God, hedging my bets and V.C's
Our teacher greets us by saying "hurry 'ome" confided my daughter.
I was alarmed. I didn't want any teacher dropping aitches to teach her. I would have to sit her down ala Eliza Doolittle and make her practise using a candle flame, words like home, harm, happen. I would have to teach her to watch for the flickering flame every time she made the 'h' sound. Would that be safe? I wondered.
I had had a hard time retraining my elder one as it is, he had a kindergarten teacher who pronounced 'h' as 'hech'
My current issue with his school though is that the kids seem to have a fake American accent. They speak in sentences which end in the words "and stuff" and use the word "like" even when they are not expressing any appreciation or indicating similarity of two situations or objects. An example of such a sentence would be " I told him, like, it was going to cause stress and stuff"
Of course all these thoughts flitted through my head in milliseconds; suddenly the thought that should have struck me first, reared it's head and I asked the baby of the house, what ruckus her class had been up to that the teacher wanted them to hurry home rather than sit in class.
She looked at me nonplussed. "Mamma the Gita teacher says Hari Om, not hurry home" she patiently explained.
Ah! The spiritual classes which my parents never had the foresight to put me in. I know "My father in heaven " and can probably recite it, even if shaken out of a deep slumber without any hesitation, but try Hanuman chalisa and nada.
In the days when I was trying to wring out some non existent spiritualism from the depths of my admittedly shallow being, I questioned my mother about the poor job she had done in raising me. Not even one shloka did I know. She very calmly responded by saying "you don't need to know Sanskrit sholkas, just ask for whatever you want, in whichever language you are comfortable." Very easy.
That's what I like about the Hindu way of life. You don't have to believe in it, you don't have to practice it and still you find that you can twist the philosophy to make yourself a practising Hindu.
The religion is flexible that way. For instance if you argued that religion is irrelevant and that the best of people suffered despite never having harmed anyone, you are countered with the premise that the wrongdoings of their past life caught up with them and their good behavior in this life would ease their next one. If you cited the example of someone getting his just desserts it would be karma which would get credit for it. You can't really beat it's logic.
I had already had deeply philosophical conversations with my older one where I had tried to change his attitude from blind observance to a questioning attitude. So I had asked him if he believed in ghosts and he said they didn't exist, and his reasoning was that you couldn't see them, feel them or hear them. My next question was if he believed in God, so he says 'yes' and I countered it with his previous explanation for the disbelief in ghosts. Taken aback, he voiced the opinion that people from ancient times had expressed their faith in God's existence hence it had to be true. I negated this argument by saying in earlier days people believed that the earth was flat which we now knew to be false so how could one place too much reliance on what they said. Thoroughly confused he asked me, "so what should I believe, does God exist or not?"
I told him "I don't know, but you are free to follow any path you want and believe in whichever God you want or not, as the case may be"
Admittedly he was only seven and the question has troubled people far older and wiser than either of us.
My better half was horrified at my instructions to my child on religion. He decided to take matters firmly into his able grasp and resolved to take him to Radhaswamy Satsangs. I wasn't very worried either way. My husband suffers from a life altering condition. In laymen's terms it is called inertia. He has an abiding dislike of being forced to shift locations. Whether the root cause is congenital or environmental, I am not able to tell for sure. It could be that years of dealing with Bangalore's notoriously bad traffic had made him averse to movement. It seems more likely that this is a condition that he was born with. Newton might have studied him in his previous life form and come out with his first law.
Even on the off chance that he was able to shake off his affliction and take the kids to the aforementioned Satsang, the only change that was likely to happen was that they would become like their dad.
He was hardly the torch bearer for religious adherence. His one concession to religion was to recite a daily prayer before he opened his laptop; but since that prayer expressly thanks God for world peace and a clean and green environment, maybe an optimistic way of trying a self fulfilling prophecy, I was convinced he didn't have a direct line to God.
Here I was, trying to hedge my bets in life, married to a believer but he dilutes it all by making impossible requests instead of asking for the easy ones.
I have a couple of theories on why his prayers don't seem to be heard:
a) God doesn't exist.
b) He doesn't use a middleman, read, a priest. Hello! The procedure is the same as for a driving licence. Find a tout to get the job done. One would imagine, being a man of this world, he would know this.
c) The number of people asking for the things he wants is outnumbered by people asking for the reverse. So God being democratic and all that, chooses the larger number.
I have a very good friend who wants to start a religion of which she wants to be the supreme leader and commander (but naturally). She may be in the process of applying for a patent on this fantastic religion of which I may or may not be a life member (I'm not telling). So as it is top secret before the patent is approved, I can only let out a few important points, it would be an android based system so anyone could improve it and it might eventually be managed by artificial intelligence.
