Yes, you guessed it. Just say “Ramadan is coming” and a sudden dread fills their heart. As soon as it is said they want the thought banished lest it may linger and spoil their mood, and the person who says it is considered rude, not fit for polite company. Of course, for the pious and pretentious this is the most blasphemous thing one could say, but I’m not talking about them.

I’m talking about Muslims Lite, the kind who were born into the religion, given a Muslim name and faith, and were conditioned into accepting its ways and norms the way we are conditioned into accepting schooling, market forces, marriage, taxes, traffic rules etc. In short, they are Muslims for no fault of their own. Or, to put it more delicately, of no choosing of their own.

So, once a Muslim is always a Muslim. That is the general norm, although there will always be an odd apostate here and a victim of reason there. Even then, neither of them has much to fear, for their lack of faith was preordained. The Quran clearly says that it’s up to Allah whom He makes believers and whom He does not. Of course, Muslims Lite do not know this, nor do they care. And the mullahs even if they knew would never let on, because revealing the finer points of revelations does not make good business sense.

Muslims Lite tend to struggle with their Muslim identity like they do with their, say, skin colour, but as they grow old and are cast into the chaotic world of cultural diversity they begin to cleave to their Muslimness and even begin to take pride in it. Yet, it is rare for anyone of them to take that leap of faith and become truly religious. For them religion is a little more than a cultural thing. It gives them an identity, a community and social occasions where men and women can come together to gossip and kvetch about the world.

Their knowledge of religion is sketchy and almost always second-hand based on hearsay. For them religion is rituals, and that’s all they care about as it makes them feel and look like Muslims. Practice of formal religion, superficial and perfunctory, is as far as they would go in being religious.

And I’m with them all the way. No amount of devoutness or deep study of religion will bring them any closer to what is promised. There are no guarantees – none in this life and even fewer in afterlife, no matter what the scriptures say or how the mullahs interpret them. As for mullahs, Muslims Lite treat them with snickering contempt. But if you’ve the misfortune or the stupidity of belonging to the priest-infested Orthodox Bohra fold then it’s mullahs who hold you in contempt and snicker in your face. Yes, such a thing is possible.

Muslims Lite tolerate mullahs only because they are needed to perform rituals and, when rituals demand, tell stories. One such story is popular about Ramadan. The legend has it that the one-month Ramadan was a real deal that Prophet Mohammed struck with Allah. During the Prophet’s trip to the Seven Heavens – Miraj – Allah prescribed six months of fasting for Muslims. The Prophet baulked at the suggestion and, fearing revolt from the believers, asked Moses to intercede, who with tact and much haggling brought it down to one month. That by any stretch is quite a bargain. But for Muslims Lite it is still 30 days too many.

Even in the best of seasons, the very thought of Ramadan unsettles their mind. But it positively unsettles their life when it arrives in summer months when the days are long, the sun is hot and the mood is not just into it. It is not just the prospect of fasting for long hours that rankles them so but the fact that they have to plan their parties and vacations around the Holy month. And heaven forbid if they have to forgo some of the fun to make room for it.

For the pious and pretentious sacrificing fun is a good thing, right up Allah’s alley, the very raison d’être of religion. But for Muslims Lite it is a waste of life. Even so, no matter how much they gripe and grovel, they have little chance against 14 centuries of conditioning that has paralysed their psyche with fear and guilt. They finally give in to the inevitable. Ramadan arrives and the dull dread in the heart, in a surprising twist, gives way to solemn piety.

There is a frantic exchange of greetings on Ramadan’s arrival – and some eager souls start it days in advance much to the irritation of Muslims Lite. The greeting’s format is pretty much standard and it normally ends with the mandatory plea asking others to remember one in prayers. Muslims Lite do not normally pray the whole year but during Ramadan they make it a point to pray regularly. As mentioned, the emphasis is on rituals. It is easy to be seen to be praying, but not so with fasting which is a quiet, private activity. This leaves the young and the pretenders ample room to play fast and loose with fasting.

Everybody is expected to fast during the Holy month, those who don’t remain mum and furtive, and then there are those – Muslims Extra Lite, the godforsaken – who are open and unabashedly public about it. Regardless, iftaar – the breaking of the fast – is something they all enjoy and look forward to. And iftaar, after fasting and prayer, is the most important ritual, and perhaps the only one that takes up Muslims Lite’s most time, thought and enthusiasm.

