Why I refuse to call myself a Hindu

Can we just be human, pleeeaaassse?

My good friend Girish Pradhan was stopped from entering the famous Kapaleeshwarar temple in Mylapore yesterday. The temple authorities wanted to ascertain that he is a Hindu. Girish sports a beard and apparently that’s why the “clarification/proof” was sought.

I have been thinking about this episode ever since Girish’s wife Weena posted a status on Facebook last afternoon. And interestingly, adding to the discourse brewing in my head, I ended up watching a Subhash Ghai film “Black & White” (2008, Anil Kapoor, Shefali Shah, Anurag Sinha) on TV last night. The film deals with some searching questions on Hindu-Muslim unity, on how a terrorist is born and why most acts of terrorism are led by Islamic fundmentalists. While the film was engaging for most parts, it didn’t quite answer all the questions it raised. And that is the problem. No one seems to have the answers – even though a majority of people think peace, think secular! We are all, as well meaning citizens of the world, stuck in a situation where a few people hold us to ransom with their anti-human ideas of religious fundamentalism.

Before this post is conveniently misinterpreted and given a communal flavor, I must hasten to confess that I was born to Hindu parents. But I refuse to call myself a Hindu. My religion is humanity. Period. And Life is my God. In fact, later this month, on 29^th April, Saturday, I host famous dancer Zakir Hussain on my popular show – The Bliss Catchers – at Odyssey Bookstore, Adyar. Now, Zakir is a Thirupaavai Upanyasam expert. Had Zakir and I tried to enter the Kapaleeshwarar temple, and if we were asked to prove ourselves as Hindus, undoubtedly, Zakir would have won himself an entry ticket! And I would have failed miserably – I don’t wear my poonal (sacred thread), I don’t know any shlokas and, of course, I may have well refused the test. To me, a God who resides in the smelly, dark, sanctorums of a temple, or for that matter who is ensconced in any “place of worship”, watching over apathetically, even as people fight each other in the name of religion, is no God at all.

Clearly, we cannot afford to be like God. Not anymore. We must not sit back and allow the rot to happen. I believe each of us has a responsibility to heal our world. I am not even talking of healing the entire world. I am suggesting we begin with our small Universes, our circles of influence.

First, we must make religion irrelevant in our actions, in our pronouncements, in thought. Let me explain. I have another friend, who often brags that he prefers keeping his second apartment locked up, but he says he will not give it to Muslim tenants. Such thinking must stop. Religion, if at all it must be practiced, is a deeply personal affair. And must be kept that way. Flaunting your religious belief is what makes it relevant. And when there is a mass relevance, fundamentalists seize advantage, they want to induce fear, control you and brainwash you. Some of them take it to a destructive level – they turn barbaric and murderous. Sadly, this is what is happening around us, with alarming frequency. Second, let us understand the difference between divinity and God. Divinity is Life’s way of expressing itself – you will find divinity in a sunrise, in a raindrop, in the stillness of a valley, in a bird chirping, in a child’s eyes, in you, in me and in every aspect of creation. God, on the other hand, is a human invention, who does nothing to save the world from anarchy and extremism. Yes, there is a Higher Energy that governs, guides, nurtures and protects all of us. And we are all created by that Energy and we carry that Energy in each of us. So, to me, every form of creation is God. I don’t relate to God again as one Supremo who resides in a designated place of worship. This theory and its belief is downright divisive and abhorrent. Finally, can we just soak in the essence of this immortal song from Yash Chopra’s directorial debut Dhool Ka Phool (1959, Manmohan Krishna, Mohd.Rafi, N.Dutta) “Tu Hindu Banega Na Musalmaan Banega, Insaan Ki Aulad Hai, Insaan Banega…”? Sahir Ludhianvi’s inspiring lyrics remain relevant to this day – can we just be human, pleeeaaassse?

I know millions of people out there echo these sentiments that I share here. The time has come for all of us like-minded folks to step out and speak up for humanity. My prayer is this: let’s stop being closet secularists. Only when we make religion irrelevant in the public domain, can we make religious fundamentalism irrelevant and powerless.

