Heaven at Every Crossroad

Romantics glamorize, critics satirize. The bustle of fast paced life in an urban environment in any Indian city is awe-aspiring and nauseating all at once.

From the intermingled sweat laden bodies rubbing against each other whilst commuting to work to the whizzing past of automotive marvels of every shape and size rushing from destination to the next, everything is a blur.

Yet, somewhere in the midst of this maddening crowd of mechanized humans, inane cattle, rabid canines, and waning flock of city-dwelling birds, at every possible intersection of major roads or arterial junctions stand quaint little structures offering sanctuary to the cornea of religious beliefs. They are the symbol of today’s veneration to the divine: built towards a notion, paid obeisance enroute,  and then forgotten in the commotion.

These tiny dwellings of the gods offer neither glory to the divinity they house nor the space to their devotees to be able to offer any. If built to be sentenced to dereliction, why construct these miniscule minarets of misfit magnanimity?

Are they reminders of the mockery that we have made spirituality into or a proof of the antagonized history of communal disharmony groaning within the society manifested into religious zealotry growing out of the earth like billboards of crimes committed by people against each other in the name of some god for whom this of no consequence at all?