Religion: Cannabis  of Mass

India’s 1.3 billion population are descendants of a variety of races starting from the Adivasis and Dravidians to Aryans, Mongols, Semites and many more and uncountable intermixtures of each other. Likewise, nobody quite really knows the real number of languages practiced within India; merely 22 are recognized by the Constitution, Hindi being the official one. India is the birthplace of 4 major world religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. Though 80% of the Indian population are Hindus, almost every religion known in the world is practiced here. India has the 3^rd largest population of the Islam practitioners though it consists only of 14%. Jawaharlal Nehru, the 1^st Prime Minister of India in his book ‘Discovering India’ perfectly summed this up as Unity of Diversity which means a state of oneness in spite of the presence of immense diversity.

Getting out of the nostalgic definition, India is one of the fastest growing developing countries with an ironically high poverty rate. Poverty indeed is the core problem that India face followed by greed and irresponsibility. These three problems are inter-related and in most circumstances, they end up creating a new and unique problem which might roughly be termed as ‘corruption’. Poor people take corrupted steps in hope of becoming rich and rich people indulge in corruption in fear of losing what they already have. It is impossible to get rid of this insecurity complex unless government literally guarantees everything to everyone which is honestly very absurd. In terms of corruption, more or less every one of us is corrupted, and the politicians and the religious heads have the worst record in it.

In India, the pursuit of religion means the pursuit of peace of mind to a large extent but today the concept of religion is itself falsified in India and its citizens are fighting against each other forming own religious groups. Today, it can be declared that religion does not necessarily make a person a good human being. Yes, it might have saved innumerable people from drug addiction, insecurity complex, and nervous breakdowns, but there are the examples of Gurmeet Ram RahimJi and others. The origin of religion lies in the fear of unknown and salvation ways from one’s misdeeds but today, religion is misinterpreted and served. When it comes to things that matter most for a nation like murder, rape, falsifying bank accounts, evading tax, an illicit affair, and incest, people fear policeman’s baton and jail more than religious censure. Crimes are committed and corruption is widespread because the violator’s conscience is undisturbed as they can easily square their cheating by performing rituals or by paying lip service to god, in the name of mercy! It is pity that criminal instincts that religious persuasion kept under control have resurfaced. It is time that we conduct a reappraisal of values and pursuit of religion in India and focus on national integrity which in Swami Vivekananda’s words is:

“For our national welfare, India must gather up of its scattered spiritual forces. India must be a union of those whose hearts beat to the same spiritual tune.”

To make a conclusion, it should be made clear to the citizens of India that a country like ours which is left far behind the optimal progress can neither afford people to spend more time on fighting for religious differences nor to let religion be people’s opium.  We should try to evolve with a concept of work-based religion as suggested by Vivekananda.

 “One must follow the path for which one is best suited, but in this age special stress should be laid on Karma-Yoga “.