I wonder what would anger our Gods? The fact that a human was beaten to death by other humans while chanting his name? Only because the deceased, who is also this God’s creation, called him by a different name, worshipped him via different rituals? Or the fact that a few drunk men broke an idol that we worship in God’s name could it be the cause of his fury? Maybe not! I wonder if we continue to destroy God’s every creation to preserve what we have built, would God stop us and ask what happened to the humanity that he had created?
Maybe we continue to be inhuman in God’s name, hoping to earn his mercy with the crores we spend on building structures in his name. Oblivious to the fact that all this while there are thousands of children dying of hunger, men and women living on the streets without shelter, epidemics claiming life due to lack of healthcare and this very God’s country is lost in regressed rituals due of the lack of proper education. According to India FoodBanking Network,
- India is home to the largest undernourished population in the world
- 14.9% of our population is undernourished
- 195.9 million people go hungry every day
- 21% of children under five are underweight
- 38.4% of children under five years of age are stunted
- 1 in 4 children are malnourished.
Further, there are 1.77 million homeless people in India. According to the government’s definition, homeless or houseless are those who live in “the open or roadside, pavements, in hume-pipes, under flyovers and staircases, or in the open in places of worship, mandaps, railway platforms etc.” Yet when it comes to providing them with basic needs, governments have been failing to spend even their allocated funds, and we the citizens don’t bother asking the government questions in this regard as we are busy bribing Gods with the hope/greed of being blessed with our own individual fortune.
Let’s take a look at India’s wealthiest temples:
- Tirupati temple gets an annual donation of ₹650 crore
- Shirdi Sai Baba Shrine’s annual donation is around ₹360 crore.
- Vaishno Devi Temple in Jammu is the second most visited temple in India earns ₹500 crore annually.
- Siddhivinayak Temple in Mumbai has an average annual income that ranges from ₹48 crore to ₹125 crore.
- Meenakshi Temple in Madurai earns revenue of ₹ 6crores every year.
- Kashi Vishwanath Temple in Varanasi collects an annual donation of around ₹4–5 crore.
- Somnath Temple in Gujarat has an annual revenue of ₹33 crore.
Are we so certain of buying our way into God’s heart that we continue to torment each other, turn a blind eye towards each other’s misery and even find joy in each other’s failures, simply because at the end of the day we can wash our sins through donations made at structures we have built in the name of God? If this is what we believe in, then I have to ask, who is this God that we worship? Because I’m sure that I don’t believe in a God who finds happiness in donations—while most of his creation or his children sleep hungry. I don’t understand a God who would celebrate his birthday with a few— while ignoring the fact that the majority of us constantly choose anger over love, greed and ego over kinship and politics over humanity!