The wake-up mantra

A New Year is such a splendid calendar opportunity to recharge soul batteries that some ritual seems wanted to mark it. I know "liberals" take fright at the word but the God-sized hole in us demands to be filled and look what happens if you don't own your religion or can't refute the distortionists. Knowing "enough" about the major religions of the world ought to become part of our cultural literacy and here's where Indians need to pay particular attention. For Macaulay's children, those of us who think in English though we love the mother tongues, anything on religion has to read well in English for us to relate to it. But most of it is such embarrassingly tacky gunk.

So, who writes well about the deepest reaches of our soul? Gora, that's who. But Gora is often wrong, because while he/she is terrific at note-taking, writing up impressive chapters and being published in fancy hardback volumes by Oxford, Berkeley or Thames and Hudson, Gora can at best describe meticulously from the out side, as Western scholarship is superbly trained to do. But he can't hack the insights and applications that come from within a living faith despite stacks of research tapes and notes, because in the final analysis, Gora has to strain the material he's gathered on us through his own mental filter. His mesh is Judeo-Christian, feminist, Left, whatever, with the most curious consequences.

You, to the manor born, must learn the saga of your own spiritual landscape from wandering minstrels. We can't retake the bhasha road, but we could start listening to stuff as the first step in our own cultural catch-up.

A mantra you may like to check out that people here would say in their heads first thing in the morning: Karaagre vasate Lakshmi/Kara madhye Saraswati/Kara moole stithaye Gauri/Prabhaate kara darshanam. It means, "Luck at my fingertips, learning in the middle, valour in my palm: I see my life's potential in my own two hands each morning." So what if it's Sanskrit? Who's to mind?