What is religion? According to Wikipedia:

Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and moral values.Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to explain the origin of life or the universe. They tend to derive morality, ethics, religious laws or a preferred lifestyle from their ideas about the cosmos and human nature.

I was born and raised as a Hindu, particularly a South Indian Iyer Brahmin. While we follow all the tenets of the Hindu religion, there are some which are uniquely ours. I’ll be writing more about these in subsequent posts, but while the overarching theme of this post is religion, it is more specifically about God and my relationship with Him.

Different people view religion is their own ways. For some, this may take form of praying religiously in front of the manifestation of their preferred religion, for others it may be something they view with suspicion and fear and shun it altogether.

Where I am concerned, I believe in the religion I was brought up in and within which I bring up my children. I believe everyone needs an emotional anchor with which to anchor their lives and religion, if handled correctly, can provide that. My relationship with my religion and the God who personifies it for me is very personal and intense. To me, it is not necessary to pray a certian number of times a day, go to the temple so many times a week, but not be a good person internally. I believe that what lies between you and your deity is personal and should remain so. I definitely pray and constantly think of him, but it is very personal.

Many Hindus have something called an ‘ishtadev‘ which essentially means a favourite God or Deity. I do too and with my ishtadev, I have a one-on-one relationship. My ishtadev by the way is the Lord Ganesh. I have always been drawn to him since childhood and there is one particular temple in my hometown of Mumbai that I love going to. This is the Siddhivinayak Temple in Prabhadevi and never fail to go there each time I go back.

I look up to Lord Ganesh or Siddhivinayak as a friend. I pray to him many, many times a day and selfishly also ask him loads of things during the course of my day. If something is not going my way, I ask for his intervention and when things are working in my favour, I

do thank him. A case in point – last night we got home very late from the temple (details later) and I didn’t have a very good night. Today morning, when I got dropped off at my bus stop, I did mention to S that although I am sleepy, I know I won’t get place to sit in the bus. Then the bus that came my way was not the bus I usually take, it was an abbreviated service that I usually ignore since using that bus means changing to another bus later on. But this bus was fairly empty and I saw if I boarded it, I can get a seat, so I got in and slept till it was time to get off and change buses, which coincidently came within 3 minutes!

This is my relationship with my God, my friend. How about you? Do you believe in God, in a higher power? If yes, then how do you communicate with him/her?