"Why don't you wear a Bindi?" asked the older person to the girl in her teens. "I like it this way. We, as Hindus have such freedom and no one issues a death threat to us." replied the girl, who knew her Hindutva. I pitched in.
"Good that you know your freedom. Do you know there are various stages of freedom?"
The girl hesitated, the elder who asked the question first helped her. "We have the freedom to choose our Gods. One day you feel like worshipping Meenakshi and the next day you feel like worshipping Krishna. Or, you may choose to not worship at all. In Abrahamic religions, people don't have that freedom."
"Does it mean there are no atheists in Islam or Christianity?" asked the girl.
"Yes, for example, the punishment for apostates is death in Islam," said the elder.
I added:
"By exercising this little freedom now, you may be giving up the larger freedom of the next generations. Do you realize?"
"When you don't follow small rituals, you can't get your children to follow them. In two generations, they may be left with no tradition to call their own. In the absence of comforting rituals and symbols, ideologies enter to fill the gap. In their moments of weakness, Abrahamic religions enter and take away the higher levels of freedom. As a Hindu, you are exercising the lower levels of freedom, and only as a Hindu, you can get to the higher levels of freedom. The important life goal for a Hindu is to aspire for the highest levels of freedom. Look around the people in other religions now. Do you think they have freedom - higher or lower? What do they have to claim culture and aesthetics as their own? Do you want that to happen to your children or grandchildren?"
I hope the girl gets the message. I believe this is one of the reasons for the spread of Christianity in Hindu and Pagan communities. A few hundred years ago, most Jathis used to wear the sacred thread. Now, see which Jathi resists Christianity the most.
As people migrate, they don't get to follow their traditions in their new environments. They can't wear their religious symbols; they can't celebrate their festivals. Their culture remains only in their memory, that too for just a generation.
Look at the rise of wokeness in migrated communities that are no more in touch with their traditions. Wokeness is just as bigoted as the Abrahamic religions.
As Hindus, if we don't take our symbols and rituals seriously now, there won't be anything to call Hindu culture; worse - it would be communism, liberalism, or Abrahamic faiths that would be running riot (sometimes literally) in our societies.
