Yoruba Orishas: African gods and goddess

Photographer James C. Lewis created a series of photos where he artistically depicted the African Yoruba deities – ORISHAS – venerated by the Yoruba people of Benin and Nigeria. The result is a stunning series of photographs depicting the divine and spiritual symbology and life.

 

When asked to express where his inspiration for this photo project arose from, Lewis said,

“Throughout my formal education from elementary up through college I never heard tale of African deities. A little over a month ago I began to research online to find information in regards to the gods & goddesses of Africa. To my surprise there were many, however the ones that stood out the most were the deities of Nigeria and Benin, West Africa which they referred to as Orishas.

I wanted to portray the regal beauty of each Orisha while also representing their majestic sensuality. Each iconic depiction was rendered to lend strength to our resilience as a great race of people and to show our youth that they are beautiful, bold and brilliant just they way God created them to be. […] each Orisha’s name is written in the Yoruba dialect and captures imagery of powerful men, women & children of various complexions who are all of African descent.”

 

 

 

 

Sources: All Images Property of James C. Lewis

I learn something new everyday & this is awesome 😀

Paradox of religion and celebration

This is NOT a rant, rather an observation if you will.

Today is the 3rd day of Eid and for the past 3 days we have had this bunch of hooligans boys in my neighbourhood playing loud music on the street. Now this would not be irritating if it were not for the fact that they play it all hours, extremely loud, its last years hottest club mix (the street don’t look like no club to me) and the sound is transmitted over mike’s and loudspeakers that cannot handle the base of the music. So what we have had to contend with is JLO & Lungi Dance music, cracking at cranked up volumes. Enough to give anyone a headache, don’t you think?

Maybe I am cranky, I have been running a fever for nearly 6 days now BUT that’s not the reason for this post.

Here’s the Paradox – Eid is a religious festival. You are supposed to be celebrating the end of Ramadan, the month of patient fasting and all the lessons of empathy and sympathy, which we are supposed to have relearn over the past 30 days. It’s a time for family and friends. I wonder where Lungi Dance and JLO featuring Pitbull on “Dance again” features in that occasion.

I am all for partying, but this … 24/7. giving everyone else in the locality headaches, where’s the empathy and sympathy, or any tameez for that sense … in there? For a country that is conspicuously moving away from being Secular, how is this Islamic? What does that word even mean anymore?

I used to love Ramadan, the chance to practice patience, empathy with those less fortunate, to place yourself in another person’s shoes. But the truth is I don’t like this month anymore. Every single day I have witnessed at least 1 act of violence, a non-sensical reaction, which is then attributed to the fact that the person is fasting and has therefore less patience. Don’t fast then. People work less because they are fasting. They are late to work, because they are fasting. They leave early, because they are fasting. People scream and shout abuse in the roads at the CNG’s and the buses because they are fasting and are at a hurry to get home. Don’t fast.

If fasting makes you behave like this, don’t fast. You are not learning anything. You are not practicing patience. You are using it like a crutch, an excuse to act out the anger and apathy that you carry around otherwise.

The biggest paradox perhaps is the way religion and its various facets have been commercialized. In a country where half the people live under or near the poverty line, we have shops that are open until 3 am to facilitate shopping. At cut throat prices, I wonder who buys the glittering things that are displayed on shop windows. I wonder how many people instead concern themselves with making sure that they have calculated their zakat correctly and given it to someone who needs it.

Celebration is all very good but at the end of the day, why can’t we just say that we are doing what we are doing, because we like to have a good time. That would certainly be a good enough reason to celebrate our family and friends, every single day of the year, instead of just a couple of times. It would also be a good reason to practice the art of giving – gifts, zakat, sadka – throughout the year. We have been gifted with life. Life is a gift. And it is worth celebrating every moment that we breathe.

You want heaven? practice this!

To those on my FB list, who keep posting about how you MUST copy and re-post that you love God, or say Allahu Akbar when an atheist blogger is killed, or any such religious extreme messages…. copy and paste this… not on your FB status, but in your heart and mind. The greatest Jihad is that which you engage in within yourself.

Next time you are feeling malicious, DON’T. Next time you want to treat someone else as less than human or less than you because they have a different religion, race, etc… DON’T. Next time you want to break a heart, flirt a little, kiss a lot… DON’T. Next time you are tempted to raise your voice on your parents because they just don’t understand, DON’T. Next time you forget to give someone or something (yes even animals count) less than your best… DON’T.

