My mother and I were sitting in our family room before dinner, when I opened my Lonely Planet guide to India for reference.
The situation was this:
A week or so earlier, we had been at the Soul of Yoga's yoga church and had sung a chant naming Ganesh, the Hindu deity of good fortune and the remover of obstacles (who has an elephant head). A pretty cool deity if you ask me. A few days after that, we had watched the movie Outsourced, recommended to me by Aunt Sharon, which is a hilarious movie about a man who goes to India to train his replacement at a call center. In the movie, the American is freaked out by the god Kali, depicted with a smile as she hacks off a head to presumably add to the ones stringed around her neck. His Indian friend explains that Kali is the destroyer, but sometimes destruction can be a good thing; one cycle has to end for another to begin.
“Is Hinduism a polytheistic religion?” my mom asked. I told her I didn’t think so, but we needed to consult the guidebook.
All Hindu deities are regarded as manifestations of Brahman (God). There are three main representations, Brahma (the creator, who is in meditation unless he’s creating the universe), Vishnu (the sustainer), and Shiva (the destroyer, without which creation couldn’t occur. Kali is somehow a combination of Shiva and the divine mother, I’m still unclear on that one).
(Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva)
(Kali)
My favorite is the story of Ganesh (remover of obstacles, bringer of good fortune). Ganesh is the child of another deity Parvati and Shiva the destroyer, but Ganesh didn’t know that Shiva was his father, being born while he was away. When Shiva showed up to see Parvati, Ganesh wouldn’t let him, because his mother was bathing. Shiva lopped off Ganesh’s head, only to find out later that he had lopped off the head of his own son. Feeling rather remorseful, he vowed to replace his son’s head with that of the next animal he came across…which happened to be an elephant. Thus, Ganesh has an elephant head.
(Ganesh, Remover of obstacles)
Further exploration in the guidebook led me to the section on Indian holidays, and to the holiday that I am looking forward to the most: Holi. During Holi, the coming of spring is celebrated with color. By color, we mean everything from smearing a bit of colored powder on someone’s cheek to drenching people buckets of color-dyed water. Here, let me explain:
This is a clip from the movie Outsourced, which I would recommend to anyone. This is what I'm looking forward to.
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