In Search of Temples

My temples are places of art

As a child growing up in a Hindu household, I was taken on several pilgrimages to remote parts of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, and Delhi. Famous temples in India are not the hang-out spots of preference for teenagers, for several reasons:

• Most of the rituals happen ridiculously early in the morning.
• In popular Indian temples, people are packed like sardines. If you are not a VIP or don’t work for the government, you are likely to spend at least half a day standing in queues, being shoved around. Every ounce of divine purpose will be gone from your being, and you will instead be dreaming of the crassest of creature comforts.
• Returns are not commensurate with the pains.

Pains: giving up your weekend (that you’d rather spend playing video games/hanging out at a café with friends), to travel on roads that often don’t exist, to remote, hot, dusty lands without clean bathrooms.

Returns: Catching a glimpse of a black stone statue decorated with flowers and jewelry for exactly three seconds before you are pushed ahead by a uniformed, crowd control officer (hired by the temple for this very purpose, surprisingly).

My idea of temples has changed now.

My new temples are houses of art, where people bring something into existence. Where people look for meaning.

I spend hours and hours perfecting a large porcelain bowl at a ceramics studio only to have the cuff of my shirt destroy it in seconds. With each incident, a bit more of my ego is destroyed, but I’m happy. The smell of wet earth under my hands is my incense.

This new temple surprises me with the spirit of community, beauty, and fragility.

I go in with the intention of spending three hours focussing on nothing but mounds of clay. It’s not about the object being created, but the act of creating itself that’s worship. I am fully present, and am open to each moment. I am the clay too, in some sense.

My new temples are music halls, where people lose themselves to sounds.

My new temples are libraries, where people live other lives, if only briefly.

My new temples are clubs, yes clubs, where people dance with abandon.

There is pursuit of divinity in each of these places.

There is a longing for something greater than oneself in all of these places.

What’s your temple?