The gold of small things

Sharanamma, 75, is a pious woman. A resident of the newly-formed Telangana state, up at the crack of dawn, bathes, does puja at home, then walks to the nearby temple and drops Rs 10 into the mostly-empty donation box. May this be attributed to her intensely charitable constitution? No. Sharanamma vowed to the goddess in 2016 to donate this money every day for a year if her son landed a government job.

Kalvakuntla Chandrashekhar Rao is also a very pious man. But the similarity with Sharanamma ends here. Rao, better known as KCR, is also the Chief Minister of Telangana, who recently donated gold worth over a whopping Rs 5.5 crore to the famed Lord Venkateshwara Temple at Tirupati, as he had vowed to do so if Telangana was successfully conceived. Did it raise eyebrows? Yes.

KCR is not new to controversy when it comes to his magnanimous donation habits. This act of his rang alarm bells in my mind, so I decided to speak to a few people who could throw some light (or gold) on the nature of donations that go to temples in India.

First up was my neighbourhood priest in Kolkata. He is the founder of a temple with multiple devotees. From a frugal beginning of just the idol of a goddess, the temple is now a brightly-coloured structure with idols of most of the deities. Over the years, these idols have also started sporting new jewellery sets — all gifts from devotees.

"The idea of gifting things to the goddess comes from treating her like your own. Devotees often pray for certain things and when they get them, they gift things to the temple. Wouldn't you happily gift your mother something if she did something nice for you?" said the priest, who is known as Swami Bedacharya.

A number of devotees at the temple supported this feeling as one summarised for me: "I don't have a mother. The goddess is my mother. So when my son recovered from a bad bout of dengue last year, I gifted the goddess a pair of small gold studs. I was grateful for her blessings."

Patilji, my friend's neighbour in Mumbai, feeds 50 orphans every year on his son's birthday. I approached him for his two-pence and he said, "We conceived our son after much difficulty, so this is my way of saying thanks to the Lord. Instead of doing pujas or donating money to temples, I thought I would feed the poor."

It must be noted here that according to the World Bank's poverty report of 2013, 30 per cent of India's population still lives under the $1.90-a-day ( about Rs 126) poverty measure.
However, a friend in Bengaluru who has her own committed relationship with god, explained a different take on the matter. According to her, gifting things to anybody is a personal thing. She does not feed orphans but neither does she gift tonnes of gold to temples.

"Of course, I ask god for things all the time. And when they happen, I mutter a thank you. Once in a while, I drop a tenner in the donation box of a roadside shrine," Ria explained.
As Swamiji had added before I left after speaking to him: "One must not treat this as a barter system. The goddess does not care for material things. There's a kid who gets lozenges every time he passes his exams. You think the goddess will fail him in class without the sweets? It's a personal thing, just like godliness."

While the aforementioned explanations resonated with me, I also realised that what actually got my goat about KCR's ostentatious donation was a statement marking it as a gift on behalf of the Telangana government. While one's relationship with god is purely personal, adorning it with state-honours to make it look legit, especially when there is a massive drought in the state, should ideally be a blot on the elected neta's white kurta. I wonder whether KCR's gold-gilded god will be able to win him the elections again.

The writer is a freelance journalist vacillating between happy and blah.

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