George Orwell, in his signature sardonic clarity, once wrote, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” This destruction doesn’t require jackboots or gulags. We do it efficiently, artfully, with the panache of PR on a sugar high. And history is spun, tailored, rebranded.
A riot becomes a correction.
A genocide becomes a defence.
A war becomes a holy obligation.
And a lie becomes policy.
Euphemisms like 'collateral damage', 'cultural revival', 'necessary evil', 'historical rectification' don’t emerge from accidents. What begins in the classroom, on primetime news, creeps into family dinners, hiring decisions, public policy, eventually, spills onto the streets, into the ballot box, into democracy. It is how devotion ossifies into ideology. How religion becomes doctrine. How ideology calcifies into nationalism. And how we confuse our personal understanding with universal commandments.
Some truths we canonise. Others we ridicule.
Someone meditating in a forest is seen as spiritual.
Someone entering a mosque becomes suspicious.
Someone praying to a cow is dismissed as delusional.
Someone praying to nothing? Dangerous.
In such a climate, the act of questioning becomes betrayal.
In the third decade of the twenty-first century, one might assume we have matured past such divisions. A time when we’ve mapped the human genome, sent rovers to Mars, and trained neural networks to compose haiku (badly, but still). We are, by all measurable standards, a brilliant species. Yet, never before have we been more divided, more defensive, more entitled to our unchallenged opinions, and more confused.
Even our enlightenment feels engineered, fragile, ending the moment someone questions a belief we inherited before we had adult teeth.
We create systems, name them truths, and guard them with our lives. And then we handpick the gatekeeper, the self-anointed custodian of truth, or worse, God's reputation. The belief that my value system is superior, my culture, caste, community, country are the gold standard is the same arrogance that colonised continents, burnt libraries, buried languages, and dictated whom one may love.
Faith is beautiful. It’s personal, comforting and deeply humane.
Quiet. A balm in a loud world.
Religion, however, is where things get performative, competitive, even feral.
We legislate in its name.
We go to war in its name.
All while the gods, if they exist, must surely look on with divine exhaustion.
When Gandhi referred to the passage in Leviticus, "an eye for an eye", he wasn’t indulging in poetic hyperbole by adding, "makes the whole world blind." Judging by our collective moral myopia, we may already be halfway there. History is a graveyard of those buried under someone else’s version of truth. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the Partition of India into the Republic of India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Rwanda, Bosnia, Gaza, all of them are grim landmarks in humanity’s long and tragic pilgrimage toward one unwavering belief, that only one truth must rule all. Families displaced. Generations destroyed.
That dangerous belief that our truth is not just a truth but the truth.
That our pain is the only pain.
That our flag is the only one that matters.
And this is what we feed our children: that the world is divided between “us” and “them”.
To question is to betray.
To believe differently is to not belong.
All of this has left us with inherited trauma, spiritual amnesia and anxiety passed through generations that has mutated and metastasised into cultural paranoia and violent nationalism. So, we keep drawing lines, keep weaponising belief, and keep deciding who belongs based on which God they pray to or don’t.
If God created us all, the believer, the atheist, the agnostic, the sinner and the saint, from every speck of dust and blade of grass to galaxies, infinite and unfathomable, then do we really think He needs a few billion mortals subcontracted to protect Him from, well, other mortals?
Truths are not absolute. They are local, perceptive, contextual and rarely rational. Life itself is not rational. Not love, not war, not heartbreak or ambition. Not even ethics and morality.
Then, whose truth is the truth? And who decides which ones are sacred and which ones are absurd?
And the most fundamental question remains, can we kill our way to the truth?
You can’t eat your truth and have it too!
Truth, if it needs protection, is not truth.
To reduce God to a slogan, a weapon, it's not faith.
And perhaps that’s the most inconvenient truth of all.
The author is a Mumbai-based producer and actor