THAT would be you practicing religion, any religion, the way they were meant to be practiced. Religion was sent to make people better human beings. It was not meant to divide. Lets not forget that if you are muslim and a follower of the prophet, then by his own teaching, you are required to respect and love the other prophets who brought the word of God – Jesus, Moses & Abraham. You are required to love them and respect them and their followers too.

In the Judgement day, you will be judged on your actions, not your uttered words or FB status. You will be judged on the way you treated others, even in your thoughts. You want heaven? Make sure that you are creating a little piece of heaven right here in this earth with your words and actions, for your parents, your family, your friends, your neighbours, your community. Your existence should make other people’s life better, it should benefit and bring peace, are you doing that?????

No doubt we all know that pride and hatred are sins. Yet how many of our youngsters are led astray by people advocating exactly that? pride in their religion and hatred towards those following other paths.

It is not religion that makes a man. It is the character of the person that makes him/her a better human being. It is the continuous practice of sympathy, empathy, love, respect, honor, responsibility, tolerance for difference, patience etc. that makes the character of a human being. Work on your own character first before you point a finger at others.

 

 

There I think I can safely get off my soap box now 😀

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Women, Food Security & Religion

Study after study has shown that while men tend to spend only about 30-40% of their income on their family, even while the overall income of the family is not enough to meet their needs, women spend over 90% of their income on the family. When women have control over their income, their families needs are met better, their children are better fed and more likely to be educated. Yet, studies have also shown that a large number of women and I am talking of a REALLY large percentage here, do not have control over their OWN income. This is specially true for women who are married but this phenomenon is not just true in the developing world, it happens even in the most developed countries.

 

In the country that I live in and in the work that I do, I see these women all the time. A significantly large portion of the population still lives below the poverty line. A significant portion of children are still malnourished. There are miles to go before we can rest easy and claim to be truly food secure. Yet yesterday’s shut-down and the 13 point demand of the religious extremists really drove home the point that religion is being used in this country to drag us back by thousands of years. If the demands of these men are to be met, then women will cover up and stay inside the four walls of their home. And I wonder do these men even realize what they are asking for? They are asking for generations of children to grow up, malnourished and uneducated?

 

Half the farm labors in this country are women. While the men are hunting for work in big cities, it is the women who are tending to the fields, raising cattle, feeding and keeping the families together. It is hard enough for these women to interact with the formal market, to impose a restriction like this… who is going to keep the agro-economy going? Where do these men think they are going to get the rice that they eat in every meal?

 

I haven’t even mentioned the ready-made garment industry yet. The big thing that brings in more money, the jewel in Bangladesh’s crown. Who works in these factories? Women. It is women and millions of them that keep these garment factories running. That provide the hard labor that goes into shipping containers of clothes to the west, earning the country foreign currency and bringing in more FDI than any other sectors yet. What will happen to these women? to the families who depend on them? To the factories? To the economy?

 

When the extremists make their demands and when I see hundreds and sometimes thousands more men sitting beside them in solidarity, I wonder… where they borne by men? Where do they get off in denying basic human rights to women? Were they brought up solely by women hating men? Are they really blind and dumb enough to think that they are going to drag half of a country’s population into hell and not go there themselves?

 

Yesterday, I was on the phone with one of my friends and her 63-year-old mother got on the phone to solemnly inform me that if these extremists ever take over the country, she’s going to run for the hills. She is a house-wife, she prays 5 times a day and ever since she came back from the Hajj, she has been covering up (just not in the black hijab thing). That conversation is when it struck me how desperate this situation is becoming. If this woman cannot feel safe in her own country, with people who are supposedly proposing to uphold religious laws that she already follows, what hope do the rest of us have? And I can’t stop thinking of the millions of women who march to the factories every morning with their tiffin carrier in hand, what will happen to them? to the families back home in the villages who depend on them?

 

And to be honest, I can’t wrap my head around the religion they are talking about. The Prophet (SAW) that I love, the Prophet (SAW) whose religion I follow, he himself was married to the most successful business woman of his time. Her business spread across several countries and he himself worked under her. He continued to show an equal amount of respect for all of his subsequent wives, whose opinions he cherished and whose counsel he sought. So where do these men get their interpretation of Islam? When the prophet himself showed respect to women and was the most vocal in ensuring them their rights, where do these men think they get the fatwas that take away women’s right, to work, to education, to an income of their own? Where?

