Atheism 41 – 46

This is the last and final part of my 4-part series on Atheism. The first, second, and third parts provide an insight into the several interesting turns I took along my childhood, adolescence and adulthood. It is not necessary for you to read all of them, however I feel they provide context for who I was becoming. And I hope this post will make evident that it was all right before my eyes before I actually saw it.

Lockdown: The first time in 40 years I had nowhere to be

2020 was a watershed year for the breathing human species. I was also newly single. Again. Alone in the world. Probably more alone than anyone else I thought. The silence was different. The mornings felt sad and the nights were eerie. Usually, when I was silent I would find someone around me making some sort of ripples in the air. This phase made us fear the air we breathed. While people were wearing masks, mine were falling off. I was able to see through the masked faces as my own nonsense was quiet.

By the grace of some benevolent benefactor friends I had found myself a lovely apartment to be in. It was quiet even though it opened to one of the most boisterous roads in Bengaluru. Its crowning glory was a grand balcony that oversaw the community’s swimming pool. The balcony was dotted with a dominantly magnificent christmas tree with other smaller and beautiful green and flowery plants which provided a great foreground to meditately stare at the colourful skies and sunsets that are typical to Bengaluru.

I was learning to login to Google Meets, Zoom calls, and Microsoft team meetings to work with colleagues who lived two streets away. Organizations that placed an inordinate amount of value on in-person meetings were suddenly transferring crores of rupees after having a couple of stamp sized faces smiling at them over an excel sheet or a powerpoint. The helplesness of the situation was only calmed down by the fact that we were somehow surviving while the world around us seemed to collapse.

Whatever support networks we had had just disappeared. We had to build them again in a new form on a platform that was virtual. A word that signified something wasn’t really real. And yet here we were. So, a lot of self-reliance was the model. The more privileged ones among us began to thank the womenfolk of the earlier generations who managed households consisting of joint families or even nuclear families with multiple children. Visits to pubs and restaurants were now replaced by standing in front of piles of utensils waiting to be cleaned before they magically appeared in the same sink within what seemed minutes. And the clothes. The floor seemed so dirty.

The rituals that did not reach me

Those months took several people I loved. I will not name the people here. The details are not the point of this post, and the dignity of the people involved matters more than my making a clean narrative out of their absence.

What I can write about is what came after. Hindu death rites are elaborate and insistent. There are mantras to be chanted, rituals to be performed, days to be counted, food to be cooked and not cooked, clothes to be worn and not worn, a priest to be called, a fire to be lit. I watched all of it. They were done the way it was done in our family. The way I had watched every male member in my family do it.

I tried listening to Vishnu Sahasranamam and doing Hatha Yoga (suryanamaskars and asana-based meditation mainly) to calm myself down. I remember asking my brother to share the mp3 of some carnatic classical devotional keerthanas.

None of it reached me.

The shlokas that had soothed me at twelve were just sounds at forty-two. The fire was a fire. The priest was a man doing his job. The mantras were syllables in a language I had been told was sacred. The mangalarathi bell – the one I used to ring as a boy at my grandfather’s puje – would have been ringing somewhere, for someone, at that very moment. I thought of it while standing through the rites and felt nothing at all.

This was the dichotomy I had promised, in my very first post, would be solved later in my life. It solved itself here, but not the way the seventeen-year-old me would have guessed. The philosophy and the practice had always been on different tracks. I had just never noticed, because I had never asked the practice to do real work. The first time I asked it to carry weight, it did not.

I was not angry. I was not in rebellion. I was simply, finally, being honest with myself about what was and was not happening.

What the silence let me see

The silence did one more thing. It brought back into focus four years of work I had been doing without yet understanding what I had been seeing.

From 2016, as part of a job I was fortunate to be in at the Azim Premji Foundation, I had travelled across the country managing a portfolio of grants in their philanthropic initiatives arm. The Foundation’s core idea – towards a just, equitable, humane and sustainable society – was transformative for me at a personal level. I had heard those words before. This professional stint helped me convert them from a phrase into a practical framework for looking at the world.

Most of us, in the heart of our hearts, want to live in such a society – or at least want to see it built around us – irrespective of whether we ourselves are any of those things. A fully Utopian world is probably not achievable. But if we do not even attempt to get there, we are compounding the inertia of the world with the apathy of our own choices.

What I saw on the field over those four years was hard to unsee.

Seventy percent or more of our population depends on agriculture for survival. A colleague handed me a book called – Everyone Loves a Good Drought by P. Sainath. It was about rural India of the 1980s, and almost nothing had changed nearly forty years later when I was on the field myself. All the chest-beating about majoritarianism rang hollow when the majority was living below the poverty line.

The financial inequality was striking. The social inequity beneath it was worse. The two are not separate. The social system we have run for centuries – the caste system, and yes, I am going to call it that – reflects itself almost identically in the financial structure. Both by numbers and by power. The shiny lights of the capitalist world do not change this. They just make the shadows harder to see.

