Peace of Mind: And how to ruin it

I am at the beach. It is a beautiful morning. THe sun is coming up. There are glimmers all over the ocean, which is as placid as a millpond. There are dolphins in the distance, about 4-5 of them, and they're performing interesting maneouvres, either mating or feeding.Neverthless, it was fascinating to watch their bodies gleam in the sunlight and to watch the spouts of steam issue from their blowholes as they frolicked around. The pelicans were gliding along the waves. There is something very elegant about pelicans. I could go as far as to say that they are the only elegant denizens in this blighted marshland otherwise known as florida. Everything was all right with the world, and to amplify my good mood, the beach was deserted. Perfect time to do a little bit of self-hypnosis/meditation to steel myself up to face the idiots at work. But no, trouble looms on the horizon..Since i face the sun, whenever i close my eyes i can feel the light hitting my eyelids and everything is a brilliant red with eyes closed, but this time there was a shadow looming over me, for a while i thought it was a passing cloud and continued my ruminations undisturbed...then that somehow didn't feel right...there were odd sounds..and something licked my face... I turned, and there was a species of mottled old lady standing behind me. I winced and prepared for the worst.... No, she didn't lick me you perverts, it was the bloody dog.
"Are you meditating?" ....well, not anymore woman...
"I just saw you sitting there and felt like I had to talk to you"
I don't know what it is, but there is something about the sight of a person sitting alone and for once, enjoying the fucking solitude that seems to rankle the spirit of every ditzy sociable person within a 50 mile radius and makes them want to go about spewing chaos and irritability into an otherwise peaceful melting pot of emotions.
Then she went on about how she was from new york city, and then people around her had started dying, and about how it really got her thinking about the purpose of life, and about how she wanted answers....good god..
anyways...i kept thinking...'so where lieth the barbed point buried beneath honey'd words?'...and promptly enough it poked through..."then i found christ"
ugh.
At that point, i had to intervene, i had to tell her i was meditating for a reason,something...i hadn't said a word throughout this soliloquoy and unless cut off, she would continue to extend herself and nail her toes to her pedestal. The only thing i managed to bleat out was..."Well i have."....that was enough for her..for the next 20 minutes, she went on about the king james bible, and about how I should read that instead of other bibles, and then she also told me that she doesn't read that bible but instead reads the original hewbrew, whereupon i had to politely interject to find out if she really was a learned lady, in which case she'd have my respect, or just another locust from the Religious Yahoo swarm that's currently ravaging the country. No, she doesn't know hebrew, she uses a lexicon. A pretty nice way to describe a dictionary with frills. How do you appreciate prose if you translate everything to english anyways? I decided not to ask her that as that would only add to the fire...so on and on she went...at one point i had to stifle a giggle, i was thinking of odd things to suddenly yell out loud about...something on the lines of, "The Asiatic Lion was once a majestic species, its range stretching all the way to Rome! It's chief diet consisted of antelope, buffalo, and also the occasional Christian at the local Colosseum."
instead, like the idiot i am, i said.."I know all this. You see, I Don't like religion. I grew up a hindu, in a muslim neighbourhood, and went to a jesuit school where i saw priests doing bad things. I don't like religion" "but religion is a guideline, life is so much better with God"........i love you god, but save me from your followers. It was a long time before i could get rid of her. I totally lost sync with the mood, had to go late for work, and listen to the ceo of my company make it sound like his company was actually a charitable organization that brought happiness to so many people. in short, my day sucked.
Anyways, the point of the whole thing is, if you have peace, and if you are at an easy equilibrium with your surroundings, please, keep it to yourself. There is nothing that betrays insecurity as effortlessly as proselytyzing, besides, people can sympathize more easily with your pain than with your pleasure..and well, use your head..anyone who tells you that they are right and that most of the world is wrong is either fantastically arrogant, in which case they should be trucked off to Auschwitz, or they are hopelessly insecure in which case they have no business feeding you bullshit they wish they bought, and that brings me to the point of religion. I hate it. For all of you in other countries who think somewhat highly of the Indian diaspora in the US, i have some jarring news for you. They are a bunch of putzes. No doubt they are educated, but so is every mugpot who can learn hamlet by heart, miss all the beauty but is perfectly capable of telling you on which page Polonius got poked hiding behind the tapestry, but that's not what bothers me. IT's their religiousness. I should be tolerant you say, but i can't be tolerant of intolerance, and i tend to get very worked up when i go to someone's house for a nice meal of sambar+rice and end up listening to bullshit like "WE MUST STAAP THI MUSLIM APPEAJMENT!! NAUW!!".."we must build tembil in ayodhya"...." all muslims in india are muslims first indians later" ...?!?!?!?! This VHP poster-boy stuff coming from graduates from good colleges who've spent the better half of their lives in good families, you know, middle to upper middle class people, the arterial blood of the country..first of all..everytime you make a statement beginning with all or most but missing a reference to observed population, and not estimated population, it is patently false. to know that all muslims are bad, or most hindus are idolators, you'd have to know all hindus, or all muslims, and out of that you must have done a percentage study to determine the true opinion of every member of your subset and then have these facts on hand to support your argument, and even THEN you could be wrong, because some dick in that subset would have lied. That does sound ridiculous, doesn't it? To me it sounds about as ridiculous as "All muslims hate hindus"

