The marutis who sold their monks

As India proceeds on its 8% brave new world growth rate, as the intestines of an aging superstar get more prominence than the rain ravaged interiors of Tamil Nadu and as ' naughty becomes in and nice is out' since the czar of candyfloss claims it in Neal N Niki, I always wonder how Hindu roots, rituals and traditions would evolve in the next 5-10 years. Usually there is one section of the young generation , which believes that most of our rituals are crap.They dont know why a shraadh should be performed every year, why a sacred thread should be worn, and have forgotten to pray with verses . There is one section that believes in God but not in the ecosystem that comes with it , the pujaris and the pyres. There is one section that just follows their parents and performs activities as per their wishes just to avoid any confrontation. There could be many other sections.

What is of acute concern is the amount of time we spend to gain insights into the Hindu religion and its philosphy either through experiences or reading. It is unfortunate that most youngsters learn a foreign language like French during school for better global prospects rather than Sanskrit. Knowledge of Sanskrit enables one to atleast understand the various mantras chanted during a ritual or the scriptures in the Vedas. Another barrier is the mental block associated with the effort required to understand or experience. Sample this ' I went to Enigma this weekend; it rocked' versus ' I went to a Rudrabhishek pooja yesterday'. How uncool . Today's generation is making choices without adequate knowledge. Its a strange vaccuum where the joys of materialism after years of Brahminical restraint and the vapidity of mainstream media have left us very little time or inclination to find and know our roots.

However the outside world is now exhorting the virtues of the Hindu way of life with all the marketing chutzpah associated with it. For this look no further than 'The monk who sold his ferrari'. The wisdom of the fictional 'Sages of Sivana' mentioned there is no different from the journey of self-improvement advocated in the various texts. If one starts seeing the holistic picture based on 'using religion as a means to spiritual bliss and being a better person, the wonders of yoga and ayurveda for a healthy mind and body, there emerges a beautiful path to being a better person which is what everyone strives for. My next post would be how all the modern thoughts of self-help and science and lot of our age-old wisdom are the same.

As a start let me leave an interesting thought: We all know that E= mc2 where E = energy , m = mass and c= velocity of light . If one studies Hindu mythology we have a multitude of Gods. Well all our Gods are just different manifestations of energy and God and all the mythological stories are physical forms ( the m part) of that energy. In fact if one reads some ancient shlokas, they describe the arrival of some Gods as "prakashit" and prakash in Sanskrit is nothing but light. In fact some of the world best healing technique "Reiki" is energy based. Now there are enough dots like the above. We all need to connect them in our unique way on this journey to wisdom. And there is no destination, the journey is all that matters. No wonder some sages in the Himalayas as claimed even in the "Monk" are more than 100 years old.