Review By Harsimran Kaur
Rating: 5/5
Are God and Religion one? Or are a lingering shadow of each other where one pulls the other to form a sheath of ineluctable uncertainties and prevalence of the unknown.
It’s always better to keep them separate as ‘GOD’ is a universal power and religion a conscientious path towards attaining GOD. The polemics between the agnostics and the believers has made God a swaying pendulum, an erratic wayfarer who is obliged to keep the eccentricities of the mind under control; agnostics giving God a sclerosis tic oblivion and the worshippers a Sisyphean validation.
Khushwant Singh is an agnostic; though born and brought up in a family where reciting Sikh hymns was a composed ritual but his belief in the existence of GOD has been a self-justifying exculpation. Religions in general have intrigued him, and is an aficionado in expatiating “The Guru Granth Sahib”, “The Quran” and “The Bible”. God to him is an illusionary idee fixe that undergoes unsatisfactory calibrations by the human mind for any aggrandizement on a personal or a professional level.
People throng temples and Gurudwaras and other sanctum sanatoriums to pay obeisance in their own privileged way.
- Is it a conscious effort to do sins and then smear the head on the ground to ask for absolutions?
- Or God has become a perfunctory need to create a defensive shield against anything imperceptible and bedevilling?
Whatever the reason be, ‘GOD’ is here to stay. Singh with his remarkable genius of expounding facts and foibles is in no contract with GOD. He gives more importance to religious text that through proper interpretation and contemplation can help you ease your life’s misery. Wisdom of the scared text helps you go beyond the illusionary self-assessment of God and puts you in control of your viability to this existence.
If God eludes him, so does the Godmen who act as soothsayers with miraculous powers. The founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak Dev and the founder of Khalsa, Guru Gobind Singh never indulged in phantasmagoria to hail their extraordinary powers but aligned their actions to the will of the divine, thus propagating that religion is the emancipation from evil and chicanery of solipsism. Considering the current BJP government targeting the constructions of numerous mosques as illegal—an iconoclasm that is bound to siphon fissiparous tendencies—Singh is quick to underrate that unnecessary building of religious places should be deflowered. Processions too are a nuisance and disturb the acclimated privacy of an individual.
The author has so beautifully embarked on the journey trail of Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind, exponentially serving in insight into their thought process which is sinequa non for a righteous living. It’s the ‘Bani’ of the Gurus collected in the scared text which exhibits the worldly wisdom of honest living without fear.
Puritanical beliefs hardwired into religious oratory have sabotaged the entire essence of the divine knowledge. Prejudices and disbeliefs are a functional anomaly that has impaired the true essence of religious text; and it’s not a misconduct of today but goes back to the pejorative pulsations of the atavistic. God does not require refinement to suit our whims and fancies but is a power that looks after his creation, if we want to believe.