not everyone is like that of course..there's also the daler mehndi crowd and a small section of the population that actually does think straight. you'll know them when you meet them by how refreshed you feel after a 10 min discussion with them...not the daler mehndi types. You'll know those by how refreshed you feel after getting away from their clutches and their "what yaar that bhangra beat is classss yaar..oye soni kudi" words of wisdom.

but anyways, religion has done nothing spectacular for india within the past 50 years...unless you consider Partition movies mesmerizing. We have "rich cultural heritage ok", which is basically our crutch. No power, cultural heritage. Poverty, cultural heritage. It's like a kid who fails in all subjects but does excellently at english grammar(i am using a real example. that kid was me). "You FAILED MATH???AND PHYSICS????" "but mommy..i did so well in Make Sentences!!"... Religious riots, cultural heritage. Our answer to everything, and no doubt it is there. I love it. I love going to temples. I love reading old texts and getting in touch with a forgotten past, it is no doubt very exotic, but when i am woken in the middle of the night by a phone call from my mom asking me to listen to "vishnu sahasrananams because it spreads good vibrations around the house", i tend to go on my God is dead trips....but otherwise culture can be very refreshing, and gives you a good feel for what you are, and what you can or want to be....but at what price? There are more widows than there are buddhas. Is it worth it? Give a human being an idea and he will corrupt it in an instant, and that's what's basically happening. Why does being proud about hindu mean having to hate muslims/christians for so many people? Why this (check previous post) binary logic? Why can't people follow the middle ground...actually, why be proud about anything? why be proud to be hindu? is it a culmination of personal achievement? born 30 seconds later you could be ethiopian, or worse, catholic..

anyways, i came out of that discussion feeling thoroughly disgusted. It's things like that that make me feel disgusted at everything that goes on back home. I love the country so much, and it is really painful to see it get raped by people like this, in the name of religion/caste/creed/. I don't have orgasms if i see saffron but I am a hindu, in terms of my upbringing,the sense of comfort i feel in sitting by myself in ruined temples, praying to gods that i am on more familiar, personal terms with(when i am content or afraid enough to believe in one). i don't feel a need to be proud of it, the same way i don't see a reason to be proud of who i am. We're six billion insignificant little shits swirling around in a universe that doesn't give a damn. It's about time we realized that if we're insignificant, so are things like caste,creed, race. Nobody cares, least of all your God. What's better? Dying and killing for a god, or living without one?
I'm done. I don't feel like I've done complete justice to my feelings, but if i continue i risk being stoned, or worse, sound preachy, which is exactly what i want to avoid.
Moral of the story: If you see a person sitting alone on the beach, or in any place of scenic beauty, and he/she looks happy, leave them alone. That way, they will have one less reason to post stuff that ends up making you wince.