 

Stop searching for methods, start living with gratitude

The problem with searching for what isn’t there is that it takes you away from what is there!

We recently bumped into a couple who had attended one of my Talks a few months ago. The gentleman said he was very moved by our story and inspired by our ‘courage’. He suggested that we attend an Isha Yoga Program led by a prominent member of Jaggi Vasudev’s team. He felt we need to ‘put into practice a method that can attract abundance and inner peace into our Life’. Both Vaani and I politely declined his suggestion. He was a bit taken aback by our response. Noticing his discomfort, I told him that we had nothing against Jaggi Vasudev personally but we are saying no because we don’t believe that there are any methods to live Life.

The Isha philosophy has somehow never appealed to me personally. Nor has any other. In the past, people, out of sheer compassion and love for us, perhaps even concern, have recommended various approaches to us to help us ‘solve our problems’. Someone said that we must follow Buddhism, another said we must try or Pranic Healing or Reiki, my former secretary said we must embrace Christianity, a friend suggested we meet a Pir Baba at a mosque on Pycrofts Road (Chennai) who would look at eggs and tell us how to get rid of the ‘evil spirit that had gripped us’. So, the suggestions have been plenty. But we have consistently declined embracing any method, any practice.

Not that we haven’t tried anything ever. We did pujas, pariharams, went on pilgrimages to various shrines, across religions, wore rings on all fingers, fasted on specific days each week and followed several, several, methods and practices. But none worked for us – forget solutions, we didn’t even feel the peace we were desperately seeking! What I am going to say now applies to Vaani and me. There is no suggestion that anyone must agree with us or that it will work for others. After years of trying various approaches, we have realized that Life cannot be methodized. This understanding alone has worked for us. So we love it. And religion, practiced in a God-fearing, ritualistic, mindless, divisive manner, as it is done today, doesn’t work. At least it doesn’t work for us.

They say religion is for those who want to go to heaven. And spirituality is for those who have been to hell. Vaani and I have been to hell, are in hell, and are loving it here. Because if a problem-ridden Life is hell, then, no one is ever going to be living a problem-free Life. So, in a sense, we are all in hell already. Instead of loving what is, and learning to deal with it or work on changing it, we clearly don’t want to merely pine for – and suffer for – an aspirational state.

Spirituality is an inner awakening. It is understanding the divine, the godliness in you. And realizing that everything about your Life, including this lifetime is impermanent, except your divinity, or as every scripture points out, except your true Self. As Osho says, there is no God, just godliness. Or as German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche (1844~1900) asked so thought provokingly: “Which is it, is man one of God’s blunders or is God one of man’s blunders?” So, spirituality inspires us to live our temporary, soon-to-expire, human lives, intelligently, beautifully, happily. On the spiritual path there is no religion, there are no methods, no mantras, no practices. There is just an awakening; an empowering awareness that there is no logic to Life, just magic, everywhere, in every moment, in everyone!

I am reminded of Baal Shem Tov (1698~1760), the mystical Rabbi, who implored his followers to drop all rituals, all methods and all practices and simply trust Life. He used to say: “Trust Life, trust God, and whatsoever has been given to you, enjoy it! Enjoy it with such deep gratitude that every small thing matters and becomes holy, becomes sacred, becomes God.”

If you think about Life deeply you don’t have any other way to look at Life than with gratitude. This whole Life is a gift. The experiences that you have been through and are going through are unique gifts – that teach you and awaken you – too. When you realize this you will wonder why did you ever complain about Life, why did you have to struggle with and suffer in Life, instead of celebrating it!

Because you think you have to ‘solve this problem of Life’, it has come to mean a set of things that you don’t have or keep aspiring or searching for. Which is why you are looking for methods, which is why an external resource, a God, or religion, or ritual, is seen as a possible panacea. But are you at peace with your Life, are you happy, despite being religious, despite practices and rituals? To be sure, this search is futile because there is nothing, no one, to be found; there is nothing to be solved. You miss this simple truth about Life because while you are running amuck chasing what isn’t there, you never feel grateful for what is there, for what you have!