But say what you may, after the first few days of sleep deprivation and tea-less, heavy-headed mornings Ramadan settles into a nice rhythm of fast and break-fast, and Muslims Lite begin to enjoy the religiosity of it all. Except that by the end of the first week everybody is soundly constipated. Barring the digestive and sleep problems, a diffuse air of spirituality begins to hang over their homes and Muslims Lite go about their day with stoic self-control hoping as hell that all this that they are subjecting themselves to will come good on the Day of Judgement.

Or is this all a hoax? The doubt is always at the back of their mind. But they go through the paces anyway, not wanting to take any chances. Because perchance if all this turns out to be true, then they have got, to put it crudely, their asses covered. Well, at least partly covered. The notion that appearance is all that matters is deeply ingrained in them– and they know it works. Detaching intention from action is the way of the world and they think it will work with God as well.

One has a hard time explaining Ramadan to non-Muslims. They actually think it is self-torture but Muslims Lite are always quick to justify it as a noble deed, a way of feeling the pain of the poor and hungry. But nobody tells them that feeling others’ pain will not make their hunger and poverty go away. Isn’t it better to feed the hungry rather than just feel their pain? Another explanation which is quite common and I believed in it for a long time is that fasting is good for your health. It helps get rid of toxins in your body (not to mention the sins of the soul). Then there are those who use Ramadan to get back in shape. Trim the fat and earn (heavenly) reward points – a win-win situation. But, to be fair, this and other such justification are only partly true.

So far as I’ve understood, Ramadan has two main objectives.

One, the sense of deprivation that day-long abstinence creates is designed to force us to realise that our life, our very survival is dependent on God’s bounties. At iftaar we are supposed to partake of food, water and other nourishment with gratitude and a deep sense of humility. Our own Thanksgiving, if you will. But it is more than that. Ramadan cuts our ego, our arrogance down to size, and shows up we humans to be what we truly are: vulnerable, weak and at the mercy of Mother Nature. Maybe, there is a Green message in there.

Two, Ramadan provides Muslims a chance to shun the material world so that they can come closer to their Creator. Fasting is their hidden, private passage to God, a way to commune with the divine. Those who have any idea of what spirituality is about will know that it makes a lot of sense. The break from unconscious daily routine – from food, water and other needs and pleasures – does create opportunity and space for God to creep into one’s consciousness. The sense of spirituality one feels during Ramadan is none other than the presence of the divine.

But there are several problems with Ramadan as it has come to be practiced. First, even most devout Muslims have no idea why they fast. Two, the whole thing is bogged down in rituals and there is little time for self-reflection. And without reflection there can be no connecting with God. Three, the sense of spirituality – if at all sensed – is too ephemeral to leave any lasting impact on one’s consciousness. Four, Muslims have been taught to fear God who demands absolute obedience. Hence the emphasis is on obeying God’s laws rather than communing with Him. Besides, any relationship based on fear cannot lead to Love – which is God itself. Five, when you’re hungry all you can reflect upon is food not God unless of course you have the self-discipline of those yogis who starved themselves in hopes of achieving nirvana. Thankfully, Ramadan was not designed to be so taxing. The sunrise to sunset abstinence was thought to be good enough. Yet, it seems to me that spiritual gain of fasting, if any, is quickly lost in the material binge of iftaar.

And for Muslims Lite iftaar is the only light at the end of the fasting tunnel. Depending on one’s social class and family tradition, iftaar can be a quick routine affair or an elaborate glutton fest. For Muslims Lite who are generally well-off the latter is normally true. My family was typical Muslim Lite, in fact any sign of more than necessary religiosity was frowned upon and actively discouraged. Although we were quite well-off our iftaar was a pretty spartan affair, perhaps in keeping with our small-town culture. Samosas and tea were pretty standard in most homes. In bigger cities and richer homes iftaar was quite a feast with a variety of fried goodies, cold drinks, lots of fruits and the customary almond encrusted dates to break the fast with.

Such luxury was unheard of in our town and our home. Minced-meat samosas was the only delicacy we knew, and to our young minds, the only reason to fast. If you fasted you got to eat more samosas. If you didn’t you not only got fewer but also survived the day on leftovers. Definitely a bad deal. Then there were occasional shaami-kababs to break the routine. And on days when there were pakoras – the lowliest of fried goodies – you felt cheated. Even insulted. But, then, it was all relative. The people who could not afford meat samosas seemed quite happy with lentil samosas or pakoras, and on a good day when they felt like it they allowed themselves meat samosas but there was more onions than meat in them and they made them small and lean.

