Moving Gods : The Young India

Kartikey Sehgal

Journalism can be tough; especially when the issues you stand for stand right outside your door.

On the road outside the office of a newspaper, there were homeless people, scattered, in small groups-many of them migrants.

The children were almost naked but the Gods were in place; provision made for their residence on the brick wall.

A little further stood a tall building and at its base there were more migrants under the shade of some trees. The tree is the saviour and it shades even the Gods.

On the road ahead there was a Jaina temple. Under reconstruction. New stone. Better marbles. So even the poor can place their head on them and ask the Gods for money. The tree outside the temple is also a temple.

‘Dr Chowthmal Valchandji Shri Seemandharswami Jain Derasar’. Inside the temple, one worker called out to another, “Arre, Salim kahan hai?”

The temple was constricted for space. It must be facing problems from the poverty outside and the splendour inside. The Gods must be confused.

But a little ahead there was a spacious multi-crore ground where children were playing cricket. Perhaps the temple envies this space. Where would a tired person go for solace? To the confinement of religious buildings, or to some spacious ground.

The neighbour of this open-space ground is the washerwoman with her own personal temple at a tree. “The tree is a temple. It protects me”. No rituals here. No marbles.

This woman and the children playing cricket are slightly better-off than the migrants on the road. So they can have children with clothes and Gods at fixed places.

It is not temples but faith that is the commonality between different social classes. When you don’t have money, then your God moves with you. When you have money and settle down, then your God settles too.