Life is happening in every moment. If you are not present in each moment you will miss the most spectacular show in, and of, your “entire lifetime”! You may define some moments of your Life as good and great and several others as plain drudgery. That’s perhaps because you don’t see the blessing in each moment. If you pause to look, every leaf looks beautiful in the sunlight, and differently beautiful in the darkness of the night, every cloud has a silver lining and everything around you, in you, is a miracle! What method do you need to see all this? What practice can help you see what is evident? How much more abundance do you need than what is and that which you don’t already recognize? When you do awaken to Life’s magic and beauty, you will stop searching for methods and start living with gratitude!

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Your unhappiness comes from your incompleteness

Anything incomplete makes you miserable and unhappy! And the horrible truth is that many of us are leading incomplete lives.

We recently met a manager who lamented the lack of fulfilment in his Life. He has everything material – two cars, a large apartment that’s free of mortgage, a globe-trotting job and lots of money in the bank that’s enough to ‘pay for retirement and leave behind some for the family’. “Yet”, the man confessed, “I feel incomplete. I am missing something. I don’t know what it is. I am searching for it.”

Many people around us are in a similar state. This happens when you reach that point in Life when materialism cannot satiate you anymore. So, you are seeking inner peace and happiness. And you realize that all that you have achieved – academically, professionally, socially and financially – is not fulfilling. This is the time to pause and ask yourself if you are indeed being yourself – not the super-qualified, brilliant engineer or doctor or accountant or singer that you think you are, not the parent, not the spouse, not the dutiful tax-paying citizen that you think you are, but are you really enjoying being who you truly are?

There’s a simple way to check this out for yourself. Are you saying what you really want to say in all your relationships? Are you doing what you truly, deeply, love doing all the time? Are you happy in all contexts of your Life? If you answered ‘no’ or ‘not quite’ for any of those questions (and these are not the only ones) then your Life is incomplete.

At the core of your unhappiness – both stated and unstated, but felt – with your Life lies your incompleteness.

You hate your job. But you go on doing it because it ‘provides’ for your family’s upkeep and maintenance. You are incomplete. Your don’t relate to your spouse anymore. But you go on suffering in that relationship because you don’t know how to get out of it. You are incomplete. You don’t like what someone in your family is saying or doing. You hesitate to speak your mind because you don’t want to hurt them, you want to be seen as a nice person. But you squirm in the person’s presence, because your value system doesn’t sync with theirs. You are again incomplete.

Remember: your incompleteness helps no one. Least of all you! German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844~1900) memorably said, “Life is not a dress rehearsal.” So it is! In a preparatory Life you can afford to rehearse, put off your best act for the final performance. But what is the point in living an incomplete Life when this is it? When this is the only Life you have?

Life is not an examination. It requires no preparation. It requires living. Living completely requires spontaneity. When you see a beautiful sunrise or a flower dance in the breeze or a child smile, you ideally don’t think of anything else – you just soak in the beauty of that moment. The moment you think of something else, you miss the moment itself! Then you are not being. You are not present. You are physically there. But mentally lost in worry, anxiety, guilt, anger, sorrow – whatever. Bottomline: you have missed that moment! You have missed living it!

This is how we end up remaining perpetually incomplete. This is how we miss living. Missing moment after moment after moment – and often an entire lifetime! All our lives we prepare for a tomorrow and then for another one and then another. Or all our lives we cling on to a dead past, a memory, a guilt – and we suffer endlessly.

I have nothing against theorists. But people who talk of karma and say that everything is ordained are encouraging, perhaps inadvertently, us to give up on living fully. Maybe everything is ordained. But to live the Life that is given to us, and not to suffer it, is still an intelligent choice we may like to exercise. You can’t be living incompletely all the time. Then you are not living. You are merely existing. To be sure, the moment you remove all the factors in your Life that leave you feeling incomplete, and start living spontaneously, you will be happy!

