No one has invented a condom for a pen yet
Khushwant Singh’s famous quote tells why he is India’s most prolific author. His writing spared no one. A self-proclaimed agnostic, he did not take kindly to religious doctrine and dogma. Yet, he took his investigation into the nature of religion seriously.
Did a god create the world? Should religions bow before the word of science? Is sex wrong? In his incisive book,”Gods and Godmen of India”, Khushwant relates a lifelong mission to ask these questions.
The first half of the book describes his views on agnosticism, God, and prayer. But it’s the second half that gets interesting. He charts a skeptical and irreverent journey to decipher the fraud from the flawed, in the index of India’s holiest men and women, dwelling on the texts of every major religion and quoting seamlessly from the Gita, Quran and the Bible. This armed him with a familiarity with the common themes: abstinence, an afterlife, and the ironic material wealth of the pious.
He had his favourites, no doubt. In the small essay on Osho Rajneesh, he respects the idea of a good life; one of dancing, singing and flirting, saying “all other preachers of religion were constipated with Puritanism…”
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