In our home they were thankfully fat and stuffed. They felt so good in your hand, crisp brown crust with a glistening patina of oil, a perfect triangle of voluptuous goodness. Oh that first bite, crunchy and juicy, was just heavenly. Our own sensuous, culinary communion with God. And there was no such thing as enough samosas. But in a joint family with uncles and aunts and cousins there was only so much to go around. Besides, children were the least of everybody’s priority. Adult men got the lion’s share of everything. The world never seemed more unfair than at iftaar time. Where was God’s justice, I secretly and constantly wondered.

Maybe it’s because I don’t pray, I tried to rationalise. Because instead of praying I was trudging to the mosque at maghrib time (evening prayer) with a kettle of hot tea in one hand and a bundle cups and freshly fried samosas in the other. This was the iftaar fare for the men of the house who went to the mosque for prayers. Most other men would carry their own food, but the men in our house were calibrated differently. They insisted on their food delivered exactly at iftaar time so that the tea was hot and samosas crisp.

We children were pressed into service. During that 10-minute walk carrying that precious cargo I was filled with anticipation and shame. Anticipation for obvious reasons and shame because I was not among the other boys my age lining up in the back row praying. It really felt humiliating to be ferrying food like a girl while my peers were doing the boy thing. On days when I reached before time I just lingered outside the mosque trying hard to be invisible. The thing was I did not know how to pray. Well, I knew some of the stuff which we had learned by rote but I could never bring myself to practice it.

But I did not know then that those boys did not know much either. They were there for fun – pushing each other when they went into sujood (prostration), snatching caps and kurtas and harassing some old coot who happened to cross their path. I was too timid and protected for such rambunctious horseplay, and had no wish to be part of it. I still envied them, though, for they did not have to deliver food, and that they were wearing suitable “Muslim” clothes unlike me who in half-pants, gangly legs felt exposed. And ridiculous.

As soon as the maghrib prayer ended the congregation would break for iftaar and the collective sigh of relief was almost palpable. I would enter the mosque in the nick of time and melt in the crowd hoping nobody would recoginse me. Those who lived close by would rush out to their homes for a quick bite, the rest would hurry up to their respective spots, huddle around in small clutches and, squatting on their haunches, proceed to eat.

My father and uncles would come to our designated spot where I would be waiting – and the fast would be broken without much ceremony. We all ate in silence, except when someone would comment on how the tea was not hot enough or the samosas lacked salt or some such thing. By the way, the samosas for them could never be perfect. There was never any appreciation for the effort that went into making them or the humiliation involved in delivering them. I would look around to see what others were eating only to learn that the general fare and palate was fairly limited. It felt good as my private shame found temporary refuge in the smell of food and din of chatter that hung over the mosque.

When iftaar was over and before the muezzin called for the next round of prayer I would slink out and trek back home, convincing myself not to do this next year. But that never happened until fate took me to the big city where I had no choice but to claim my place among the boys in the back row. I had finally arrived. Even so, I could never come to terms with religion and my relationship with it remains uneasy and conflicted. To this day.

It’s only appropriate to end with a couplet by Faiz:

Aaayiey haath uthain hum bhi,
hum jinhein rasme dua yaad nahin

Come let us also raise our hands (in prayer),
Those of us who have forgotten how to pray

Ramadan Mubarak! God bless us all.

But of course we never get to make that choice. By the time we’re born it’s too late. Or is it? Do we choose our own life? Do we choose to be born and come into this world? Is there life before the body? Is there life after the body? Who is asking these questions? Who is reading it? Oh, the tyranny of not knowing. These are the ultimate questions which at first blush may seem ridiculous.

But when you are done blushing, done this and that and the other, done achieving success and wealth and fame, what are you left with? Satisfaction. Pride. Sense of fulfillment. Maybe. Yet there comes a time when the smugness about your successes becomes rancid. When all is said and done, a free-floating emptiness remains deep inside. A dull, un-named sense of despair silently plagues us, as if something is missing, as if you have reached someplace but have yet to arrive.

Maybe it is a bout of existential crisis that hits one at a certain age when you have seen through the arrogance of reason and the imperium of science. When you have wrestled with philosophy and high-thinking and have found them wanting. Intellect, no matter how brilliant, can only take us so far – at the end of all possibilities, at the end of all knowledge – beyond which lies the great unknown that stares back at us, mocking our learned pretensions.

This is not to belittle man’s intellectual achievements but to put them in perspective. When I was young – or rather younger – I prided in being rational, to the point of being militant about it. Bertrand Russell was god and Jean Paul Sartre the high priest. Religion was the opium of the masses and Marx the purveyor of secular nirvana. You were so cocky that you viewed all orthodoxies – religious, capitalist – with all-knowing disdain and didn’t even realise that you were clinging to one of your own. You only read books that confirmed your biases. The whole world was of course a bourgeois conspiracy and whatever was left over was laid at the door of religious bigotry. You pointed at human tragedy caused by senseless accidents and natural disasters and mocked the believers with “why is your God doing this?”.

