Where Gods are not Dumb but Deaf

It has been said that our ancient sages had the power through their chanting of hymns in the yagnas, to invoke the Gods in the clouds to fulfill the needs of the earthlings in times of natural cataclysms. Today, despite there being more Godmen or more mantra chanters, and yagnas being held anywhere round the year, the Gods must have taken refuge far beyond the madding clouds as such proceedings, failing to reach them, scarcely secure solace to the sorrowing. This is starkly simple, given the fact that today; pleas are not made in our God given voice, but are amplified through microphones. The ruckus thus created has caused the Gods to flee and shift their abodes to inaccessible altitudes. Let us scratch a bit deeper.

People pray for many reasons, but more often they look to do so to accomplish their own ends. Enshrouded in own worldly fears, the fear for divinity is invariably heightened. One may pray to reach Godhead, to achieve Godliness or, accomplish one’s own or one’s own family’s egocentric ends and seldom, if never, for altruistic considerations. Apart from perhaps, a handful of saints, it is the fear for one’s dear life that drives people to congregate in mass prayers in times of collective distress. For no sooner they depart from them, mundane angst drive out any attitude of bonhomie. In any case, everybody has own ways of communion with God. So we may safely conclude that sacred practices are often, a strictly personal expertise. But then there are countless holier than holy folks, outside the cleric class, who consider it a sacred compulsion, far above their other imperative obligations, to visit their common places of worship atleast once, if not twice, a day. Now ways of worship, as already stated, being a pretty personal business, is of no business to others, even for the most prying eyes or the pushiest of noses. If this is accepted as the accepted code of social conduct, the converse of this should also hold good. That is to say that these holier than thou souls should also be restricted from ruining the private lives of the ‘less’ pious individuals. Otherwise, there may be a lot holy reasons to conclude that there must be stimulus, other than sacrosanct, behind the devout stringency of our hallowed brethrens. This deduction is neither baseless nor biased.

Even hardened conformists should agree that austere personal divine practices need no exhibitionism. Freedom of faith or worship is definitely not synonymous with the freedom of freely propagating one’s own faith or worship while upsetting or unsettling the private lives of those who neither subscribe to nor resist another’s faith or reproach another’s worship.

Whether one likes it or not, it is a fact that today, there are more places of worship, per kilometer, than there are places of education or healthcare or of other crucial civic amenities. This number game is regretfully true in the case of temples and mosques. Traveling on the highways or down any road for that matter, one’s eyes turn sore at the sight of the infinite Shiva Mandirs, Namghars and Mosques. Irrespective of whether they convey the strength of our unity or the force of our enmity, one thing does stand out, that we are either too numinous or are too obnoxious. We need more than the force of our faith, its prosperity or popularity or the mass acceptability that it commands, or even its pomp and grandeur, to affirm communion with God and keep up the faith of the faithful followers or add more to the list. We need desperately to resort to artificial means of proving our keeping abreast of the modernity of the times. This fairly abrupt spurt in the growth of religious places is definitely not indicative of a related growth in our morality or belief in faith, on the contrary, it points to a most unhealthy phenomenon, that of the loss of faith amongst ourselves. When infidelity rules, fidelity vanishes. Where enter faithlessness, there exits Godliness. Things have come to such a pass, that if God does indeed have eyes: he must be totally devastated at what he beholds. But all we are concerned about here, are ears – of God, as well as of ours and not with eyes.
The growth in the number of religious places has not been preceded by any growth in the number of followers. Factionalism incidentally, has resulted in fragmentation - dwindling of the cohorts of each faith. Now logically, a reduction in numbers should make the process of communication within the group, much easier and smooth. But universal logic rarely applies to divided lots. Because communication among fellow followers of each group; following the reduction in their numbers, or their prayers to their Gods-the number of whom have also been reduced subsequent to the reduction in the devotees; should have now been comfortably possible via word of mouth, without causing to impair anybody’s eardrums.
In the stadia of divide and rule, the display of power and courage is the name of the game; hence a more powerful, jarring and deafening way of communication has become inevitable. Hence, nothing but the loudspeaker would do. And the more the sound, the merrier the moods, because this best parades their win win arrogance. So every dawn and every dusk, or every week from dawn to dusk, or non-stop daily on occasions till the occasion lasts, through dreary days and endless nights, it blares on and on in full blast. Nothing and nobody else matters. What is blasphemously ridiculous are the raucous cassettes of devotional songs from Hindu temples, sung to the tune of hit filmy songs - a practice that has become a super hit since the last few years - under authoritative patronage. While one religion almost never resorts to such ludicrousness, except may be on silent and holy nights, the religion with probably the least number of followers here, who are famous for their gusto and also for the jokes made at their cost, appear to be the most boisterous particularly where their sacred haunts are located in residential vicinity. In this war of one-upmanship, the battle of brouhaha must have started from those who customarily scream into the mouthpiece from before the cocks’ crow and at regular intervals throughout the day and intermittently, throughout the night.
Irritated by the regular, religious, raucous ruckus, my thirteen-year-old daughter once remarked, “Father, I was in Ambala for a week. There was a place of worship next to the school where we stayed but we were never disturbed by any noise from it. How come”, she asked, “this criminal offence on our auditory senses here everyday?”
God help the God fearing neighbours of the homes of Gods! Their prayers from amidst the cacophony of the pollution of noise, to make the sound of silence rule, have fallen on the deaf ears of the self-assumed representatives of God. God can only be deaf for those children of the lesser Gods devoted to the religion of making one another deaf. All religion is the creation of man and not of God. The express purpose is to serve the God in all people and to eliminate the Devil within them. Religion is not service to the Devil within a few, at the cost of disservice to God who is also inherent in them.