'Tripping Down the Ganga' by Siddharth Kapila: Discovering an Awakening

Witnesses not only hold within them the history of human civilisation, but also keep its past alive for the future generations. Most societies trust those witnesses to feed them with information about their lifestyle, folklores and customs. They do not have to be human beings. They can be geographical locations with their own individual language. For India, most of these witnesses originated from the River Ganga. It carries the weight of an entire civilization and has been silently gifting its offering to us. Siddharth Kapila라이브 바카라 part-memoir, part-travelogue Tripping Down the Ganga, gives us a personal experience of the river and of how faith travels from various bodies of this kind to portray the societal, cultural and political atmosphere of the nation.

The Ganga is popularly connected to faith, mainly Hinduism, and this has led to the development of a general perception. For most people, documents, texts and pictures (static or moving) on the Ganga seem to be components leading to propagation of religion. Thus, the river has always been an external agent that deepens the root of faith. The discovery of the self remains untouched. Although if we converse with people who have really felt the river, we do get to listen to personal stories. They talk about alteration of the mind and the body. This book is a breathing, liberating extension of those oral tales which never saw the light of the day. Kapila is a medium and through him, his own faith, and the river, universal truth appears before readers. A testament of experience.

Kapila does not write the book from the perception of a saint or a devout individual. It has been woven together to discover the awakening that was dormant in him. This awakening is not religious. Rather the journey of the writer라이브 바카라 process or the process of his journey heads towards finding and investigating his own self.

His spiritual and rational contradiction with his devout mother fuels him to be introspective and skeptical towards everything he gets to observe. Memory mostly undresses the truth for the human eye. When the writer remembers the tirtha yatras of his childhood, his memories of them act as images or moments that help the adult in him to identify what should and should not be done. Faith is both free as well as tethered to propaganda. Those who desire to filter propaganda start questioning their own self. Others accept the rusty version of faith.

In the present socio-political climate of India, Hindus are directed to destroy the diversity of the religion. Skepticism is seen as the womb of atheism. Those who give such directives are unaware of saints like Charvaka or Gorakhnath, who attained the zenith of faith by questioning the conventional customs of Hinduism. The Ganga is considered a river that purifies us of our sins. But during his journey, Kapila notices how even around the environment of the river, orthodoxy and patriarchy dominate. The process of purification should have washed away the seeds of discrimination. But the saints discriminate between pilgrims on the basis of caste and class. Observation alone cannot lead us to the absolute truth. Thus, for his contentment, Kapila compares the observed phenomenon with records on the river. It gives readers a picture they can relate to. The book refuses to revolve around any specific idea. Even when the writer is keen to have a certain idea, circumstances save him from becoming deluded.

As the book progresses, Kapila presents before us the authoritarian structure of priesthood in temples. Scriptures and reality do not go hand-in-hand. A strange contradiction develops and subsequently, blurs the philosophy. The author presents many such instances before us where priests ask the pilgrims about their gotra (which brings in the factor of caste) and also make discriminatory moves to stick by conventional rules and regulations. In any religion, such acts lead to devolution of not only the religion, but also that of an entire community that believes in a supernatural entity.

People in relationships often speak about red flags when they are searching for the right person to pick as their lover. We are also related to religion in a similar manner. But when our faith becomes senseless and blind, it leaves very little room for us to address or even spot the red flags. Politics has always shown interest in claiming the idea of religion. With time, the heads of religious bodies encouraged political ideas to prosper in the realms of their own faith. This particular red flag is still an important topic that we are afraid of acknowledging. Kapila brings in the issue of Ayodhya to project the growth of Hindu nationalism and later, also notes how most temples and their rituals manipulate people only to turn them into tourist spots. The entire system operates on fear.

It is unfortunate that even after considering the river as a Goddess, human beings do not hesitate to pollute its body. Even after years of awareness raising initiatives, we have constantly made a mess out of the river. This leaves us with nothing but a polluted idea of religion. Tripping Down the Ganga is a fundamental book to gain a deeper understanding of India라이브 바카라 history, culture and politics. It manages to strip the veil that covers the country라이브 바카라 bleak reality.