what do we believe now?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nBeing born into modern civilisation means beginning \u00a0in the middle of a story, like a dream. night colors sound sugar supermarkets subways radio tv smartphones wifi bluetooth imax films snapchat emojis concerts festivals clubs sensory overload tinder supernormal stimuli.<\/p>\n
return to a village. dusty dirt trails goats cows chickens dogs fish & meet sold in the open flies everywhere. blazing sun, dust in your eyes and mouth everywhere. the water isn\u2019t clean enough to wash it off.<\/p>\n
nature was the first god; the sun and the moon. in the absence of artificial light the moon is a gleaming orb of mystical beauty. soundtrack of insects and animals. sunrises and sunsets are spectacular. darkness is incredibly prohibitive. lightning is terrifying, literally AWEsome with a capital A.<\/p>\n
Temples start to make sense in such a context. The promethean power of fire is easy to forget in modern contexts, modern life. It is at the heart of religious ceremonies (and barbecues). Light and color, music and spectacles. The moon would\u2019ve actually affected people\u2019s behaviour and lives back then. Modern loose corollary might be wifi and battery life. Power sockets. In a sense, these are our idols now\u2013 we beg and pray for them to bestow connectivity to us.<\/p>\n
Electricity. Mud huts, attar huts, bricks, wells. My grandfather\u2019s village lies on a point between the past and the present. The local temple is the village equivalent of times square. Massive chariot for people to carry the stone idols of their gods around the city.<\/p>\n
(The bible was the first mainstream book).<\/p>\n
Shops selling shoes and clothes are a huge deal. (McDonald\u2019s was once a status symbol, kind of the way hipster cafes might be today\u2026?)<\/p>\n
Bollywood movies make much more sense once you\u2019ve lived in an indian village. Colours and dance.<\/p>\n
Constant smell of dust and dung, dingy drains and dirty dogs. Where would you start cleaning up? it isn\u2019t dirty or disgusting to them, it\u2019s simply how life is. And in a sense we are the paranoid ones, antiseptic and alien, fat from sugar, muscles atrophied, bodies bent over desks. Old indian ladies carry heavy loads on their spines, backs strong and taut.<\/p>\n
Barefoot children playing in the streets. India is too big to be orderly at our present levels of technology, and in any realistically imaginable sense. (That said, tech evolves faster than the magic of our imaginations\u2026 so I\u2019m not going to write off our imagination.) Orderliness is a sort of OCD-ish game that some of us play, that most people in the world actually don\u2019t have time to bother with. Dodging goats and chickens on the way to work or school, hardly anybody wears a helmet. In the news, people are murdered and kidnapped and raped and horrible things happen all the time, such is the law of large numbers.<\/p>\n
But technology has found its way into these spaces. It\u2019s always tempting and easy to talk about these places as backwards and\/or lacking, but they\u2019re hackers. They improvise. They meddle and tinker and repair. They crowd around lights at night. Their vehicles often play music when reversing, and are colourfully decorated. Houses are painted in delightful shades of teal, pink, green and so on. Gold jewellery. WhatsApp on TV.<\/p>\n
Kumar, 21, drives, climbs things. Knows his fruits and berries, knows a tailor, knows his town inside out. He is a master of his domain to a degree that I am not a master of mine; my spaces have been created for me to a much greater degree than his.<\/p>\n
Food place\u2013 some are remarkably clean, workers are polite and attentive, dressed sharply.<\/p>\n
Long dusty roads. I know there are intellectuals, rock musicians, poets, dancers, yogis, terrible things like rapists, yet mathematicians and rocket scientists and and ganja-smokin sadhus.<\/p>\n
(Suddenly remembered the game Breath of fire\u2013 Gods get their power from people who believe in them. Wifi router as the modern altar).<\/p>\n
Things get bigger, louder, shinier, more addictive than our old gods which now seem primitive and quaint in comparison. A comic book hero like superman can challenge and inspire us with the complexities of modern life, in a way that the ancient gods aren\u2019t quite able to adopt to.<\/p>\n
(add more about TV, HBO movies, radio, the experience of indian cinema)<\/p>\n
What about the huge temples? Tirupathi\u2019s Venkateswara, Rameswaram\u2019s 24 Wells, Madurai\u2019s Meenakshi (SO FUCKING EPIC. Makes the biggest temples in Singapore look like tiny shrines. Holy shit. Hundreds (thousands?!) of years old, 64 kings passing the baton from one to another. Elaborate systems emerge and assemble to manage throngs of people, funnelled along like electrons in a circuit, cells in a greater body, reverberating and echoing through the hallowed halls.<\/p>\n
Our gods are a function of the loving, fearful attention we pay to them, and that in turn is a function of the technology and context that we are born into and operate in. No matter how hard I try to grasp for God, my search will never yield to me what God meant (and continues to mean) to villagers and xyz peeps.<\/p>\n
In a sense, loosely sketching, we are the gods now. Or to be more precise, the relationship between man and \u201cGod\u201d has changed, where \u201cGod\u201d represents everything that man is not. Nature. Power. The infinite. The unknown. The sun and moon aren\u2019t worshipped so much anymore these days, and Zeus and his lightning bolts are managed with an understanding of electromagnetism, conducting rods and so on. It\u2019s telling\u2013 when do we fall to our knees and pray, in the modern world? When we\u2019re confronted with immeasurable pain, sadness, grief, anguish. Suffering.<\/p>\n
Gods have been forgotten and gods will continue to be forgotten, but as long as the infinite and unknown feature in our lives, gods will continue to be enshrined and lovingly tended to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Questions: there\u2019s a relationship between the \u2018power\u2019 of a god and how\/why people believe in it (consider how greek myths are fairy tales now, but people kill over X today\u2013 what makes a religion decay?) why did people believe what they believe? what are the contexts that shaped those beliefs?… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[280,484],"class_list":["post-9925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-word-vomit","tag-fiction","tag-supernormal-stimuli"],"yoast_head":"\n
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