Of Caste and Religion.....

Why do we have Castes and Religions? Like many others, I was, and am haunted by this question. I'm still trying to figure out possible reasons. It seems like a brain-child of our ancestors of yesteryears; formulated to create a social hierarchy, group people per their chores and use them for their own needs. Something that started several years ago, still grows, courtesy our ever power hungry politicians. Though people are trying to forget the caste and religion feeling, the so called leaders have been nurturing the feelings and cashing on the same. We call ourselves the hi-tech era, 21st century, modern world etc etc., but are still entangled in the web of caste and religion. There are still people who restrict temples and mosques to the respective religions. Little do they realize the fact that there is only one supreme power. Its we who depict the almighty in different forms. If each of us are asked to depict or visualize the supreme being, each one would have a different picture of the unseen power that drives us. But still people fight on the name of religion and their god being the most powerful. The so called scholars restrict the people from entering the holy shrines, Pilgrim places just because they belong to a lower caste or belong to a different religion. Recently, an incident was reported that a certain temple was "purified" because a leader of another religion stepped in. These people who "purified" the temple call themselves the scholars, pundits and care-takers of the temple. I feel that they need to clean and purify themselves. They need to start understanding the fact that god doesn't differentiate people on basis of religion, caste, race etc. They have a no right to call themselves scholars when they fail to understand the simple fact that its not in religion that almighty resides, but in the hearts of the people who have faith. People are stoned to death, beaten, killed for the sake of religion that someone made, sometime in the past. A couple is separated on the pretext of caste and religion. People who dare to go for an inter-caste marriage or marry a person from other religion are out casted. What is more funny is that highly educated people support caste and religion concepts and separate people. In one of the conversations with my colleague in US, we hit upon the caste topic. He was surprised by the fact that there is still "caste system" in India. But yes, a surprising fact which astonishes many people that a fast developing country like India has these kind of systems being followed to this day.

Its time that the people change, and think logically rather than accepting the baseless concepts and age old "practices" that bear no meaning. Something wrong doesn't become right, just because many people are following it. One deep thought will answer what is right and what is wrong. Give it a thought folks!!