It is
canonisation time over in
Pope-dom. The funny thing is that the Pope himself is involved in the process of the Vatican rubber stamping the sainthood of a person. The person can then be
offically worshipped without fear of persecution from the officials of course :)
I say, the process is kind of bureaucratic, ain't it? I will stretch it further and say that it is also very elitist :) Why should the church decide who is a saint and who is not?
Over in our land of Hindustan our daily lives are governed by bureaucracy but not our religion, you see! The Hindus are empowered! We can start worshiping whoever we want to. Everyone and everything is valid game.
We have gods and also goddesses. (Yes really we are quite an
equal society that way when it comes to the male vs female thing nevermind the issues of
skewed sex ratios though.)
We even worship stand alone human organs, genitals to be precise. We maintain equality of the sexes in this too, worshiping both the
male and the
female organs.
Sometimes we absorb Gods from other religions too by simply declaring the other God to be an incarnation of one of our Gods as in the case of
the Buddha.
Although I am an atheist, I feel this is where Hinduism beats the crap out of the monotheistic religions. We can deify almost anything when it comes to God and it fits well in our religion's (thankfully loose) framework. Regardless of the merit in worshiping someone in Hinduism it is ok for common people to canonize a person of their wish be it Amitabh Bachchan or a obscure sadhu baba.
And it is only fit that if we can idolize Amitabh as a God, it is also the duty of our news channels to report over-enthusiatically throughout the day if the God has a stomach ache.
PS: There is no restriction on who is worthy of deification althought there are cases where who can worship has created controversies e.g. we have sexist temples that do not like fertile women as worshipers over at
Sabrimala. The website title says
Sabarimala-The pilgrimage is a symbol of love, equality, and devotion
with the following paragraph in the main page to justify the
equality Unlike certain Hindu temples, Sabarimala temple has no restrictions of caste or creed. The temple is open to males of all age groups and to women who have either passed their fertility age and those before reaching the stage of puberty.
Their definition of equality is just a bit different.. all are equal.. but if you are a fertile woman, tough luck, our equality function is not defined over your set.
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