None of the Above

Quite recently, there were public uproars for admitting NOTA option in Indian General Elections. NOTA had been introduced, clearly because there were people who did not like to stand by any of the candidates in the list. When election rules were set in India, nobody might have thought that Indian politics is going to be a byword for open corruption. However, not too many have envisioned the problems this little NOTA might invoke in case it scores majority of the vote. Will NOTA save the nation is another question. 

There was a time when every Indian citizen loved to be identified with the faith/religion, culture, or cast to which he/she belonged and so an application/submission form with a box to indicate the applicant’s religion was not at all an odd thing. This is not the case now. The number of people with indifferences towards religions is slowly increasing. This is not any kind of atheism which administers the doctrine that deities are not real but a movement limited to an understanding that the logics religionists follow are wrong. Once, if Indians were born into a religion and always died in a religion, now all those who are born in a religion are not buried in the same. Non religionists courageously say that they belong to None Of The Above (NOTA). These non religionists believe that in most cases religions are derailed and avoiding them could be better. This NOTA attitude is not restricted to elections and religions only; it has spread to social/family relationships too. People love to live maximum unattached. 

This has come to be a trend. 

Recently, I read about entrepreneurial religion, that is founding one’s own religion. A month back, Indian Express had published news on unattached Christians staging a demonstration in Nagercoil, demanding separate burial grounds. Hinduism in India has ever been open; nobody cares too much about one’s religious faith exercises and almost all have entrepreneurial approach at least in some cases. Entrepreneurship is not alien to Islam too, where some people yearn for peace and tolerance while some others insist on might and rights. Elements of irresponsibility in total consciousness generated by this People, who have chosen to be entrepreneurial in faith and NOTA in action is enough to change the world, absurd in spirit. That is my concern.

Joseph Mattappally