How Hurt Religious Sentiments Work?
A WhatsApp Family Group Conversation That Might As Well Be Our Country
How It Started
After the death of a family member due to Covid, and the subsequent hospitalization of another family member, I joined a few family WhatsApp groups for broadcasting health updates. I could’ve left after my family recovered, but I noticed some staggering forwards.
Communal posts like ‘Bollywood Ka Islamikaran’ ( Translation: Islamification of Bollywood), Unsubstantiated claims like Padma Awards 2020 having no cricketers, politicians, and Bollywood celebrities; Legends presented as ‘Real’ History — Mohd. Ghori was murdered by Shubhrak, Prithvi Raj’s horse, to avenge his master’s death. (Curious how historians could establish a horse’s motives academically?)
Maybe I wanted my relatives to learn fact-checking & critical thinking. Or maybe I was just a belligerent prick. Or maybe both but I took a stand on every time verifiable misinformation was forwarded. Then happened the series ‘Tandav’.
The Discussion:
The discussion was a whirlwind. A bunch of people throwing all kinds of topics, interspersed by slights, slurs, labels, and put-downs. One part of it though serves pretty well as an example of what a slippery slope a hurt religious sentiment is.
One of the issues a relative had was Naarad Muni was portrayed clownishly. I then gave an example of a few old religious movies where Naarad Muni was portrayed clownishly (Hari Darshan, 1972). These movies weren’t ‘edgy’. They meant to appeal to the religious and the collections show they did. But now, even that was blasphemy. Every movie portrayal of anything religious was bad because it wasn’t from Shastras. Note how quickly the scope of hurt religious sentiment expanded from ‘edgy’ (read gimmicky) web series to any religious movie.
And then, the relatives/admins blocked any replies except them. After which, they declared their moral victory.* If that doesn’t describe the state of the country, I don’t know what does.
I’ll end this article with a memory. It wasn’t always like this. These relatives didn’t always react this way to religious jokes. In fact, some of them cracked religious jokes as adults. Here’s a joke a relative told me during less polarized times:
A pandit is walking through the jungle and a tiger ambushes him. The pandit tries saying a prayer. The tiger’s still there. The pandit tries another one. The tiger’s still there. After a while, pandit exhausts all prayers he knows. At that point the tiger replies, if you’re done let me say my prayer — Vadani kawala gheta… (Marathi equivalent of grace)
Current times look bleak. But these too shall pass. Relatives will be wiser to IT Cell influence. Then, who knows, they might even make a conscious effort to shun casteist practices. It doesn’t seem likely, but I hope. I hope.
[*If the relatives want to engage on this article, they’re welcome to. I’ll try my best to apply free speech guidelines — Broadly speaking, you’re free to express anything, as long as you don’t infringe on other people’s rights.]