The Brave Pedestrian

Let me unpack the atheism concept a bit. Theism is belief in a deity, a creator. Such belief is a default position in society, because of how we are all born into Christian, Hindu or Muslim families.. and that's how we end up with Hindu-sounding names like Krishnaraj or Christian-sounding names like Lata Tauro . Based on our names, everybody, including State, assumes that we are followers of Hinduism, Christianity, etc. However, some of us (like Lata and I, for instance) analy ze our childhood indoctrination and conditioning little by little (or all at once) and we conclude that our earlier beliefs were based on mythology rather than reality. We come to the conclusion that our religious faith is totally unsupported by evidence. (Simultaneously, we also process the available information and come to the conclusion that other religions besides ours are also similarly unsupported by any evidence.) Nor is it just a question of lack of evidence in the existence of a dei...

Hanuman, like Spiderman, is an imaginary superhero. The people who imagined and wrote the Hanuman stories -- as part of a larger story called Ramayana -- are ancient people, revered as sages. They lived in India many millennia ago. The sages wrote these imaginary stories for the ethical upliftment and entertainment of the illiterate masses, and filled these stories with morals. Through such stories, many generations of sages improved the quality of life of many, many generations of Indians, and helped to regulate society. Through such stories, they propagated rules for proper living, and also gave people something to believe in. But that does not change the fact that Hanuman is an imaginary superhero. He did not exist at any point of human history, and he does not exist today. Hanuman -- and the whole pantheon of superheroes, demigods, gods, demons and super-villains -- are imaginary. Time to stop being senti about our dhoti-wearing gods and grow up. Ancient do...

We grew up reading books of history and Amar Chitra Katha comics that convinced us that wise people called sages could gain superhuman powers by sitting down in a forest or ashram, meditating, practicing austerities and doing penance. Even educated people in India believe in these things as if they are historical fact, and not just mythology. As impressionable comic-reading kids who suddenly sprouted breasts and moustaches, we never had the occasion to question such childhood beliefs before entering the grown-up world. Grow up, people.Think. If a person sits in a forest or a hill for months or years "meditating", the only things he will get are: (1) severe malnutrition, liver and kidney failure (2) permanent wasting away of the muscles of his legs and hips (3) horrible bedsores on his bony bums (4) insect bites and parasites. It doesn't matter whether you are a "sage" or an "asura", the same rules of biology apply to all of us. Time...

Every time someone tries to force you to respect an inanimate object, a dead person, an ideology or an institution, they indirectly steal your self-respect from you. By making you "respect" the dead and the non-living, they make you respect yourself less. And they make you respect other people less -- people who are alive. Respect is a currency in our social lives. It is a scarce and precious currency. This is a diversion of respect from those who are alive, to those who are dead, or those who were never alive in the first place. I object to such diversion. When I talk about respect, I talk about all the forms of respect.  Respect for the non-living and non-existent manifests itself in many forms. It manifests as worship and devotion. As fear and awe. As blind following and blind faith. As a refusal to think and question. As a refusal to act rightly, or speak out, when violence is being inflicted upon the living. Without thinking, without questioning, people say ...

August 7, 2009: My 13-year-old daughter had a nasty spat with a schoolmate today. Coming home in a bad mood with bite marks on her arm, she changed into her home clothes, and headed for her room, her computer, her personal space on the internet… her blog. Then my wife said something about the exams and told her not to waste her time, and got some kind of angry retort. Offended by the “attitude”, my wife switched off the computer, wiping out a few paragraphs of rant on the blog, and triggering an episode of tearful rage. I heard the shouting match and intervened. All the manuals on parenting advise that at such times, parents must pull together in disciplining the kid. But there’s one problem: I identify more with my daughter and her concerns about privacy and freedom, than I do with my wife and her concerns about propriety and discipline. And so my daughter and I had another one of those long, rambling father-daughter talks that we seem to have every six months or so. Much of w...