You don’t have faith in
a person you test,
a passion you question,
a goal you rethink,
a dream you stifle,
a craft you conceal,
a belief you violate,
a god you make deals with,
a truth you ambiguate,
an identity you morph.
Careful.
If you’re constantly on the fence,
you’ll never get to the other side.
Copyright © Roshni Ramanan
You ask me to seek the Lord in a distant temple on a faraway hill, a herculean climb, convincing me that I can please God only with the pain of my labour.
You demarcate places of worship to fuel the fire of exclusion and build walls to serve casteist and anti-woman agendas.
Can’t I find him in the sanctuary of my own devout heart? Didn’t you say He was Omnipotent?
You discriminate the disabled, reassuring me that their past birth karma has earned them their troubles.
Religion is your tool to make me feel ashamed of my festive womanhood.
You assert that my flamboyant sins would weaken the Lord. Didn’t you say He was Omnipotent?
You cloak yourself in the Just World phenomenon. Tit for tat.
You refuse to believe that life isn’t always fair.
Instead, you fancy that the Omniscient above holds weighing scales and strict calculators of Virtue and Vice.
Believe what you will. Worship a stone as the mighty lord, or elevate a philosopher or a God-man to an all-powerful entity.
Let me believe what I choose to. Don’t force your rigid rules and hidden agendas on me.
If you try to contain religion in a matchbox, it’ll combust and set you aflame.
Author’s note:
I’m a firm theist and this is more of a critique on the deliberate misuse of institutionalized religion, especially through beliefs and practices perpetrated in the Indian context, where there is no healthy distance between the State and Religion. For me, religion is very personal and pure and it is gut-wrenching to see it contaminated by underhand schemes for epistemological, economic and political power.
Running breathlessly,
The finish line evasive as ever.
Alone in the hunt –
Inspired creation abandoned,
Bidden goodbye a decade ago.
Chased by dreary shadows
Of a fluid ideal,
Encased by ghosts of
an undefinable exemplar
that haunt me in my slumber :
Madness is my pursuit
that survives through
mythical tales –
tales of Paragon, of perfection.
stumble upon serendipity 