 

No matter what goes on in the streets today or tomorrow or in the upcoming days, I cannot believe for a moment that in a country of 160 million people, these mere million or two of so-called religious people will ever reign. This half of the population and the families that depend on them is not going to take this lying down. People are already struggling with the high rates of inflations, increasing costs of living, energy costs are sky-rocketing, they simply cannot afford to have able hands sitting idle in the house or being forced to stay off the workforce. The mass population will simply starve, it’s as simple as that really, so they will fight this extremism for their own survival. In order to keep this economy running, to keep the GDP growing, the business community and the politicians can’t possibly sit idle on the side as well.

 

In a country that is bravely marching forward despite all of its draw back, these days will be but mere blips. I still trust in our people. I still trust in my country. And I still believe that no matter what, we the “Bengal Tigers” will see better days ahead.

 

 

 

Related articles

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• A Message From A Muslim Feminist (numzical.wordpress.com)
• Losing my religion for equality…by Jimmy Carter (americansforcommonsenseblog.wordpress.com)

Karma, prayers and others

What is karma?

We have a very simple one word in bangla to describe all that karma implies, “kormofol”, basically what it means is that ‘you reap what you sow’. Now wiser men than me have always said that… they’ve said it over the ages… decade after decade… yet, the simple man still is more likely to blame their misfortune or lack of fortune on their lack of “luck”. Now what is luck? being at the right place at the right time? No one achieves anything like that. Show me a man who is lucky and I will show you the years of work that he’s already put in there before he got to the point where other’s refer to him as lucky. Simply put luck is the combination of hard work, consistency, sincerity etc. All the stuff that takes a lot of hard work to build into one’s character.

I meet or am greeted by a lot of chronically jobless person. You know the one thing they have in common? Inconsistency. They are inconsistent in their actions, in their jobs. And all these supposedly free people are the worst people to give any job to, ask them to do something for you and it will never be delivered on time. In fact more often than not, they will fail to even apply for jobs on time. Yet, year after year, they will blame their luck, lack of support, lack of nepotism, as the reason for their joblessness. If these people stop for just a moment and really take stock, they might actually discover that either they are aiming for the wrong jobs, have the wrong or no qualifications or lack communication skills. Problem is because they are so busy finding other scapegoat excuses, they completely miss out on the opportunity to better themselves. And talking to these people is the same as trying to wake up a person who is pretending to be asleep. You can wake up a sleeping person but you can’t shake awake a person who is busy pretending to be asleep. With eyes wide shut they go through their lives with various scapegoats to blame their failures on.

I am not infallible. I catch myself blaming certain things on certain factors too. Then I catch myself, shake myself out of it and move on. Change is the only constant thing in life. And the biggest difference is that I know that I am not perfect and I know that I still have a LONG way to go, a lot to learn and I am not going to pretend to be asleep when I am awake.

Then sometimes I catch myself wanting to pray. The ritualistic prayers. Lets get one thing clear, I have prayed. I was brought up in a very conservative religious household. Religion was shoved down our throats at every single opportunity. It got to the point, where in one point of my life, I rejected religion. No one could answer my question – Was religion made for humans? Or was human made for religion? Who controls whom? What is religion anyway? I started searching, seeking answers. I met people or rather priests from almost all religions and here’s what I learnt:

All religions are the same.

There’s one God. He has one name. His name is blessed.

All humans are equal. Human beings were created in love.

Then why do we have so much division in the name of religion? Why can’t we respect someone else’s religion or their way of praying? What difference does it make whether I go ring a bell in a temple? light a candle in a church? Or bow down in prayer in a mosque? All these people fighting over religious differences, calling others atheist, declaring that all who don’t follow them are going to hell…. is that what their God said? Is that what is written in their books?

Today when I felt like bowing down in prayer, I remembered that the biggest expression of our prayer is our work, our attitude, our humanity. The empathy and love that we are all capable of … yet so often lose when it comes to our day-to-day dealing. Leave someone smiling today, remove someone’s sadness and that in my book is a successful prayer right there. If I leave someone else better than how I found them, then I have done a little bit more in fulfilling my destiny, my reason for existing in this world, for having been created as the best creature in this world.

I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on where my life is headed. I need to get that picture in my head. The picture of where I want to be 5 years from now or 10 years from now. It is only when I know where I am headed that I will reach there. And that has got nothing to do with ‘luck’ or ‘karma’. It will have everything to do with the amount of effort I put into making that dream a reality. I know that I can achieve anything that I set my mind on. It’s the same with all of us. Dream … and dream big… then work your ass off to bring that into fruition.

And that’s why Karma is a Bitch whom I like very much! Because it comes back to bite you on the ass when you least expect it 😀 

But this isn’t about how what goes around, comes around… this is about reaping what you sow 😀