When my father was rushed to the hospital, I was in Bombay. Flew back the next day & went straight to see him. He was unconscious. That night I sat by him out of fear. In the midnight, I saw a patient two beds away close his eyes for the last time.

It took me a while to process that I saw a man die. Saw life extinguish out of his body. It is at that moment the pervasiveness of religion dawned upon me. Not that I became religious but I could empathise why people chose to believe.

Life is writ with absurdities and of things that don't make sense. Things that we cannot articulate or express. Things that you think shouldn't be happening to you. Religion promises to linearise that for you. It will give you a theory of karma, or an afterlife, promise heaven.

That incident at the hospital didn't make me a believer. But it did shatter my belief that all religions are invariably bad. Religion is also a site where people choose to heal. Choose to offload the absurdities of their life and seek some clarity.

It made me appreciate Ambedkar converting to Buddhism, to give Dalits a spiritual realm to lead their lives, something that was denied to them by the caste system. His critique of Hinduism made more sense. A theology of graded subordination cannot be redeeming in any sense.

Surely religion is a site of violence. It may as well be the opium of masses. And it also promises to restore dignity of people who feel they are broken by society, families, conditions, institutions etc.

There's no moral to this story. Life continues to remain too complex to be reduced into Atheist versus Believer binary. Thanks for coming to my ted talk. I hope you find a way to deal with the absurdities of your lives.