Once more people have killed others in God's name. It is an old sport. Regrets and accusations are flying in the air, with smoke and the stench of burning flesh. The canvas is all red and black: nearly one thousand corpses of people burned, stabbed or lynched.

What kind of man is he who stabs and burns people in the name of God? Does he have a genuine religious consciousness? Is it really the crusader's blind passion impelling him?

What is his economic position? What are his ideas?

Strong religious passion (but how do you measure it?) drives people to kill others, argue the killers' apologists.

Were public visibility of religious passion an indicator of religiosity, the Hindu women would make greater killers than men. You can check their attendance at religious discourses. There are thousands, swaying in frenzy over vacuous discourses spiced up with mythology and music. At the end of the discourse, many queue up to receive the spiritual communicator's blessings in the hope of a pre-fabricated, ready-to-wear medal of promised moksha.

This ancient land of spiritual freedom, India, is home to the world's greatest number of spiritual traffickers today. (Even Mephistopheles would be humbled!) They discourse day and night and emasculate the people by undermining their capacity for spiritual freedom. And this, ironically, in the name of religion.

Of late, men's attendance too has been increasing though it should not delude anyone as indicative of a happily disappearing gender divide. The savvy journalists call it men's feminization, but it could be some kind of neutering.

The training in frenzy might come handy if you wanted to enlist in a gang of terrorists or rioters. The communicators use rhetoric and pseudo spirituality to pilfer your resistance, and gradually paralyze your thought and will. The pseudo spiritual discourse is the finest instrument of intellectual castration.

With the e-touch, it stands perfected as a multiple warhead system targeted at the human spirit. You surf channels for the right flavor of spiritual wisdom to go with your breakfast. The mediated spirituality proliferates virally. Overwhelmed and addicted, you gorge ever more on simulated spirituality.

Spiritual simulation, rendered magnetic with simulated spirituality, corrodes truth and destroys the strength to be free. It makes people impotent--across the genders.

I guess religious violence is a symptom of collective impotence. It is also, of course, a perverse sublimation of the repressed desire to be creative and free, manifesting as cataclysmal frenzy in terror and rioting.

Rioting deeply elates the rioter. The rioting mob's anger is celebratory--almost like a primitive cannibalistic ritual. When there is a religious riot, the mobile and tenuous line between riotous celebration and celebratory rioting blurs completely. Shout, sing, dance, kill! Poison and pleasure blended in perfect vintage cocktail.

It is the taste of killing, not the love of God, which attracts the killers. There is a pleasure in it, albeit perverse. They kill with the abandon of a group on a wild picnic whose individual members momentarily let slip their social relationships and corner a helpless girl to rape and lynch her.

There is in their act of killing a sense of accomplishment. Most of them have no work, or little and uncertain work. They think, incorrectly though, that they have no stake in peace. Their religious identity feeds their craving to belong to a powerful group. In losing themselves in a faceless crowd, they seem to find themselves. Stabbing a person or dousing a family with kerosene or gasoline and setting them on fire are to them sort of strokes of art.

These men would go insane if they ever sat down in solitude to replay the spectacle. They must live all their life without memory and imagination and thought--in the desert of that last poverty, the poverty of humanity.

They are incapable of ideas and captives of ideologies. The latter-day crusaders deploy them as remote-controlled cybernetic infantry in battles of politics marketed under the logo of religion. The poor mechanical toys of God's evil children, they have long been denied self-awareness. They are the cyborgs of India's medieval politics in the age of information technology--pre-programmed to destroy and, eventually, to self-destruct.

In place of continued education, they receive a messy serving of escapist pseudo-spiritual discourses that come a dime a dozen in the virtual economy of religion. Their vendors are the self-appointed franchisees of religion who are sprouting everywhere like toxic mushrooms. India is choking with them; they are so numerous.

Truly, India badly needs another avatar, another Divine Incarnation. But I fear the franchisees of religion might form a cartel, negotiate a secret deal with some wicked politicians and unscrupulous IT wizards, and foist a fake, virtual Divinity on the believing, unthinking people. This pseudo avatar--the Chief Executive of the Pseudo Spiritual India Inc.--will one day implode under the stress of His contradictions and, in the process, terminate this oldest living civilization on earth.

This civilization has gotten too old perhaps. It has become so refined that its skin has become bizarrely translucent. The eruptions of blood and fire could forebode the final stage of spiritual cancer. Of pralaya, the Doomsday. Who knows?

Copyright © 2002 Rajesh K. Sharma. All Rights Reserved.