http://www.tehelka.com/story_main14.asp?filename=Cr111905do_bigha.asp
A thing of beauty is a joy forever... or so I was joyed to see the Akshardham Temple. But this article made me think... think thrice..
(thanks to
Alok and Blog Bang)
God lives elsewhere
So how much space does god need to call it his home? How many crores
does god want us to spend on him so that he can possess a swanky,
sprawling mansion which dominates the skyline? So what will god do in
this huge expanse, move from room to room? Looking for what, inner
peace, outer silence, inner silence, bitter truth? Or will he play golf
or ride a horse and gaze at the distances of the private property he
possesses, till the eye can see, like landlord-princes in old European
paintings? Is god terribly afraid of darkness? Does he suffer from
insomnia? Is he a sleepwalker? If not, why does he need hundreds of
jazzed up lights all night in a city so starkly short of power and in a
nuclear power country where half the population still don't have
electricity (or enough to eat, below that mythical poverty line)? So
why does god need this rolling-in-wealth real estate?
And if he resides in the quietness of our hearts, in every word, bird,
leaf and leaf storm, in every butterfly, ant and inanimate object, in
rippling rivers, evening tides, moon shadows, mountain trees, and if he
lives in the winter wind which we breathe and if he is formless and
infinite, objective and etherised, essence and presence, then why does
he need a lavish palace in concrete as his residence on earth? Whose
god is this god?
Is god terribly afraid of darkness? Does he suffer from insomnia? Is he
a sleepwalker? Why does he need this rolling-in-wealth real estate?
President APJ Kalam, a pro-bomb scientist, inaugurated the opulent
Akshardham temple in east Delhi recently, modelled on the Akshardham
temple in Ahmedabad. Accompanying him was Dr Manmohan Singh, a man of
austerity and scholarship. Also present was the original patron of this
mega religiosity, 'pseudo secularist' LK Advani, who not only fights
elections from Gandhinagar, but compulsively backs Narendra Modi who
presided over the post-Godhra genocide. Find the links: the Akshardham
complex is controlled by the powerful, cash-rich Swaminarayan sect,
mostly based in Gujarat, with strong NRI links among the Friends of
vhp/bjp. And it won't be a misnomer to say that they, like the vhp
NRIs, are orthodox Hindutva loyalists, top-heavy in the caste society.
This pink sandstone dham of godliness, sprawled over 100 acres, as
mushy newspaper reports tell us, cost Rs 200 crore, (some say Rs 400
crore) and it is 141 feet high, with 234 ornate pillars, 20,000 gods,
sculptured flora and fauna, a vedic village, markets etc, the works.
God's own little sacred space. Next to a river which is dead, a dead
Yamuna, killed by urbanity's insatiable insensitivity, now nothing but
a nullah, a dirty repository of sewage and shit, static, with plastic
and polythene bags full of flowers and offerings to god floating in the
quagmire, like a rotten memory which refuses to die.
Across the temple, beyond the high, protective, iron fences, like an
apartheid fortress, live the other children of god. The invisible row
of proles, in sub-human ghettos. On Diwali, outside their thatched
homes, they smeared the courtyard with cow dung, some made alpana with
mashed rice, the little feet of Lakshmi, and lighted a diya with a few
drops of oil. Days after the festival of lights, the diya still burns
in this dark expanse under the Nizamuddin bridge, as if telling the
dazzling Akshardham adorned with hundreds of lights, that yes, god
lives elsewhere. In the ignited minds and wings of fire of democracy's
black irony. God's own democracy.
