The man with a lean hungry look worked feverishly chipping at the stone carving by the temple site. The fierce sunlight mercilessly scorched the back of the child in rags. Close by a monkey danced a jig to the latest screen tunes while his master scooped up the pennies. Two boys haggled and fought each other for a stolen piece of bread. Horn toting rickshaws tried to break up a crowd of women mesmerized by the bearded swamy. Fortune tellers offered phantoms of hope to a desperate humanity. In God's great crucible thus live the anvil of society bearing everything, feigning nothing, great hearted men and women reduced to poverty by the bludgeons of chance. Faith throbs in their hearts like muffled fire, mellow and steady, keeping their cold lives warm.

In God's great crucible also thrives the better half that does not care to acknowledge the existence of this half. The wily bania for example counts his money, trembling with anticipation while millions starve. He is an honorable man and regularly goes to temples. So does the pillar of society, the judge who would rule without hesitation in favor of the politician, the corrupt and the jet-set mahatmas. Such men's beliefs are bad but they believe it will be improved just by going to the temple. Then we have the nouveau rich, the yuppies, the politicians with big tilaks, smooth talking intellectuals who do not hesitate to display ostentatious wealth right up to the gates of

the temples; who take their clothes and jewelry to the temple rather than themselves; who paste their eyes and ears with stained glass to shut out the cry of the hungry and the hurt; and who change the purpose of a temple from being the dharamshala and conscience of society to an instrument of the rich and the powerful.

Still Hindus will pour millions into building these grand temples rather than open their hearts to the blossoms in the dust all around them right in the precincts of the temple. As Shakespeare would say, "Judgement thou art fled to brutish beasts and men have lost their reason".

Temples have been built all over Fiji, Trinidad, Africa and Guyana. But what has happened to Indians in these places? Have the temples helped when country after country scattered the unorganized race and sent them scampering like mice to seek safety in some distant shore? If they had spent a fraction of the cost of pouring into temples towards owning their own media, newspapers, lobbying for political power and protecting their interests, they would have become  powerful minorities with a place under the Sun.

Last update : 21-11-2009 19:42

Keywords : Too Many Temples, Too Little Divinity, Aneeta Chakrabarty

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