Comfort my people

Comfort my people
Renuka Narayanan

Strange things can happen at three in the night. After OD-ing on caffeine on deadline day, the sleepless can wander irritably to the TV set and switch it on low, so as not to wake the neighbours, and then sit electrified watching a strange Star Plus programme called òf40óLife in the Word. A trim, tall woman paces energetically across a neo-classical stage full of flowers. She's Joyce Meyer and she's waving a big, black Bible. She's addressing a captive, eager audience of black and white Americans at the Hampton Coliseum in Virginia. Each listener is equipped with a Bible too and Meyer takes them through verses in Genesis, Deuteronomy and Peter, to ram home many good points. "It says so HERE!" she often says, smacking the Good Book really hard. I can almost hear the heavenly host -- tall, solemn archangels, fat little cherubim and slender seraphim, squeal a collective "Ouch!"

But her sincerity and energy are great to watch. And what she's saying -- it's pretty good stuff, actually. It's about forgiving and forgetting, about moving on, about leaving behind how your high school teacher or your parents or in-laws hurt you, about taking the wounds they dealt you and turning them around so that you become a blessing to whomever you meet. Whatever AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) has achieved, she thunders, "is because it was taken from HERE!" Whack. "The original ideas are HERE!" Whack. "America is a CHRISTIAN nation!" she yells, finally.

She's a terrific performer, you may laugh, but you know what? She's riveting. Her body language, so sturdy and confident, is something many Indian women would relate to, especially those who wear flowers in their hair and hold their heads up to heaven, as God intended them to. You could take stuff from Meyer that would have you reaching for a heavy frying pan if some patriarchal type tried to lay it on.

It's so easy to let go of God because you find organised religion with its heavy patriarchal bias so disgusting and demeaning. But there's another place, where mostly men have done a great deal to discover the face of God to humankind, and that's the Nature channels like Discovery and National Geographic. There's a man I knew who swore off God for good because, at age eleven, he and his granny were almost trampled to death by a stampede of devotees at Nathdwara. But he watches Nature channels with fervid interest and awe and vows that's the closest he's come to seeing God.

The heavy, classical graphics and logos of a channel like the National Geographic instantly raise my hackles because they trumpet White, Male Establishment. But the next moment I kind of relax, arguing that that's who they are, that's where they're coming from, it's their money where their mouth is, so they're entitled! And look at the work that goes into their programmes. Ten seconds of Galapagos iguana footage underwater cost many hours and many dollars, just for that bit which finally got included in the master tape. It cost prodigious human effort. It's like prayer and penance, isn't it, for one perfect revelatory glimpse of God's world dancing?

Somewhere it connects in your head with the ancient belief that Shiva dances his Ananda Tandava, first in Chidambaram and always in the hearts of mankind. A Diane Fossey rapping with gorillas, a Louis and Mary Leakey searching patiently for decades just for one little trace of pre-historic man, a Jacques Cousteau building his underwater diving bell, a Ranulph Fiennes or Thor Heyerdahl adventuring across land and sea. These scientists and explorers are more exciting than priests, because they expand the soul's craving for knowledge of God's creation. TV's not a bad temple, really, when you come to think of it.