The Kanwars usually lack lusture in their clothes but not in their heart!

Their Spartan saffron makeover carrying the appurtenances of small wooden canopy slung on their shoulders and a cloth tied around the head walking allegretto turns out to be a fantasia for the passers-by. These indefatigable devotees carry ‘Ganga water’ in earthen pots to finally offer it to ‘Shiv dham’.  It’s a long tumultuous journey, however made easy by people who set-up camps and eatery shops where these devotees can rest and eat the savories offered to them.

Who are these people? Are they men of God who are taking this noble opportunity to do ‘seva’ for the ‘Shiv Bhakts’? We don’t know their names but know them through their pious intentions. Under the sweltering Sun and the consequent shimmering darkness, they are awakened to the brisk steps of the ‘Kanwars’; the service they provide to the ‘Shiv Devotees’ is bereft of religious conceit, and thereby brings into focus the raison d’ etre of human inclusiveness.

However, the political scuffle of making the names visible on boards outside their respective eatery shops has adumbrated yet another religious stalking horse. The scruple around ‘faith’ is not something new but allowing faith to work on sophistry thus causing dissension is bragging around one’s own closet.   

• How would a ‘Hindu name’ or a ‘Muslim name’ chop-off the religious sentiments carried by the ‘Kanwars’?
• The political rabbit-punch on the ‘name nebulous’ is like collecting stalks of ‘Ragwort’ to poison minds. What name has to do with intention?
• Humanitarianism cause demands ‘trust’. When the political rabble rousing creates a po-faced revue of mistrust, doesn’t the schismatic take over the self-effacing?

My cook is a Muslim but never has her name been an impediment to make the ‘froths’ and ‘curries’. Neither she is subject to self-pity because of her name. Why to make ‘name’ a liability? It should be a progression of your identity and not scorn you off your privilege. My cook—as long as she follows the protocol of my food culture, how does it matter if the disagreeable pass on the cudgel blows? Hasn’t the Muslim community be triggered once again? The owners, after being bedeviled by the decision, felt like sauerkraut of chopped emotions satirized by sententious political gamble. However, the scherzo did not last long and one now sees the saturnine faces of the ‘decision makers’ like a tray empty with scuzzy blotches.

I am never asked for my name when I visit a Temple or a Mosque. My faith is not epicurean though, but the intention to know the recondite does not make my ‘prayer’ less effective. My footsteps entering the ‘other religious structure’ might not be discreet in its hegemony but that does not wither my feet to be inclusive at every step. My hands, in obeisance, may not form a tenacious grip in awkward silence but that does not initiate a digression from my usual pity of the existential recherché’.

So, what made the polity reticulate the name of shop owners as the de rigueur? Communal perpetuity has made them raddled; invoking such decisions is reprehensible, and to see it as raffish is a political misadventure.

Overbearing poweress could be one reason. But, perhaps is the intemperate flow of casuistry that makes ‘faith’ a spinning web of ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’. The Supreme Court finally did the éclat; to disavow the putting up of names or any religious identity by the owners, however, taking care of the vegetarian preferences of the ‘kanwars’. The question thus arises:

‘Is name actually creating a prejudice or one’s religion propels the political parties to come out with rubbish declarations that go insanely argumentative? This drama is perhaps a simulacrum of political chicanery of alienating the minority.  It’s important to come out of this figment of separatism. As put by Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Guru of the Sikhs,

“Man breaks through the human limitation by being ‘Nimana’, the ‘humble one’.