We drive over rainwater drains where people do their laundry. The salary from sitting in an air-conditioned office is treated as more dignified than the same amount earned cleaning the urinals on the same floor. The educational background of the person earning the salary is irrelevant if the spotlight is on him. Meanwhile, the man holding the spotlight has that job because his father held it, and his father before him.

I had been carrying this for four years. I did not yet know what to do with it. Lockdown gave me the time to put it next to everything else I was carrying – the rituals that had not reached me, the guru I had walked away from, the philosophy I had spent twenty years inside – and ask whether any of them addressed what I had seen on the field.

None of them did.

That was when I started looking at what they were doing instead.

the bhangi and the uncle

Years before I understood any of this, an uncle came to stay with me in Chennai for a few days. I wrote about him in my second post. He brought his own portable stove and his own pre-mixes. He would not eat what my Christian cook made. He would not eat what my Muslim cook made. He lived in a flat rented from a Christian landlord, paid for in part by Christian and Muslim flatmates, and he ate his own food at night, alone, after we had finished. I called my mother to ask why. The explanation, when it came, only made it worse. It was not just about religion, it was also about caste. He would not eat from any non-Brahmin’s hand.

I filed it away then under hypocrisy. That was the wrong file.

It took me twenty years and travel across the country to realise my uncle and the village that won’t let a bhangi walk on its main street were running the same code. His was the dining-table version. The logic was identical: there is a hierarchy of human beings, that hierarchy is fixed by birth, and the people at the bottom exist to absorb work the people at the top will not touch – cooking it, cleaning it, carrying it away. My uncle would not eat food that had passed through hands he considered below his. The village would not let those same hands draw water from the same well, walk on the same road, or be buried in the same ground. Same rule. Different scale.

I had been told repeatedly, by people I trusted, that caste was not part of the system. It was a distortion, a misreading, a colonial invention, an unfortunate sociological artefact that the real tradition disowned. The Vedas were about Varna, not caste. Caste was something else. Caste was somebody else’s problem.

This is the line I had been raised inside. It is also the line that does not survive thirty seconds of contact with a sanitation contractor in any city in India.

I had spent four years before lockdown travelling for work. I had seen the hands that clean the toilets we use. I had seen the streets they live on, the schools their children go to, the bus seats other passengers move away from. I had read the book a colleague pressed into my hands, ‘Everyone Loves a Good Drought‘, and seen that almost nothing had changed in forty years. None of this was hidden. It was operating in plain sight. I just had not yet connected it back to the philosophy I had been carrying since I was eight.

Lockdown gave me the time to make the connection. The ‘all is one’ of Advaita, the universal compassion of Ramakrishna, the inner light of Sadhguru – none of them ever reached the bhangi. They could not. Reaching the bhangi would have meant naming the system that put him there, and the system was the same one that funded the ashrams, filled the satsanghs, paid the priests, and seated the patriarch at the head of the table. The metaphysics had a job. Its job was to make the social arrangement feel like the natural order of things – for the people on top.

My uncle was not a bad man. He was a kind man, a generous man, a man who would lend you money without asking when it would come back. He was also operating, faithfully, a piece of cultural machinery that depended on someone else cleaning the toilet. The bhangi is operating the other end of the same machine. I cannot honour the uncle without dishonouring the bhangi. I had been doing it for forty years. I had run out of the ability to keep doing it.

The two filters, AND MORE, applied to everything

The silence of the lockdown echoed within the emptiness of myself. A lot of what I believed was true had just fallen by the wayside. Whoever I had held on to as my guiding beacons were either gone or found out. Clarity, awareness, and trying to be-good-do-good seemed to be bad friends with belief systems.

Thought systems that survived the filters of religious bias and historical inaccuracy were accepted. However, all the thought systems unraveled by themselves. Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Swami Vivekananda, Ramana Maharishi, Osho, Senior and Junior Sai Babas, Asaram Bapu, Nithyananda, that Ram Rahim fellow, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Quran, Bible, Guru Granth sahib, so on and so forth. For some thought systems that appeared to be peaceful on the surface one had to dig deeper. For instance, Buddhism, often presented as the gentler escape route for Hindu Dalits, has its own historical record (the treatment of women in the early sangha, the violence in Sri Lanka, in Myanmar) that does not let it stand outside the audit either.

People, however, were held to a higher standard. They needed to bring clarity and awareness. Evidence of which was in the levels of compassion they displayed. Kindness became the highest form of intelligence.

An invaluable realization for me. This lens has not failed me yet. People have dropped off my social network. A childhood friend did not invite me to their wedding. Another has not bothered to call me after one phone call where we debated politics. I am not complaining just stating it as is. I take these as indicators of how we have grown as people. We seem to have diverged and we are happy where we are. At the same time, I would be remiss if I did not mention the number of people who have invited me to their life events and expressed their happiness at having me around. These were people who I still disagreed with on many things but who did not disown me. Probably they don’t know me well enough yet!

‘Vedas are about Varna, not caste’ – historically inaccurate. Caste is what Varna became in practice, and has been for over two thousand years. Not a result of the British rule. Not something that some random individual came up. We then codified it through the devastating text of ‘Manusmriti’. And today, we are crying hoarse that this is the dharma we want to uphold.

