Thursday, June 16, 2011

Divine Matters!

"How will she take her aunt to the Kalighat Temple? She is a naastik."- Maa was speaking of me. Tired and exasperated.
It didn't shook the ground under me, it didn't break my heart. But, it immediately struck me as lightoprofoundophilosopho topic that might call for some mild pondering, a cynical blog-post.

I am not a Naastik! How can I be?! I am not well-read enough to denounce the might of all the gods and goddesses floating in the heavens to protect us. Me too!I am just a lazy female who never had the time to attend to gods after flipping through Old-English, Middle-English translations, Albert Camus, essays of Simone de Beauvoir and all that luggage. Not to forget the household chores that kept tumbling into my daily life, the multiplying population of guests and siblings, and finally, urgent matters of my delicate heart. Where was the time left for deities huh?

Parents are to be blamed too. Of course. Shocking as it might be for the reader, our family has never had a Puja-room, so to speak. Like us, the billion struggling, sweating Indians in this cramped country of ours, our household gods have also had to jostle for space within a fragile, wooden cupboard, which I guess belongs to some year in the B.C. era. Framed in big and small, seated and standing in brass, silver or a stingy coating of gold, I see them all as a community equally plagued by issues of space, attention, care, infrastructure and so on.

For my part, I have never discriminated. I have prayed to them with the same brisk swing of the incense stick, each time I had an exam in college. However, persistent unsatisfactory scores, ensured the end of that prompt practice too...
As matters stand now, there is complete harmony between me and the godly community. We are each others' well-wishers and even room-mates whenever I am here at home in Calcutta. I hope with their divine generosity they might still have some pleasant things stored for me. Your's truly, you will be happy to know, has plans of building a Puja-room for the plagued divinities...some day.

Naastik. Who?

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