Feel free to write to me, if you want to fund this or feel free to tell VC's about us.
I was alarmed. I didn't want any teacher dropping aitches to teach her. I would have to sit her down ala Eliza Doolittle and make her practise using a candle flame, words like home, harm, happen. I would have to teach her to watch for the flickering flame every time she made the 'h' sound. Would that be safe? I wondered.
I had had a hard time retraining my elder one as it is, he had a kindergarten teacher who pronounced 'h' as 'hech'
My current issue with his school though is that the kids seem to have a fake American accent. They speak in sentences which end in the words "and stuff" and use the word "like" even when they are not expressing any appreciation or indicating similarity of two situations or objects. An example of such a sentence would be " I told him, like, it was going to cause stress and stuff"
Of course all these thoughts flitted through my head in milliseconds; suddenly the thought that should have struck me first, reared it's head and I asked the baby of the house, what ruckus her class had been up to that the teacher wanted them to hurry home rather than sit in class.
She looked at me nonplussed. "Mamma the Gita teacher says Hari Om, not hurry home" she patiently explained.
Ah! The spiritual classes which my parents never had the foresight to put me in. I know "My father in heaven " and can probably recite it, even if shaken out of a deep slumber without any hesitation, but try Hanuman chalisa and nada.
In the days when I was trying to wring out some non existent spiritualism from the depths of my admittedly shallow being, I questioned my mother about the poor job she had done in raising me. Not even one shloka did I know. She very calmly responded by saying "you don't need to know Sanskrit sholkas, just ask for whatever you want, in whichever language you are comfortable." Very easy.
That's what I like about the Hindu way of life. You don't have to believe in it, you don't have to practice it and still you find that you can twist the philosophy to make yourself a practising Hindu.
The religion is flexible that way. For instance if you argued that religion is irrelevant and that the best of people suffered despite never having harmed anyone, you are countered with the premise that the wrongdoings of their past life caught up with them and their good behavior in this life would ease their next one. If you cited the example of someone getting his just desserts it would be karma which would get credit for it. You can't really beat it's logic.
I had already had deeply philosophical conversations with my older one where I had tried to change his attitude from blind observance to a questioning attitude. So I had asked him if he believed in ghosts and he said they didn't exist, and his reasoning was that you couldn't see them, feel them or hear them. My next question was if he believed in God, so he says 'yes' and I countered it with his previous explanation for the disbelief in ghosts. Taken aback, he voiced the opinion that people from ancient times had expressed their faith in God's existence hence it had to be true. I negated this argument by saying in earlier days people believed that the earth was flat which we now knew to be false so how could one place too much reliance on what they said. Thoroughly confused he asked me, "so what should I believe, does God exist or not?"
I told him "I don't know, but you are free to follow any path you want and believe in whichever God you want or not, as the case may be"
Admittedly he was only seven and the question has troubled people far older and wiser than either of us.
My better half was horrified at my instructions to my child on religion. He decided to take matters firmly into his able grasp and resolved to take him to Radhaswamy Satsangs. I wasn't very worried either way. My husband suffers from a life altering condition. In laymen's terms it is called inertia. He has an abiding dislike of being forced to shift locations. Whether the root cause is congenital or environmental, I am not able to tell for sure. It could be that years of dealing with Bangalore's notoriously bad traffic had made him averse to movement. It seems more likely that this is a condition that he was born with. Newton might have studied him in his previous life form and come out with his first law.
Even on the off chance that he was able to shake off his affliction and take the kids to the aforementioned Satsang, the only change that was likely to happen was that they would become like their dad.
He was hardly the torch bearer for religious adherence. His one concession to religion was to recite a daily prayer before he opened his laptop; but since that prayer expressly thanks God for world peace and a clean and green environment, maybe an optimistic way of trying a self fulfilling prophecy, I was convinced he didn't have a direct line to God.
Here I was, trying to hedge my bets in life, married to a believer but he dilutes it all by making impossible requests instead of asking for the easy ones.
I have a couple of theories on why his prayers don't seem to be heard:
a) God doesn't exist.
b) He doesn't use a middleman, read, a priest. Hello! The procedure is the same as for a driving licence. Find a tout to get the job done. One would imagine, being a man of this world, he would know this.
c) The number of people asking for the things he wants is outnumbered by people asking for the reverse. So God being democratic and all that, chooses the larger number.
I have a very good friend who wants to start a religion of which she wants to be the supreme leader and commander (but naturally). She may be in the process of applying for a patent on this fantastic religion of which I may or may not be a life member (I'm not telling). So as it is top secret before the patent is approved, I can only let out a few important points, it would be an android based system so anyone could improve it and it might eventually be managed by artificial intelligence.
Feel free to write to me, if you want to fund this or feel free to tell VC's about us.
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