‘Spiritual India was always tolerant’ – historically inaccurate when you read about untouchability, sati, child marriage, devadasi traditions, or how Buddhism and Jainism were treated.

‘Garlic and onions are negative pranic food’ – Sadhguru. This reeks of religious bias. I have no idea how we arrived at this conclusion but if you look at the Hindu religion – you will see that Brahmins have followed this for over centuries. And look down upon those who eat it. A simple hirearchical discrimination which is inherent to the caste system. There is absolutely no scientific basis to this based on all we know. You should read more about how I came out of Isha based on his opinions that were historically inaccurate. Btw, even at Isha ashram, the people who clean is a different category of people!

Philosophies that sound like the Advaita’s ‘all is one’ sound universal. But every text it lives in is silent on the bhangi. Every commentator who explains it had a caste. Every ashram that teaches it has a kitchen, and the kitchen has rules about who cooks. The ‘all’ in ‘all is one’ turns out to have a footnote.

Looking Within

Looking within only returns what I put in. What I put in came from the same books, the same gurus, the same culture, the same caste. It was an inward-facing camera I had been told was a microscope. I had been examining my conditioning with my conditioning and calling it self-inquiry.

The label – spiritual, not religious – I bought at eighteen turned out to be the same product, repackaged. Spiritual was not the upgrade. It was the deniable version. Religion at least announced itself. Spirituality let me carry the same system without admitting I was carrying it.

Letting go of ‘spiritual’ was harder than letting go of ‘religious.’ Religious was always external – rituals, temples, festivals. Spiritual had been my refuge and identity for twenty-five years. That label was the last layer of the onion, and it was the one most painful to peel. It wasn’t peeling as much as it was a withering away. I stopped watering the identity and it disappeared.

A friend once told me this beautiful analogy while we were trying to build and grow a cricket club. I am paraphrasing his words here. He said we need to think of ourselves as a gardener. A gardener provides the necessary conditions for the plants to grow and periodically removes the weeds that are growing in the same conditions. Deweeding is as much a necessary activity as growing else the growth may be affected.

And that’s exactly where I was. What was left after all the deweeding was not another new philosophy or another new guru, it was just a quiet little tree. Much like the Christmas tree in the balcony of my flat. The sun had just set. The skies had all sort of hues and it was a quiet state to just be.

The residue

The space became quieter.
It went dark.
I could still see.
The residue.
Atheism.

No arguments. No philoshophies. No anger. No rebellion. No debating postures. Not even cleverness. No intellectual positioning. Just what was there. Not an intellectual identity to replace the spiritual one. I am not angry at a God I stopped believing existed. That would be a category error.

What atheism is, for me, the residue. What was left after every other position dissolved under honest examination. Not a position I arrived at through argument. A position I arrived in after walking through everything else.

I do not believe in God. I do not believe in a soul. I do not believe in karma as a metaphysical accounting system. I do not believe in a universal consciousness that will receive me when I die, or that received the people I have lost. I believe none of it because, when I examined each of these claims with the same filters I had once happily applied to a Guru’s politics, none of them held up. That is all atheism is for me. It is what is left.

I am not telling believers they are wrong. I am not running a campaign. Others may run their own filters and find that different things hold up. That’s fine. That is their honest work, not mine. I am simply done pretending.

I am not going to ask you to become an atheist. That according to me would be a betrayal of my own understanding of what it is. You need to arrive here on your own. If you don’t, that’s fine as well. Your journey is yours.

The naïve person is the one who actually checks. The confident people around me, the ones who said I was naïve, were not more sophisticated. They had simply stopped checking earlier. Naïveté, it turns out, was the only honest method available to me.

I walked the path. It ended where the so-called path-makers never wanted it to end – at the door, with the door closed, and nobody waiting on the other side!

Atheism is simply the state that lets me be as humane, just and equitable as I can be.

I choose to be compassionate from the fundamentals of who I am. I don’t need a license from a scripture or validation from a cult. I have it. I always had it. It came from being human, from being loved, and from receiving kindness from strangers. No tradition issued it to me. No tradition can take it away.

I am curious (I refuse the adjective – naive!). The same curiosity that made eight-year-old me ring the bell at my grandfather’s mangalarathi. It never needed the bell or the ritual. It only ever needed something to notice. It is still working. It is still your most reliable instrument.

Family. Friends. Food. Cricket. Music. Films. Fitness. This blog. The ordinary support structure of life does not require a meta-layer to feel full. The work I am doing. The conversations I have that close the gap between people without anyone needing to invoke a soul.

A few people you can be honest with. Not many. I don’t need many.

If you have read this far – thank you. If you have found some reflection of your own self when you were eight, seventeen, thirty or forty – it is probably the same journey we are on. Some of you, may recognise none of this. Both are fine. I am just writing about my journey on a public blog so that you know that there’s this path also. You do not need to walk it unless you find that it works for you. To each his/ her own.

To everyone I have parted ways with (left whatsapp groups most significantly) as I have walked this path – I wish you well in your own journey even if it takes you elsewhere.