IN THE NAME OF THE LORD

Hi,

I don’t want to get all political but you have to read on with a certain degree of consternation about the recent ruckus about the sethusamundram project.

For those of you who don’t know about it here’s a brief intro.:

Current shipping routes around India have to go round sri lanka because the other route (the Palk Strait) has the “Ram’s Bridge” blocking it. The Sethusamundram project was meant to solve that. They were to remove about 48 million cubic meters of silt in the palk straight and create a channel 167 km long to make the sea in this region navigable. This will shorten the distance between the east and west coasts by about 780 km for the ships! They no longer will have to take the longer route around Srilanka. This will also be a source of greater financial income to India as all international shipment now can pass through the Indian seas in this region with the benefit of this shorter distance, saving about 30 hours of time!

This new canal construction is also said to increase the Naval security of India due to the obvious reasons of making the connections between western and eastern naval sectors of India shorter and easier and more importantly independent of dependency on Srilanka!

Ancient India
Now a bit about ancient India. The ancient Indian text Ramayana talks about a bridge being built in the seas of Palk Straight by the then king Rama of North India who wanted to take an army to the kingdom of Srilanka. This bridge is said to have been built from “Dhanushkodi”, a place in South Indian coastal region near the sea facing Srilanka, to Mannar in Srilanka.

Satellite Photographs

The satellite photographs (see pics above and below) are of the “Palk Straight”. Clearly visible to a naked human eye can be seen a line connecting the main land of India to Srilanka in these photographs. This is exactly at the same place where Ramayana talks about a bridge being constructed by Rama and his army to cross over into Srilanka. It is visible from Dhanushkodi of India to Mannar in Northwest Srilanka and is about 48 kilometers long.
Controversy
The Hindus call this bridge “Ram Sethu” and is a sacred structure for them since it is mentioned in their ancient texts. The proposed Sethu Samudram project is going to destroy this structure. It is a different question as to whether this is a man made or god made or natural structure..

The issue here is that this project in its current proposed format is definitely going to destroy this structure. The controversy is that do we need to have economic progress at the cost of our cultural heritage?

Anyway while many people felt that we should not cling to religion and myths and let them encumber the economic progress of the country others felt that religious sensibilities should also be taken into account.

Here is when things get murky.

Hinduism is one of the few religions which has its base as much in scriptures and preaching as in mythology. On one hand we are exceptionally reverential (we remove our footwear while entering holy places, don’t wear any leather inside temples, don’t mind being sprinkled with bovine piss etc ) and on the other we are also exceedingly liberal in our views of our gods and religion (we don’t have to go to the temple every week or pray a certain times a day, we are not judged if we are seen enjoying a good glass of wine or prime slice of angus steak).

If that wasn’t enough we must be one of the few (if not the only) religion in the world which has such a informal, casual, familiar and unceremonious relationship with our gods. Who else can be fine with their gods being portrayed as a playboy (Krishna), a blundering chauvinist (Ram), avenging murderer (Kali) or for that matter even as Creatures, eg. simian (Hanuman) pachyderm (Ganesh) rodent ( Ganesha’s ‘vahaan’) , leonine (Singha), reptile (Kakshpati [tortoise]).

So in the midst of this curious mix of sensibilities is the sethu-samundram project.

Yes we believe in the our heritage yet we are also open minded enough about it to not let it hamper the practicalities of life.

Now you decide if you think the project should go ahead or not.

As the avowed atheist Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu (which stands to gain the most from the project) challenged L K Advani to a debate(which LK incidentally did not accept) on the factuality of the Ramayana he let loose a salvo.

“If Hanuman and Ram did indeed build the bridge,” he asked “which engineering college did they go to?”

I won’t even begin to attempt answering that but I can bet you that it does not have a simple answer.

Give me Indian Idol any day.