The future is Sanskrit

And I consider only Bharat Mata to be my real and ultimate super-deluxe mother

India is a religious country, and rightly so. Religion is important. It is more important, if you ask me, than decency, compassion or common sense. If you are religious, you are freed from any obligation to be decent or compassionate, or to respect common sense. The only thing that matters is your religious sentiment.

For the longest time, like most Hindus living in a constitutionally secular republic, I had assumed that religious sentiments are a personal matter, not meant to be advertised publicly, let alone imposed on other people in defiance of the law. It had been so long since I last exercised my religious sentiments that I couldn’t even locate them when I needed them. How did I end up like this — a person with no religious sentiments worth offending? The answer in one word: secularism.

I’ll be frank: like most people of my ilk, I’ve only paid lip service to secularism for narrow cynical ends. I never took it seriously. How could I, except in a hypocritical way, and as someone said, “ Hypocrisy ki bhi seema hoti hai” [Hypocrisy also has girlfriend named Seema]. My biggest problem with the concept of secularism is that it is too rational. Rationality is to religion what Odomos is to mosquito — they are adversaries. This is why in India the life expectancy of rationalists tends to be unpredictable, as we saw with Govind Pansare and Narendra Dabholkar.

But now in the New India, I’ve finally rediscovered my religious sentiments. Having rediscovered them, I’ve started believing in them deeply — so deeply, in fact, it’s easy for me to take offence in their name. Keeping quiet when religious sentiments are getting hurt is a bad thing — it’s an outright sin — when you belong to the majority community. Condemn me or call me a majoritarian bigot or whatever but today I want to come right out and say this: the endless hikes in petrol prices are severely hurting my religious sentiments.

“In exchange for my unconditional love for the Supreme Being, I ask for nothing more than a measure of financial protection for savings against inflation”

My religious sentiments are also offended by the state of the economy. Like the majority in India, I also worship financial well-being and a steady growth in annual income. In exchange for my unconditional love for the Supreme Being, I ask for nothing more than a measure of financial protection for savings against inflation. Some of you may wonder where is it written in the  shastras that petrol prices cannot be ₹350 per litre if the government so decrees. But there are as many versions of Hinduism as there are Hindus, and in my personal version, it is a sin to pocket bigger and bigger slices of the common man’s meagre wages through taxes when his real income hasn’t risen in years.