Lorne, in the past, you wondered why I a Hindu support the Muslim religion. Here is one instance. This is an excerpt from a leading Pakistani daily The Dawn reporting on an incident in Hindu India. Here goes. Happy reading.
Muslim stitches outfit for Hindu idols
By Jayashree Lengade
MUMBAI: Every day, just after dawn, Abdul Rashid walks to a grand Hindu temple in suburban Mumbai to start a full day's work.
This isn't just another daily ritual of faith in a country where religion dominates people's lives: Rashid is a Muslim tailor whose creations adorn the statues of a worldwide chain of temples belonging to the International Society of Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), dedicated to the Hindu god Krishna.
Nothing - not even the recent religious carnage in the western state of Gujarat in which more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, died - has deterred Rashid.
He and his team of 20 are now working hard to assemble a line of tinsel-and-sequin clothes for a grand festival on Krishna's birthday in August.
"It brings me pain when people fight in the name of religion," said 52-year-old Rashid as he put finishing touches to a coat spun of gold thread in the tailoring room of the temple in Mumbai.
"Why do we identify anyone as being a Hindu or a Muslim? We belong to one country and we have to learn to live together."
ISKCON's saffron-clad devotees who shave their heads, but for a tiny ponytail, believe in the scriptures found in one of the important Hindu holy books, the Bhagwad Gita - a philosophical treatise in verse in which Krishna advises the warrior Arjuna on the battlefield.
The group, which started out 35 years ago with one temple in New York, now has nearly 300 around the world, mainly in the United States, Britain, Australia and India.
SILK AND SATIN: Just weeks before the festival, Rashid and his team are hard at work - cutting and sewing silk and satin to make long skirts, blouses, sarongs, shawls and halos for Krishna idols and those of several other Hindu gods found in the ISKCON temples.
Krishna, represented in blue with eyes like lotus petals and a long flute in his hand, belongs to a varied pantheon of Hindu gods.
After 27 years in this line, Rashid said he had made thousands of dresses, including the five grand outfits he sews every year for each of the 10 main marble idols in the temple in Bombay. Each grand outfit, embellished with gold cords and artificial pearls, costs about 30,000 rupees ($615).
Temple authorities say Rashid sometimes worked all night to meet deadlines before festivals, when the kohl-eyed idols are dressed in their finest clothes.
On other days, the deities are dressed in simpler but nevertheless rich attire. At night, they change into plainer "nightwear".
Rashid is married to a Hindu and both religions find expression in his home: posters depicting Krishna hang on the walls while the Muslim holy book, the Quran, rests on a table. His parents and brothers, who live in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, were worried when he migrated to Mumbai and took up the job many years ago.
"I assured them that my faith in this work was stronger. Nothing could go wrong," he said. "Call it a gift of God. I feel in this job there's honesty, a lot of satisfaction. It's a form of worship."-
dawn.com |
