A Guide to Being Hindu

My intent of writing this blog is not for the traditional scholar who studies the texts for much of his childhood and youth. This is meant to be a chat with my now grown-up kids. And I was quick to realize that they are really not interested in it. At least not yet. But there will come a time to understand it. Let me start by saying that there is no such thing as "Hinduism". It is a convenient term coined by British colonial missionaries in the early 19th century to identify Indians who were neither Christian nor Muslim. A term for the "others". And it was the British colonials who perpetuated "Hinduism" as a religion. Not surprisingly, even most Hindu believe that it is a religion. Things are changing though. Whether the Modi government is to be credited for this resurgence is debatable, as his government has, unlike previous governments, only stopped damaging Hindu interests, whereas all previous governments deliberately made minority appeasement ...

I was born Hindu. I always thought it was one religion, just like Christianity and Islam. Hinduism for me was going to a temple occasionally. I don't remember the occasions, just that we did go. And every visit was somehow lots of fun. Like a picnic. Once we even climbed a hill on horses. And there was a cave we had to slide in on our belly. "This cave was created by an arrow!" My jaw must have dropped open, because my mother asked me to close it. Her point was that there was someone coughing in the cave just ahead of us. We could stand up in the cave. There was a stream running through it, that did not go out the way we had come in as the entrance was raised. But the stream was definitely flowing. And it was pitch dark, with just a faint light in the distance. Then my sister, who was just five or six years old at the time, fell into the water. And I remember a lot of yelling and screaming. My mother was on her hands and knees in the water. I too bent down to see...