Your Life, just the way it is, fits in perfectly into the Masterplan!

Life is molding us continuously to fulfill a larger cosmic design.

Many times in Life, you encounter situations when you feel you cannot go on. You think you would much rather die than undergo this ordeal called Life. You want to give up. When every door seems to shut on you, when darkness engulfs you, when you see no way out and you are in the throes of despair and fear, check your pulse. Listen to your heart beat. Hear yourself breathing. If you are alive, it means it is not over yet. Stop looking for external signals for hope and revival. Look within. Feel Life’s energy thriving in you. “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” said Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th Century German philosopher and poet. Know that this is true. This is what Life is all about – indeed, there is a lot of Life after a crisis!

Life isn’t about winning or losing. It isn’t about acquiring and owning material assets. Life is an opportunity to experience uncertainty in each moment, it is an adventure. Don’t look for a pot of gold at the end of the journey. The journey itself is the reward. Every experience in Life teaches you something. Focus on the experience, focus on the learning from it, and don’t really bother too much about the result! If, at the end of the day, you have had a million experiences in your lifetime and have learnt from each of them, you are the biggest millionaire around! It is through the experiences that we are put through that Life keeps on molding us to fulfill a larger cosmic design, a Masterplan.  And remember, Life’s Masterplan for each of us has no flaws!

So, when you are enduring a difficult phase, focus on the experience and what you can learn from it. Embrace the uncertainty, don’t hate it. Only when you do this will you see how perfectly you and your Life – the way you are, the way it is – fit into the Masterplan!

Trauma is a catalyst – it can transform you

You often understand Life only when it becomes miserable.

This is the most amazing truth about Life. It is a revelation, a discovery, that strikes you, dawns on you, when you are in the throes of pain and despair. When everything is going per your aspirations, your desires, you conclude that you are in control, that you are the Master, that it’s all yourdesign. You matter the most to you in these times__times that are popularly labeled as ‘successful’. You do well in academics, land yourself a dream job, get married to a person of your choice – well, you think you managed all of that ‘success’ on your own steam. Because of your brilliance, genius and effort. Undoubtedly, you have worked hard and efficiently. There has been your contribution. But to imagine that the design of your Life was woven by you smacks of ignorance, even if not of arrogance, of the way Life works.

I met a successful Tamizh movie director, a very successful man from Chennai, recently. He is smart, intelligent and very creative. He said, “I don’t believe in dreams. I believe in subconscious aspirations, dedicated effort and flawless execution. You make your own destiny.” Poetic words. Makes sense to the rational mind. Except Life doesn’t work like that. A very successful industrialist I know, who went bankrupt and has clawed his way back into reckoning and profits in business, has this learning to share: “When things were going fine, I was thinking it was my leadership, my acumen, my business-sense that were causing my success. When we started losing money and eventually went bust as a business, I found that the same leadership and acumen__mine__were of no use. That’s when I awoke to the reality that Life’s designs are different from my own.” The thing about misery and pain is that it offers a teachable point of view. Always. Trauma is a good transformation agent, a catalyst. There’s no rocket science to why we__you and me__often awaken only when in pain. Life is best understood by asking the right questions. And we pause to ask questions, explore with curiosity, only when we don’t get what we want. Interestingly, the questions we ask beget us no answers. Just more questions emerge. And the more questions we ask, the closer we are to understanding Life. To realize the only truth that Life is, well, inscrutable! The 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche says, “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” That meaning, when discovered by you in your own unique way, is that you too can avoid all suffering by simply accepting what Life has offered you. When you reach this state of understanding Life you will see how much your pain, your trauma has changed you and helped you evolve! 

Attend to your Life to see how perfect it is

Life is perfect. As it is, it is beautiful.

