Pritam's Blog
Why God Has A Problem With People Eating Food?
This particular incident broke my heart into pieces:
I have been staying in a Muslim locality for the past six years. And during every Ramzan in these six years, a certain Muslim uncle who runs a shop nearby, I have noticed, sometimes sneaks into the building I live in.
Sometimes, he stealthily goes to the terrace; I have always found it to be fishy…
Why this surreptitious attitude when the owner of this apartment is so gracious that he built a toilet and a bathroom on the terrace of this apartment for every shopkeeper and even street vendors to use?
Few years back, once I went to the terrace to dry washed clothes, and I discovered that he was eating something during daytime…in the month of Ramzan.
I didn’t judge him, of course. Because I am not a believer myself. Because I am a foodie myself who needs to eat something every three hours. And because I don’t jump to conclusion.
I pretended like I didn’t even notice him.
I saw it multiple times after that. Sometimes on the terrace, sometimes behind the huge car parked in the ground floor…
Today, I saw him again. He smiled. I got a chance to talk.
“Why do you have to hide to eat?” I asked him.
“Because I am not supposed to eat at daytime during Ramzan… I am not even sick or anything… But I just can’t work without eating multiple times a day,” he said.
“Same here,” I said…
“I believe in God. Be it Allah or Bhagwan. But I don’t understand why people having food should be an issue to any of them… I will be mocked, boycotted, probably beaten up and killed too, by people from my own religion if they come to know that I eat at daytime during Ramzan… And from what I hear, people from your religion could probably kill me anytime throughout the year for eating beef…”
No, I couldn’t tell him that I was not a Hindu. That was not the point here anyway… I didn’t feel offended because he assumed me to be a Hindu…I am an atheist but it wasn’t something that I felt was important to tell him at that point…
I was sad and disgusted…
And the worst of all, I didn’t have an answer…