The Stench of Saffron

Should I stay or should I go?

The Clash asked that, rhythm and rhyming the approach-avoidance syndrome, backing it with a driving incessant beat, and…leaving the question unanswered, now that I think about it; which doesn’t help me a lot, or any.

See, the thing is, I’ve remained in India for the past decade and half in highly addictive expat comforts. This in spite of the best efforts of the Foreigners Regulation and Registration Office and its bureaucratically brilliant systems for making life just that little bit more pebble-in-the-shoe-ish. I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, you take bureau… I beg your pardon, Bureaucracy, which India has had for a lot longer than most other places, and you clothe it in the Eton-Harrow-OxBridge pomposities that pass for governance and administration, and what you get is the FRRO, and their ability to trigger ‘screw it, what’s the travel agent’s e-address, sorts of thoughts and impulses. But, I digress.

The FRRO is not the reason I’ve bookmarked Lonely Planet and know where my passport and traveling pants are. [Aren’t cargos just the absolute tits?]  For the first time in 15 years I’m starting to get uncomfortable with the smell of teen spirit. An appreciable, increasingly aggressive, portion of India’s youth, the generation that Narendra ‘BigMo’ Modi has so assiduously wooed and won, have embraced the concept of Indian National Cultural Values (INCV) (All concepts in India are labeled and acronym-ed. It’s a cultural thing) and are looking to impose the same on the rest of India. As an example let me cite the attempt by some of Young Modern India (YoMo’In) (concept again) to exercise their perfectly reasonable right to show affection, one for the other, in public and with due regard for the decencies necessary. Towards this end a ‘Kiss-in’ was organized and announced. This did not meet with the approval of the Religious Right (RR) (also a concept), who, in short order deployed their youth wing. There are altogether too many upper case concepts of that wing for me to list. Suffice it to say that they are manifold and are, without exception, large, testosterone driven and ready to rumble. Pumped with ideology, righteous anger, and, I suspect but cannot prove, steroids, these myrmidons of INCV were able to intimidate the local police into backing their play in preventing the Kiss-in from happening. The cops must have figured that worst YoMo’In could do was kiss them in protest while the RR youth wing was armed, but I’m guessing.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that things have reached the twin lightning insignia stage but one gets the feeling that saffron shirts and khaki shorts are being bulk ordered and stockpiled. Certainly saffron is starting to replace the admittedly condescending Congress white in the halls and seats of power, bringing with it the stench of faith based governance and reminding me of the reasons I left home, hearth, and health insurance to remain in India. But now…

I wonder if the FRRO in Vietnam has better manners.

Militant Religiosity

I find myself becoming quite religious in my antipathy to reli…no, actually, that should be, Religion. I find myself proselytizing and preaching on the dangers of institutionalized faith. My semi-libation – I’m clumsy and tend to spill things – toasts to polymath Dawkins are starting to take on the aspects of ritual, tending uncomfortably towards dogma and cant. My accountant tells me that she is considering submitting my bar bills as a tithing expense. I find myself surfing anti-Religion web sites for arguments that I then plagiarize and pass off as revelations. Hell, I’ve found myself taking out my articles of faith, polishing them, and presenting them as the only Truth that makes sense, ignoring, as I do so, the obvious holes in my logic, over-riding objections with the power of oratory. In short, I seem to have become Religious.

Oh, I have my justifications and my rationalizations, but, they all boil down to fear. No difference there, then. I mean reli… Religion got started because of fear in the first place. Fear of the night. Fear of the unknown. Fear of thunder, lightning, and the voices of the gods in the howling wind, the naked ape cowering in the sturm and whimpering in the drang . All of which is as close to a selfie as I care to get. Not that I'm scared of thunder and the voices of the gods, you understand. Those have been explained, to my satisfaction, by rationality and science No, my fear is of the rising tides of militant religiosity.

 Saffron the designated color of Hinduism, as opposed to the condiment, seems to be subsuming the philosophical and much heralded Colors of India. That’s colors, plural, as in many and varied; a heady mixture of creative concepts to explain the mysteries of life; each limning, shading, on occasion merging, with the other, to create a reasonably amicable, (for a given value of amity), system of social order that has served the sub-continent well for a few thousand years. The philosophies were not so much competing, as much as finding their place in the pavane of governance and individual rights and responsibilities. At least, that’s the way it used to be. Not so much now.

Now, here, in this land where diversity, and the right to be different, was enshrined in the Constitutional clauses of sovereignty and nationhood, the monoculture rigidity of militant Hinduism, the Religion, is, with increasing frequency, occupying the public spaces of India. Saffron robes have become the official office wear of an increasing number of legislators and law makers, who in their zealotry are passing laws and ordinances that pay little heed to the rights of the Other. Saffron rituals take precedence minority ways, and no back talk. Taking cues from Mosque and Church, Hinduism has embraced apostasy (apostasy – in a philosophy – can you dig it?) as a control mechanism. No more multiple pathways to the god head; one, and only one, saffron hued, officially approved, mandated, road to salvation. A philosophy that accepted, encouraged, questioning, and dialog is being perverted into a religion with all its authoritarian implications.

I have to stop. This is getting depressing.