Things Indians Love

Indians love temples. Indians visit temples everyday, have celebration every week, and build a new one every month. For Indians temples are the guardian of this life and the gateway to the next. Temples are the washroom for all earthly sins and trust fund for all future lives. Temples are where Indians glorify god and vilify neighbors; they bring offerings to alleviate sufferings; they come to pray and party; they gather for paid visit and free food.

Indians turn to temples in the event of natural calamity or to vent petty personal complaints. For Indians temples are tickets out of drought, destitution, disease, death, and dishonesty. Indians believe in bail out in the form of right bribe to the appropriate god. Temples are the official collection agency for divine bribes and priests are the collectors. No wonder Indian contributions to temples are directly connected to confessions, corruption, and crime. They offer every thing from rice to rose, from goods to gold, from body hair to future heir. Indian temples have more gold than their banks. India has no shortage of starving population, but not a single skinny priest.

Indians do not rank temples by size or service: temples are ranked by the strength of god’s palpable presence. Indians believe god is omnipresent, but god is more omnipresent in some temples than others. Indians are tenacious about visiting those auspicious temples - they would swim across a river, walk to a different state, climb a mountain: more torturous the travel, more triumphant the temple.

Indian temples can take decades to decorate or can be done in a day. Indian temples can be the most elaborate architectural feat, or can be as simple as trinkets tucked in the trunk of a tree or a stone stuck in the street corner. Roadside temples pop up more frequently than the potholes. In India there are too many temples, too few Indians. The competition is intense, the coexistence intricate: the complex time sharing system temples developed over centuries is tenuous at best. Indians are always at the risk of going to the wrong temple at the wrong time angering gods in other temples.

India has countless gods, infinite incarnations, and even more temples. There are temples for cows, elephants, monkeys, snakes, and even rats. In the temple of rats, thousands of rodents roam freely to be fed, touched, and worshiped. Even in the bizarre world of rodent worship, Indians cannot shade their deep rooted color complex: the four white rats are holier than the thousands of brown rats. The devotion is so deep that Indians eat rat food at rat temple.

And yet, Indians are oblivious to the rotten side of temples. In the temple for goddess of literary the priest proudly misspells the name of the goddess; inside the temple for god of virtue business men gather to complete their corrupt deals; in the temple for goddess of power women are forbidden to enter and feel powerless to protest; the stones of the temples for the god of fertility are stained with the blood of infanticide; in the shadow of temple for goddess of prosperity children starve to death.

For Indians love for temples blind them from the existential enigma, buffer them from the theocratic teaser.

Tags: Indian Temples, Place of Worship, Temples