Aditya Aamir
Can’t get over the fact that Swami Ayyappa is no longer entitled to his brahmacharya; that the caveat ‘celibate for 41 days’ doesn’t hold anymore for the Ayyappa devotee. The majority judgement that crucified Lord Ayyappan was a verdict on brahmacharya. The case before the top court was not of gender-inequality, it was about age-restrictions, which the wise justices chose to ignore.
It was as if Swami Ayyappan’s unique persona did not count. After all, he is at best lore and at worst a statue in stone! If the plaintiff was Christian, he would have sighed, ‘Oh! Lord, forgive them for their ignorance.’ And that would have been the end of it. But how can anybody ‘Swami Ayyappa’ keep quiet when a tradition backed by a certain logic is murdered in broad daylight?
Most of our lives we’re always trying to put back together humpty-dumpty and because mom swears by God and pop chooses not to laugh, we go to temples and with folded hands, eyes shut as if the sun was shining directly into them, pray to the Almighty with ‘please god help put humpty-dumpty back together’, please.
So it was with making the trip to Sabarimala, with caveats attached. Lay off the Gillette and don’t think Anonymous salacious. Celebrate celibacy! Lord Ayyappa is a Brahmachari. Honour him for that. Give him the respect he deserves, his status kept in mind. Follow the rules and stick to the straight and narrow. Sabarimala is unique and like the Supreme Court Justice said for Aadhaar, “Unique is better than best.” Isn’t that true?
But why are you, you know, like THAT? Like what? Like you’re doing a high-wire act. Like you don’t know the world has gone wholly tribal. Turned everything into a Man versus Woman tussle, Mars versus Venus? But the question is: What’s Ayyappa got to do with women? And what has the Constitution and gender got to do with Ayyappa?
Now, it’s done and dusted. The top court has declared in the name of gender-equality that even menstruating women can trudge to Sabarimala and worship Ayyappa. Hey, what about Ayyappa. You just killed him, reduced him to a stone figure with no soul, no agency.
Trupti Desai, if she makes it to Sabarimala, will look at the corpse of the deity she helped put to the guillotine. For, the minute brahmacharya and celibacy were excised out of the equation, Ayyappa ceased to exist, his grand tradition went up in smoke, the aroma of incense swapped for the stench of death.
Except for the lone Nightingale, everyone other on the five-judge bench chose to be Grim Reaper. The temple on Sabarimala will be rendered soulless the minute Trupti Desai and her band of gender-benders set foot on the shining hill and she will forever be known as god-slayer. In fact, she sounds more and more like an atheist, the #RightToPray movement weaponized to foist Venus on Earth.
While lawyers of all parties to the conflict spoke, Lord Ayyappa found almost no advocacy. Let’s get this clear, it’s Ayyappan Swami who doesn’t want menstruating women to fall at his feet. Ask the devi who has been waiting patiently for him to change his mind. She has a temple just outside his shrine – so close yet so far! Now, four men on a bench, feminists and TRP-hunting television media have banished her, too.
Those men who say quit bashing women because there are only select few with bad Ju Ju forget they proclaim themselves the ones speaking for the whole shebang. That they are engaged in reverse ‘distributed denial of service.’ DDOS is something kids do to knock people they don’t care for out of the internet. It is politics of self-destruction.
Wise men and women will know celibacy is more a man-thing than a womanly practice. It’s in the subconscious that celibacy because of an unidentified quirk finds no currency with women. It has got to do with Yoga and Siddhasana, the eternal pose of Lord Ayyappa in his temple on Sabarimala.
The overwhelming belief is women and celibacy are strangers on the deck and that is neither slander nor slur. Celibacy is much more than abstinence. It’s killing the sexual urge in its most primordial. And Lord Ayyappa knows there’s a big difference between riding the tiger and mounting the tigress though there’s one legend which says he brought home a tigress to milk.
It’s a sad commentary that very soon all the Ayyappa legends will die their death. The Supreme Court has no inkling the damage it has done to the Legend of Ayyappa. This whole shebang of gender-equality has got out of hand and it is so far out in space that it’s an intergalactic freak show with the majority not even in a position to envision how bad it might all get to. (IPA Service)
The post The Intergalactic Freak Show appeared first on Newspack by India Press Agency.
