By Subhasis Chattopadhyay –
December has come, and the world gets ready to greet another Christmas. But there are no Christmases and no Santa Clauses for the orphaned child. When well-off Hindu children will buy their Christmas trees and hang them with stars; the child in an orphanage will have no Santa visit her. The world still remains dark for children without parents. Be they Hindu, or Christian. The plum cakes and the Christmas dinner will have no meaning for the Hindu child in India who has been lost to working the mines; who has been lost to child trafficking and whose parents are too poor and illiterate to know of the Christ-child. Poor Hindu children beg outside Hindu temples; their faces snot-smeared. Poor Christian children in India beg in front of Churches; trying to glimpse the fancy dresses of the rich who go in for Christmas Mass.
Many children this Christmas will forget the coming of the Messiah. Exams are knocking at their doors. They have no time for anything but studies. Their parents have told them that God will be angry if they do not ace their classmates. They have to be good for Santa to give them gifts. Hinduism and Christianity are the same to these slaves to the pharaoh’s economy of 24*7 studies. The schools will open right after Christmas, and there is no time. They HAVE to succeed, no matter the cost.
Temple bells ring the hours of worship, mosques time the Muslim child’s days with prayer and the Church bells toll for the Christian child in India. But the reality is different: the Indian child now is hardened. She is suffering from clinical depression and cannot waste her time anymore. From Kerala to Jammu, from Gujarat to Nagaland, our children are under the death grips of credential fetish. They HAVE to become doctors, engineers, settle abroad, and no God is remembered. Everything is another ritual to be completed for trigonometry books now compete with social media. Our children no longer care for Jesus, Allah or Shiva. If they pray, they only seek high scores.
As a nation, we have to answer to whichever God we believe in for this great evil we have brought upon our children. May this Christmas remind us, the well-heeled, of the orphan child languishing in some hellish dungeon; let us remember that child who knows too early that there is evil in this world. Let us not forget that we have to answer to God how we have allowed our youth to forget God. For what we could not be, we wrongly want our children to be. This Christmas, let us look to the Child in the Crib to know that all children are vulnerable and what we adults manipulate them to do; they trustingly obey. Peace, peace, peace.
Subhasis Chattopadhyay is a blogger and an Assistant Professor in English (UG & PG Departments of English) at Narasinha Dutt College affiliated to the University of Calcutta. He has additional qualifications in Biblical Studies and separately, Spiritual Psychology. He also studied the Minor Upanishads separately. He also studied Hinduism from the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. He remains a staunch Hindu.. He had written extensively for the Catholic Herald published from Calcutta. From 2010 he reviews books for the Ramakrishna Mission and his reviews have been showcased in Ivy League Press-websites.