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Health, hunger, education, housing and jobs for Hindu masses are the crucial projects that need to be tackled. Instead, Gurus and Hindu organisations collect vast sums of money to build new temples and ashrams. Indeed, we should be maintaining and renovate the originals first before building new ones. What our institutions also ignore are the Hindus who languish in utter poverty. Beggars at the doors of most of our temple shame us by their utter helplessness, yet, we – the majority of Hindus – keep ignoring them unashamedly. Some of these beggars may be “professionals”, but a huge number are not. Christians and msulims take this as an excellent opportunity to convert the illiterate, poor, hungry and homeless to their cause.
We need to unite to face the global assault on our religion, culture, value system and society. We have survived 1000 years of foreign rule by becoming more insular, inward looking and closing ranks on community and caste lines. Those defences wont work any more. Education, job opportunities and lure of western civilisation has weakened our children’s caste and community allegiances.
We are no longer tied to our ancestral lands and as a result, our grandchildren
are becoming less aware or interested in their ancient heritage. Christians, muslims, socialists,
secularists etc are taking advantage of these cracks in our defences and are
doing their best to split us up.
Indian politicians are also doing all they can to destroy our heritage. The government has got its hands on
donations Hindus make to the popular temples.
Yet, the government does not spend anything from its loot for the upkeep
or maintenance of the temples and ashrams, preferring to give it away to muslims
to travel to mecca and christians to travel to
At a time like this, it is senseless for our religious leaders to argue about the supremacy of any one particular Hindu God / Goddess over another ! We need to unite. We need to encourage upliftment of our people so that they will not want to convert for sake of food, medicine or a job. Education, healthcare and decent housing should be where our temple donations be spent.
Instead of amassing jewels and gold ornaments that yield nothing in real terms, the temples should spend their wealth on supporting the Hindu society in their vicinity. Gold and jewels may look good, but they wont help the temple in times of need. Only people, people who have feeling of association and obligation will help temples in times of need.
Tirupati Devasthanam Trust is also making sure no one needs to beg for food or sustenance in the temple town. They have also opened schools, colleges, hospitals to help Hindus living in the area. Amongst all the Hindu temples, they have the maximum amount of money at the moment and I am sure they could do more if the government allowed it and the trustees could see beyond the Tirumala Hills.
Other temples need to follow suite and do more to help their devotes than they
do at present. If each major temple
did that, we could halt and even reverse the trend of conversions we see in
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