You mistook your naïveté for intellect and used big words to impress the girls. Much later it dawned – much to your chagrin – that you actually frightened away the girls and what you considered intellect was nothing more than borrowed wisdom. You spent too much time grappling with a language (English) that was not yours, and had little time left to think your own thoughts. Certainties came easily. Impossible was nothing. You were young and feckless and full of yourself.

Maybe all this was a necessary part of growing up. You stumbled and fell, you got back up and then stumbled and fell again. You can’t even begin to imagine how much time, energy and agony was spent on defending an idea, a belief system which later turned out to be illusory. Why illusory? Because your perspective had changed. The world remained the same, only your way of looking at things had altered. But there are people who are still mired in what you now think is cow pie. And how can you be sure that your truths of today will not turn out to be the illusions of tomorrow? Perhaps, that’s what it means to grow up, to evolve from one truth to the next. Perhaps, this is what development of consciousness is all about. Perhaps, this is what life is all about.

You look at the young people of today and wonder whether they too must repeat the same routine, jump through the hoops of temporary truths. Surely, there must be a better way of growing up. At so many levels life has become so much easier for them. From vaccinations to training wheels for bicycles, modern innovations have rescued them from the “necessary” pains of growing up. If instant gratification was not bad enough, now our world is awash with instant messaging, too. The concept “here and now” uprooted from its spiritual moorings has now ironically acquired – hungrily and urgently – a new consumerist quality. Young people have more information at their fingertips and yet are none the better for it. Reminds me of T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland, again:

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The point I guess I’m trying to make is that the modern world of physical comfort and technological advancement is the best deal the young of today have got. But when it comes to making sense of this world, of this universe, and our place in it, why are the young people left high and dry without a clue, without a signpost. Not that the grown-ups are any better. We are all in the same boat, rudderless. But age and experience inevitably bring wisdom, and most people tend to reach a place of peace. But the journey to that place, despite all the modern ingenuity, is still fraught with pitfalls.

And somehow, despite ourselves, we trust that our civilisation if we abide by it long enough will make things better for us. This is what the people of all previous eras have sincerely thought. And we continue that legacy. We think good education is all we need to solve our problems. If only the whole world was educated.

The truth though is that schools are elaborate baby-sitting programmes (to take care of the children while parents are slaving away) designed to brainwash us with irrelevant facts and snuff out the spark of life from young lives. And years of schooling which we unjustifiably call education gives us a little more than a means to a livelihood. Those with drive, ambition and luck make it good, those who have none of these just make do.

In the end, everyone comes out the same: clueless and dead. And the drama of life continues haphazardly as it ever has for millennia. We can take pride in being modern, educated and savvy. Science and technology may have given us countless comforts but at the same time they have also made us more efficient killers. All the education and knowledge of the world just cannot shake off our moral inertia. Our flawed ways of doing things. Our ingrained habits of thought.

Count among those habits the instinctive rush to religion: in a moment of crisis, or when we are at an intellectual loose end, or when our rationality reaches the end of a tether. We think if we teach the default religion of our birth to our children we’ve done our parental duty and set our children on a path to God. Actually we’ve done no such thing except repeating the error of our parents and easing our conscience. Religions are nothing but stories about the unknown and man’s struggle with it. No one story is truer than the other. And as a general rule the more elaborate a religious doctrine the more fraudulent it is. Feeding children the fiction of God and submitting them to His ridiculous rules of reward and punishment would be funny if it were not so mind-numbing.

This is not to say spirituality doesn’t count. It does, but religions have nothing to do with spirituality. And spirituality itself, overused and over-rated, has nothing to do with making sense of this universe and our place in it. If science is superficial and religion hokum then what do we have to go by? Where are our certainties?

The answer apparently lies in mystical wisdom known to the masters for centuries. If ancient sages and modern mystics are to be believed, it all comes down to the self. Or rather not knowing our true self. They say life’s suffering stems from the false belief that we are this body, that we are this life. According to them, the only reality is the reality of the self – that sense of being, that sense of awareness, that sense of presence that animates you, that courses through your body, that makes you tick. That permanence amidst the transient. This the truth, unadorned by religion and unencumbered by ritual.

