If you'll indulge me for a moment, I want to air a frustration about being hindu in the west that is going to be laughable for most of you

When you live out in the diaspora disconnected from the context that gave rise to your culture every action you take is always defensive. You can't just *be* a hindu and have your gods and foods and festivals, but you have to justify it and defend it to the greater pressures

Especially in America, and to a lesser but still strong extent Canada and the UK, the very heavily Christian influence infuses everything we learn and represent

So even if you aren't religious or monotheistic or Christian, you still take in the biases that come with the most conservative notion of the Christian worldview

And that means that our education and our pop culture and our general milieu reinforces a lot of tropes about levels of civilization and advanced culture

To bring it more specific, think about religion. In most cases, you're gonna picture one God, probably looking something like Michelangelo's bearded white guy, and all the positives and negatives that go with it

And when you hear the word polytheism, our cultural upbringing will give you either dead ancient Greeks or weird backwards tribal boogaloo

Indy Jones and eyeball soup. Or sacrifices to mysterious shadowy gods. Or poor people who haven't been enlightened yet

We see this as well when we talk about uncontacted peoples in the Amazon or the Andaman Islands and call them stone age or whatever, even though they're exactly as distant from cavemen as we are. (it's still 2020 for the San people no matter what you think)

So that means that when you grow up Hindu in the diaspora (to bring it back) you run into a big problem of self-loathing. You know what Hinduism is, but mainly through the lens of your Christian-colored education. That means that you've already got that layer of shame

So you have to start finding tricks to justify being as "modern" as everyone else, which means convincing yourself that you are actually monotheistic, or that you totally believe the same things as Christians, just in a different way, or other fake outs

Because we have this notion in the west that it goes from witchy tribalism to polytheism to monotheism to enlightened atheism

And not that, you know, these are parallel traditions that have all come through history together. It's like how so many people think that Judaism just kinda stopped when Jesus showed up

(yet ask these same folks of Christianity stopped when Mohammed started singing his sermons and just watch those pearls get clutched)

To bring it back to my initial point, it is incredibly hard to take refuge and comfort in your religious beliefs if your upbringing and cultural education have spent decades telling you it is backwards and shameful

And here's the self indulgent part- Its one of my missions in life to help folks connect or reconnect to their traditions and heritage. Not to evangelize, but to help folks who care find a way back in. And it is incredibly hard to break through the inherent shame of explaining.

Like when someone spends their life with zero to one gods in their view, how do I come over and say hey, here are a couple hundred! When their notion of religion is solemn cavernous churches and preachers and silence, how do I talk about harvest festivals and fire altars?

Cause I was born in the states and raised in this same vatavaran and have these same inherent disadvantages. How do I share something I know will never be taken seriously and given any genuine thought? We live in western rationalism which means spirituality is already a negative

Getting someone into Christianity isn't hard, because you already have the setting bonuses. But like Hinduism? We're starting at negative modifiers and all the info and resources we have are either ultra nationalist or made for folks already inside

Or just out and out misleading because they're meant to "normalize" us for the consumption of the rationalist Christian in order to make us look harmless enough to be allowed to live among them.

Read up on Hinduism and you get this idea that it's all yoga and meditation and eat pray love and beads and maybe a tiny little elephant statue. Then you go to a temple and wait, what in the world is all this.

And it's frustrating, because there are folks who genuinely want to care and learn and connect, and there are just so many barriers in the way

Sigh. It's just a lot some days.

And if you'd like to see how I'm trying to mitigate this, check out my #hinduthread posts where I retell and share hindu folklore and teachings

like this about Guru Purnima and the story of the Buddha https://twitter.com/elektrotal/status/1023008909949161472

or this on Why Ganesha is the remover of obstacles https://twitter.com/elektrotal/status/1216897209557381120

Or this thread about how a tiny local goddess got introduced to the greater Hinduism sphere because of bollywood https://twitter.com/elektrotal/status/992494857418457088?s=19