Admire your mothers, not god

Arun Shourie’s Does He Know a Mother’s Heart? How Suffering Refutes Religion, is a plea for thinking about subjects that are religious. “People are very religious in India, but we are mechanically religious. We repeat phrases such as ‘karma’, ‘god is wise’ and so on, but we have not given them any thought,” says the author, journalist, economist and minister,  who was in the city recently to launch his book. Having extensively written about economics, secularism and the like, his 26th book, a work of non-fiction, is a personal account, based on the suffering and pain of his son, Aditya, afflicted with cerebral palsy, and wife Anita, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease. While dissecting the scriptures, Arun Shourie tells the readers his tale of succumbing to the teachings of Buddha. He also connects Buddhist teachings with our everyday lives and the lessons they teach us. Another prominent theme that he has weaved into his story is that women are stronger than men. “Many parents have not been able to cope with the task of taking care of a differently-abled child. And usually, the husbands walk out of the marriage,” he says. “Reserve the admiration for the mothers, not god,” he adds. He goes on to question the all-knowing and all-powerful status of gods. “If god can create a future which is completely unpredictable, he will also not know what is going to happen. 1But how do we say that he knows everything?” He disagrees with the view that what happened to his son was because of his karma, and he feels that it is wrong to think that Aditya was targeted because of what he did in his previous life.He also insists that everybody should learn to convert pain and suffering into work, and cites real life examples such as Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. Through the book, he also urges his readers to delve deeper into some of our rituals, which also have therapeutic qualities. “We don’t know the inner meaning of these rituals but have outsourced them,” he explains. He also finds that in the last 30 years, the openness for new knowledge has stopped, with dwarfing in the practice of religious teaching, which can be revived. Justice Venkataraman Ramasubramaniam, who launched the book at the venue, said, “This book throws up a lot of questions that many of us have been confronting for years, but have not dared to bring up.”