Of life sublime and religiosity of community kitchens

Rajesh Kumar

A devotee’s unfathomable faith in religion or the deity/guru he worships is unarguably beyond the bounds of any given parameters, which may adequately gauge it. And probably, this very unshakable faith of his takes him to religious places in search of truthful answers to understanding spiritualism in essence. 

 Most resort to sermonic discourses by society’s enlightened preachers, but to many, the real quest culminates in serving humanity and mankind. Chosen pathways towards realising the noble objective may differ yet the fundamental driving spirit behind it remains the same, which is: “To be of some help to the needy in a most selfless way”. Organising langars is sui generis of a majority of religious minded in our country and the sanctified practice is observed, in all its religiosity, not only at religious places spread all over the country where mega kitchens cook food 24x7 for devotees, but also by people at community level, whereby hungry souls are attempted to be fed to their satiety!

But during such big religious congregations, do all those who partake of langars really comprise a genuinely needy lot? Perhaps, not all! It can’t be a pre-condition in all its practicability, but what if it could become one of the prime objects behind the religious practice as most of those who are fed bellyful of delicacies in langars may be genuine ‘devotees’ needing meals, just like anybody else, not necessarily deservingly ‘needy’ looking for food to sustaining their physical beings.

Could such devotees be needier than the one who, due to quirk of fate, has been rendered incapable of arranging food on his own for instance, a lame or a handicap or a marginal farmer whose crop stands devastated by vagrant weather and has not even a single grain of cereals at home to feed his minor children on? Could they be needier than the one who has been rendered homeless due to vagaries of Mother Nature or for that matters, a poor person standing outside a hospital who has no money to buy lifesaving medicines for his dying sibling inside? Do such grief stricken souls victimised at the hands of vicissitudes of life ever qualify to be the righteous partakers of the food served by god-fearing organisers of such langars?

 It is not that they are shying away from reaching out to them in their hour of crisis, but that their overwhelming generosity is getting veered off, somewhere, from its righteously correct course of serving humanity in a true sense, is something that is a bit baffling. Having fed pot-bellied elite alighting from swanky cars or rather all those who could arrange for two square meals for themselves on their own, aren’t we, in a way, depriving the real-time needy of his legitimate share of Guru’s prasad, which he ought to have had but didn’t for it never reached him? Spiritualism begins where physicality ceases to matter and could never be measured in terms of physical volume of food (prasad) we ingest at religious congregations. The same plateful of food if spared for the real needy by forsaking one’s personal share, as Guru Nanak once did in the true spirit of a Sacha Sauda, may serve, in essence, the real spiritual object behind the practice of organising and partaking of langars. The volume of food so saved on pan India basis through such a generous and virtuous gesture of ours may go a long way in filling the bellies of millions, who often have go to bed without even two morsels of life sustaining food in their mouths.

 Had a generous and open-hearted human effort and monetary contribution been made towards fiduciary organisations and missionaries engaged in charity and working relentlessly to alleviating human pain and agony, we wouldn’t have been fighting impoverishment and malnourishment today. 

 Hats off to noble souls like Jagdish Lal Ahuja and others, who are rendering yeoman service to the mankind by feeding the poor outside PGI. Their humanitarian gesture, howsoever small it may be in terms of magnitude, carries more weight and meaning than donating lakhs to temples and gurdwaras in the name of religion or ‘over-feeding’ those, who already have their bellies full.