This reality, the true nature of self, can only be experienced, it cannot be understood, it cannot be taught, it cannot be explained. Words no matter how eloquent fail to describe what is known as the Oneness of Being, the sense of the Absolute, the taste of the Supreme. The Brahma. To the uninitiated all this may sound gobbledygook, and not without reason weaned as we are on the thin gruel of mass religion. The difficulties in the path to Self are many, and limitations of human language and human knowledge make it only worse. Besides, this is not a communal, group activity. It is necessarily an individual, private, solitary enterprise. It is not a belief system nor some New Age pap.

The search for Self – commonly understood as God, Allah or whatever one may call it – as expected begins with the self. It’s not out there but in here, within one’s self, in the silence, the stillness and the emptiness of being. It’s that sense of presence which is always with you no matter what. It is you. In order to glimpse it all you have to do is quieten your mind just for a moment and look within, look at yourself. Again and again.

It is claimed that if you do this often enough you will reach a stage where the universe and its mysteries will fall in place. From the Vedas to Lao Tsu to Buddha to Sufis to Maharishis – all have validated this truth down the ages. The tragedy is not that we have forgotten our true self but also the teachings about it. T.S. Eliot sums it up brilliantly in Wasteland:

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

In a few days if not weeks Haiti will fall off the front pages and prime time news, and the media will find something else to latch on to. And we will follow it loyally to get our next fix. Haiti will go back to being normal: poor, violent, deprived, on the margins of global consciousness. The earthquake only heightened its misery and brought it into sharp focus. But for decades Haiti has been constantly rocked by economic and political quakes. Unbeknownst to us.

The world economic system based on profit and driven by greed has created conditions in which a few rich countries live off of the wealth of countries that are rich in resources but whose people live in dire poverty. Of course, all this has been analysed to death – from Adams to Marx to Keynes. Those who have read even a bit of any of these worthies know what the routine is. I bring it up only to highlight how, as a human race, we have got so accustomed to, desensitised to unimaginable inequalities of human life.

There is nothing “natural” about economic disasters. They are man-made, even if earthquakes are not (but the jury is still out on that one). But of course the mass media and our masters – in corporations, governments and universities – will never tell us this. And most of us do not care to know. We go with the flow, from media sensation to media sensation.

If we were talking about this in the context of a religion we should be branding ourselves as blind and irrational. But our modern religion of endless economic growth and endless consumption is so secular, serving the gods of the market. Nothing blind or irrational about it. Our collective conscience will be aroused by a Haiti-like disaster every now and then. But for the rest of the time we will allow the media to rule our lives and let our conventional wisdom make sense of our world.

The thing is that natural disasters can’t be brushed under the carpet. The media makes a big deal about it. But man-made disasters – resulting from the robbing of poor countries, wars, corporate greed – can be nicely packaged and made to appear as a natural order of things. No unreasonable demands are made on our compassion and generosity. We must save those for another earthquake, another tsunami. The tsunamis of everyday life are neatly tucked out of view. We live in an Orwellian reality. Obama gets the Nobel Peace Prize and justifies war without even wincing. Did we hear even a tweet of irony about that in the media?

In any case, the fact is that for the most parts, from the epic of Gilgamesh to the latest airport page-turner we humans have been telling the same story over and over, albeit with new twists and varied emphases. The narrative themes are well known: love and betrayal, sin and redemption, courage and funk, on and on… all the elements that define the human condition. The story has remained the same, but it’s the telling of it – in art, books, movies – which has kept our creative juices flowing.

My creative juices, such as they were, were used up in making a living. I do not have any story to tell. Maybe anecdotes, and some dry, borrowed thoughts. So, although I do not have anything terribly original to say, I will off and on, time and mood permitting, soil these “pages” with my ramblings. And try to make them “look” original :-). Of course, I’ll be doing it entirely for myself, writing what I think and feel. One can’t imagine how blessed I’m – we are – to have the freedom and opportunity to do so.

When I worked in a newspaper this was obviously not the case, and still isn’t with all the mainstream media owned by big corporations who ply their own agendas. In late 90s I wrote an article about the US sanctions against Iraq in which I was critical of the American role and its imperial tendencies. The editor read the article, looked up at me and said, “you spell trouble”. He wanted to water it down, I said no. The article never saw the light of day.

With the power of the internet and blogging, critical thought and alternative views do not have to suffer a similar fate. Thank God. Of course, independent opinion remains obscure and marginalised, and does not have the reach of the mass media but at least it’s in the public domain and people have access to it. If they can find it, that is. And if you have found this and are reading this, welcome. Do come back, you may find something worth your while.