You don’t notice how perfect your Life is, how beautiful it is, because you are not present in the moment, you are not attending to Life! Your body is here, but ‘you’ are lost in your own world. Think about it. A lot of your waking time is indeed spent worrying about what will happen or brooding over what has happened. From financial priorities to relationship issues to just a lot of anxiety over all the work that’s still to be done – you agonize over everyone and everything! And, therefore, your Life appears to you to be far from perfect. You imagine your Life to be imperfect because you want your Life to be different from what it is. This want holds you hostage – it prevents you from realizing this simple truth that your Life cannot be any other way. It is always what it is.

One way to participate in living and engage with Life it is to get up and walk. Every time that you find your thoughts are going astray, and dragging you into worry or anxiety, and are taking you away from the now, just get up and walk. Even if it is within your home or your office. Just walk. When you walk, you will find that your focus shifts from your current reality to your present environment. They may appear to be similar scenarios but they are two different things. Because you are so absorbed in your current reality, you don’t pay attention to Life. When you pay attention, when you attend to Life, you notice its beauty and magic. You will notice the spider on the wall, you will notice the daylight streaming through the windows kicking up millions of dust particles, you will notice the dew drop on the leaf struggle to defeat the intensity of the rising sun, you will notice your child’s scrawl on her desk, you will notice the fragrance of your beloved still hanging in your room long after she has gone to work… You will realize that Life is indeed beautiful – no matter what circumstances you are currently faced with.

The 19^th Century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844~1900) has so aptly said, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking”. When you walk, and pay attention, the greatest thought that can arise in your mind is one of gratitude. Because, very simply, you can walk! There are so many, many people out there who can’t! Isn’t that enough evidence of how perfect your Life is? When you recognize how lucky you are__to be able to walk, see, touch, feel and hear, you will soak in gratitude. When you are grateful, you will discover that, after all, despite all that you don’t have and so badly want, your Life is indeed perfect the way it is.

Every crisis has a teachable point of view

A line in a song that I heard the other day, refuses to leave me, and makes me think. The song is by the first-ever American Idol, Kelly Clarkson, from her album “Stronger” (2011). The lyrics of Clarkson’s song, which explores themes of empowerment and recovery following a heartbreak, have this famous line – “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” (follow the link below for the actual song). The original quotation is by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844~1900): “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger!”

Indeed. This is so true.

Most often when we go through a crisis in Life, we think it’s all over. And we can’t be blamed. Because the human mind thinks only logically. So, when you cannot see the light at the end of a dark tunnel, you have to rely on your mind’s assessment and conclusion that an endless dark tunnels goes nowhere. This is how fear and insecurity, which are manifestations of the mind, control and consume us. But what seemed like romantic philosophy from Nietzsche has found some scientific backing in recent times. In a 2011 report on the correlation between adversity and resilience, researcher Mark Seery, a psychologist at the University of Buffalo, in the US, says that although traumatic experiences such as losing a loved one can be psychologically damaging, small amounts of trauma can make us more resilient.

I have a more experiential take on this. If you look back at your own Life and make a list of your own “no-way-ahead” moments, you will realize that while those times were really dark, often scary, they were important for your personal evolution. When you reflect on them now, you find yourself both grateful for the experience__because it has made you tougher__and feel that the challenge, the crisis, gave your Life a new perspective.

Over the years, I have learned to make peace with my crises. After the initial shock of a crisis hitting me has subsided, I enquire within:

·         What is this situation trying to tell me?

·         What is the best decision/action I can take?

·         What collaborations/outside help must I seek?

·         What can I learn from it?

This approach has helped me immensely. It may not often solve the crisis for me immediately but gives me the courage and equanimity to face it and deal with it effectively. I have realized that every crisis has a teachable point of view. When you learn the lesson, a similar crisis may just arrive in some time – not to torment you, but it’s Life’s way of testing if you have indeed learned the lesson. And newer crises often arrive too, with levels of difficulty that are always higher, and far more complex, than the previous ones. So, in a way, Life’s like many of those computer games that people play. You get better with each game, with each play. Only to ascend in levels of challenge and learn to play the game better. Which is why, it makes imminent sense to remember what Nietzsche said and Clarkson sang!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nij7jRgNdgU