Hindustan
Hindustan is another name for India. It means the land of the Hindus.
Most of my readers are Indian or live in India.
Some of my closest friends are Hindus. My very best friend is half Hindu, half Sikh. You know what I learned from them?
There are something like 330 million gods in Hinduism. But there can also be one God behind all those gods.
Some of the gods are women, some are men, and some are animals.
The question isn't simply how many gods there are. It's also: what do we mean by God?
Is God a person, a presence, a force, an ultimate reality, or something beyond our ability to describe?
People use different names for God but might be talking about the same thing—or might understand the divine in genuinely different ways.
I’m going to be real with you. I live in America. Christianity is the major religion around here. My vision of god is an old man.
Even though my parents tried so hard to bring me to places with other Sikhs and Hindus, they couldn’t wash away the conditioning of this country.
Luckily for me, my god has no race. Unfortunately, he has a gender. He is a man.
I regret this fact very much.
It was Navratri recently, a time when Hindus honor the feminine divine. An auntie in our community was explaining how you can invoke the power of the goddesses inside you. Kali is my favorite goddess.
She is a powerhouse. When you have to fight for what is right, you invoke Kali.
Honestly, I don’t know that much about the other Matas. But the fact that they are women inspires me.
A Hindu friend of mine, who is slightly skeptical about the existence of god, went to India and visited a Mata temple.
She said the vibrations transformed her.
Doing kirtan at Sikh camp, surrounded by a crowd of people and singing my heart out, has transformed me many times.
I have watched Black Gospel church services on TV and felt like Jesus and the Holy Spirit were present in the church.
Again, I live in a different culture. I watch American TV, unless I’m watching a terrible serial on Indian television. I do watch Bollywood movies, and some of them are brilliant, but my culture is primarily American.
My vision of religion and god is based partly on television shows, movies I’ve seen, and books I’ve read. When I was younger, I used to watch sermons by Christian preachers on TV every now and then. Some of them really inspired me.
When I talk to god, I just sort of picture this vague male presence. It bothers me that patriarchy and misogyny and everything else have done this to me.
In Sikhism, we believe god has no gender or form. He is formless.
Is my god Indian? Who knows? I can’t quite place his race.
I don’t feel like he’s a white guy, but it’s just a feeling.
I am a Sikh. Is my god Sikh?
He’s not wearing a turban; I’ll tell you that much.
nina
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