The Drunk Santa Blog

Big Religion

Statutory Warning:

This post may contain a lot of religiously offensive material. Well, if you think about it, not really, but there’ll always be the boneheaded. And since we love our audience so much..

Okay, so I went to see Akshardham (Delhi) today. For those of you who don’t know what that is:

“BAPS Swaminarayan Akshardham in New Delhi, India, is the world’s largest comprehensive Hindu temple. It measures 356 ft. long, 316 ft. wide and 141 ft. high, covering an area of 86,342 sq. ft. The grand, ancient-style, ornately hand-carved stone temple has been built without structural steel within five years by 11,000 artisans and volunteers. His Holiness Pramukh Swami Maharaj, revered spiritual leader of BAPS, consecrated the temple on 6 November 2005.”

It has its name now in the Guinness Book of World Records too.

Yay for us?

On a personal level, I felt more disturbed than awed by the sight. See what bothers me here is, this is vaguely reminiscent of the times when all progress was chucked out the window and buildings, magnificent ones, were built left right and center. This was the time when dear old Mughal and co. were in the driving seat. The rich were filthy rich and the poor were dying. Enter the British.

When the poor were dying and illiteracy was rampant, when there are regions in this country where art forms along with artisans are dying, when children young and old are sold off and ruthlessly disabled to be used as beggars, when we won’t talk about sex in our houses while we have a huge and an un-talked problem of forced incest and when issues like child education, child labor and diseases like AIDS are mostly ignored; what we need is a huge mandir. Sure. We already went ahead and demolished the Babri Masjid, killing off countless people in the process. Lets have another huge mandir, the Raam Janambhoomi mandir. That’ll help India shine. Oh and while we’re at it lets throw in a few Peace memorials and random parks (which serve no real purpose since they are no where near residential areas) for fun. Yes, what we need is more pointless structures, more money and time being wasted behind parliamentary discussions on “Is the name Bombay Scottish ruining our culture”, more commonwealth “villages” that’ll show how super fu**ing advanced India is and some more random boneheads, who just can’t comprehend what “cosmopolitan” means breaking things and making good people lose money.

Anyway, the coolest part of Akshardham is, its a temple, sure, but its also a mall and an amusement park at the same time; an amusement temple if you will. An IMAX, boat rides, light and sound and an air conditioned food court. It is amazing how God has so subtly been converted into a business plan.

Oh did I hear someone say “Teach children values and culture?” and “If thats what holds their interest why not?”. Why don’t we just package candy with a picture of God on top and a “did you know” underneath? That’d do the job pretty too. And we’ll make a killing on profits too. But no, that is where we cross the line. We can murder in the name of God, we can occupy any land we want (which might belong to some good man who has invested his life’s savings in it) and keep a few random stones and call it a temple, we can damage public property, we can dupe foreigners hell we can purchase some kid, teach him some random “shlokas” and put the bugger on the job. But candy wrappers? Really? Is Santa drunk today?

Moral of the story, culture and the heritage comes first. We are a nation of a billion (minus some) blind people who just refuse to see the past screaming “I’m friggin history, don’t repeat me!”.

And we’re a big country, the homeless will find some railway track to live beside anyway.

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