This article refers to my profile picture which I published on Facebook today evening. I was, by birth, a Sikh, and I tried my best to understand the ideologies of Sikhism. I followed the life span of ten gurus, the way they lived, the messages they shared with the masses, the good deeds they did, the bad deeds they did and turned them into good deeds by giving strong arguments against the justification of their actions, I went through everything. I wrote an article in March titled “The God, The Devil & The Human” in which I presented my personal views & counter views of popular religions around the world. The article has been liked more than it is hated. I wondered what could have been the reason of its success in the times where people are just looking for a reason to kill anyone on the name of religion. Wars are waged, riots take place, youth and populations are misguided by those in power and are used against the same youth and populations.
Anyway, coming back to the picture I published; some of my very good friends have criticized my decision of renouncing Sikhism, some have broken years long friendship, some have cursed me publically, but only a countable number of people have supported me or have accepted my decision whole heartedly. I wonder why do people get sentimental when a religion is directly involved in an issue? I see religion as a garbage and the garbage can be dropped very easily. I just had to see that it is garbage. Yes, it did require courage to take this decision of dropping my garbage because I was carrying it since the time of my birth. At first, I was afraid of being empty, even if I had to cling to garbage only, I chose garbage rather than being empty because emptiness frightened me. But, at a certain point, it became impossible to keep up with so much of garbage inside. It felt messy, it felt sickening to even think about it.
Terrorist kill a Sikh family in Kashmir and Sikhs in Jammu call up a week’s strike. Who suffers? The very same people who call the strike. A railway coach in Gujrat is set on fire and Hindus & Muslims start killing each other. Who kills & who gets killed? The very same people who are born out of a similar process, who ate similar food, who talked similar language, who used similar resources to survive. With so much of similarity, where does it leave a scope for religion to come in between and tell the otherwise similar people that they are different? A group sings Vedic hymns in a temple, a group recites Koranic verses, a group sings the words of praise for ‘The Lord’ in a Gurudwara, a group gathers every Sunday in a church and prays for peace and prosperity, and all these groups consider themselves different. Why does this difference exist?
Can you imagine a world without religion? Have you ever seen two dogs fighting over the issue that one is white and the other is black? Or the one has a tail and one does not? Have you ever seen two elephants, two monkeys, two sparrows quarrelling over the issue that they are different? No, you never have and you never will because every other species on the planet accept the fact that they are not different. No one is different from the other. We are all alike. My decision of cutting my hair should not bother you. If it does, you, my friend, have a serious problem.
God is not a social experience, it is a very personal one. I deny visiting Gurudwara on the simple fact that I don’t believe there is any sense in it. It is utter nonsense. So is visiting a temple, a mosque or a church for that matter. When God becomes our personal experience, we get free from being a Sikh, a Hindu, a Mohammedan or a Christian. Religions don’t want us to be free. Religions want us to be prepared for a war on all fronts, social, mental and spiritual. Religions want us to defend our respective view points about them at all costs to ensure our space in heaven. I find it laughable to have an experience of living a life in hell in this world to attain a place in heaven after death. Just to think of it, what happens to a dead body is no less than hell. The bodies which are buried are eaten up by worms and insects of all kinds and ‘believers’ still believe that each one of the dead will be resurrected at the judgment day. The bodies which are cremated have another package for their souls. A ritual is to be performed every year to make sure the departed are doing well, living peacefully and having a good time in heaven because their children and relatives are religiously and blindly following a thousand years old ritual.
I have mentioned it several times in the past as well, I would love to see a world without religions, a world which is one, where the person standing next to you is simply a human. I want you to just think about it. Imagine, you wake up tomorrow and you see no temples, no mosques, churches or any other religious institutes anywhere around. You will see that all the seriousness has suddenly disappeared. Seriousness is a disease. Only the sick mind is serious. The youthful, the young, laugh, sing, dance and giggle. I am against all those religions which make man serious, and almost all the religions do make man serious. Religions destroy all possibility of laughter, laughter seems to be profane. But I say it confidently, laughter is the most sacred phenomenon this world has ever witnessed, because it is above all discrimination. People don’t laugh because of religion, they laugh because they are happy from within. Robots, that’s what religions create, non-thinking human beings.
So, I chose not to live like a robot and every robot around me has stood against me. Let me tell you, I will live individually and love myself wholly. My life will not be decided by anybody else, but by my own intelligence. The very fragrance of my life will be that of freedom. Not only I will live in freedom, I will allow everybody else to be free as well. You all are free to hate me for my decision of renouncing Sikhism but you are not allowed to interfere in my life. My life is very sacred to me, my freedom is the most important virtue of my life and I can sacrifice anything for my freedom, be it my respectability, be it my status or be it my life itself.