nirpekshita, the common term now used for secular. My son recently asked me what would be the appropriate word in Hindi for ‘bigot’. We tried several variations but they all fell short of the exact description. I wonder whether this is because bigotry did not come into our religious discourse until we were colonised. This is why the older Indian languages are unable to provide easy synonyms.

I like to think that what has kept us all united is a common code of conduct that allows space to each form of belief. It is no wonder that despite the onslaughts of foreign invasions, the core values of our faith have remained unshaken and eternal. In these intemperate times, this is a point worth making.