Why do I do the things I do?

All through my life, I've been a very misunderstood soul. I do things that enrage people or disgust them or make them go, "Why is she doing this? Is she crazy?". So starting today, I want to end it. I am going to explain why I do what I do. I don't care whether you agree with me or not, but I've just gotta do it. I read a blog of a dead girl. Maybe, even I'll die someday prematurely, and somehow my parents, friends or relatives may end up here and then they'll know what a misunderstood genius I was (Probably this idea is a little difficult to implant) and their feet will automatically end up in their mouths, or none of this will happen and I will be as I am, misunderstood or understood, "but who the fuck gives anything about your opinions anyway" or whatever, I don't know I cannot predict the future. I just want to crib now.

Today, I want to tell you something that people around me just fail to understand,

Why do I hate rituals, religion and all things associated with them?

Yes, I have written about this before, but it was long long ago, so it calls for another rant.

If you are an Indian, It's somehow assumed that religion and rituals are as integral a part of our blood, like life saving plasma, and if you are born in a middle class orthodox family that has a 10X10 space as a "Puja room", it's assumed that religion and rituals compose your blood, bones, muscles, pee, puke and other unmentionables.

The earliest memory I have of a festival is my Dad dragging, pleading and yelling at me, to wear a silk langa that he'd lovingly bought for me, while I was wailing away to glory. I'm sure I didn't do it to hurt my dad, as he keeps saying whenever he gets a chance which is very frequent. I hated it, the langa, the gaudy display of gods, the unnecessary dressing up of my mom who didn't look like my mom anymore, the FLOWERS (Btw, I hate flowers, I don't have any logical explanation for that, I absolutely completely loathe them..The only explanation I can come up with is maybe I was mowed down by a flower-truck in my previous birth, I know its nuts, but seriously, I can't stand flowers.), my mom cooking relentlessly in the kitchen after a 5 hr long puja, which I'm sure no one including the purohit could make much sense of.

I don't know why I had such extreme feelings when I was that young, but now, its mainly because of the futility of such rituals which just tick me off. Every festival, the gowri, or the lakshmi or Ganesh Chaturthi or whatever, we just do whatever a greedy pandit asks us to do. I'm generalising pandits as greedy because that's what I've seen. Of course, they are entitled to it. Who would want to live a sad, pious life in this age of ipods, ipads, iphones and what not. I don't blame them, all I ask them is not to preach.

Nowadays, rituals don't make sense to many and if people are just doing it for the sake of doing, all the while thinking about their make up or their saree or their sister-in-law's new necklace, what's the use of doing it?. Most people give spineless excuses like, "Just for the sake of my mom", "What will others think if I don't do this", "I do it because I respect the elders" and loads of shit like that. All they are doing is ignoring their inner voice and trying to avoid confrontation.

These days, people "fear" God. There is no respect. They try to bribe Him with money. I seriously don't know what these temples will do with all the money they've got. A country of extremes, it's got the world's biggest slum, one of the world's richest temples. Why don't they distribute their wealth to people in that slum? Both problems will be solved!

Did God ask these temples to put up VIP queues? Did He tell, "Okay, I want this guy to tonsure his head, I want this woman to weigh herself against coins, or jaggery or whatever crap that she can afford"?

They close temples late in the night, and they open them at some God-forsaken hours so that thousands of hopeless people come and pour out all their troubles. Give Him a break people! Just because you come and cry to Him once a year, doesn't mean whatever shit you did in the past year is forgiven.

Yes maybe, hundreds of years ago, people needed faith, they needed hope to survive and maybe they came up with some rules that were favorable for their time, but now, we have made a mockery of them. We twist and turn those rules in whatever way convenient to us. One guy tells, "Okay, if you come to this temple on thursday, you'll be blessed", Next day, the whole town packs their bags to go to that temple.

I do not judge people who do this. Don't judge me. I want my children to grow in a world free of religion, I want them to be free to follow whatever faith they want, I want them to be free to marry whoever they want, a muslim, a christian whatever without any drama.

You can call me a cynic, a snob, whatever but what I am is a frustrated soul, and nothing else.

PS: I was really pissed off while writing this. I thought I'll not post it, but here it is..