A Conversation with A Messianic Jew One Spring Morning in Richardson

Posted on April 1, 2024April 2, 2024 by Mukul Saran

I met Nadine in a Richardson Park on a nice spring morning in late March as she was walking her little dog and she wondered what 911 Day of Service meant on the banner hung on the outdoor park pavilion iron bars. This lady with years of life on her face, was curious and ventured up to the registration desk we had set up in that pavilion. She had seen many folks wearing the bright yellow-orange T-shirts doing the dirty work of picking up the litter around the park.

She was genuinely interested, and genuinely thankful that we paid attention to the litter that had accumulated in this otherwise lovely park with a creek and a bountiful of while swans & ducks adorning the rock barrier meant to contain the debris floating down from upstream.

She noted that many people do not care about simply taking care of their surroundings. That upset her. She wondered if we were a religious group. I explained ‘we are a Hindu faith-based group, but not focused on religion. We use our unique religious inspiration that guides us – all living and non-living beings are part of the one same whole. Taking care of ourselves necessarily requires us taking care of them all at the same time. She was happy to hear that.

She introduced herself as a Messianic Jew. As a child she had understood Jesus Christ to be a messenger but not the Son of God, who sacrificed for the sinning humans. Now she had found a savior in her Lord, Christ.

She was a little unsure about how to ask the question, but she wanted to know who our ‘Lord’ was in Hinduism. My answer was simple: we do not have one ‘Lord’, but we believe, and know, that we all have One Source. We give that source a variety of names – Shiva, Krishna, The Energy, or God etc. Beyond that Truth we differ; we hold different beliefs about how this ‘Lord’ operates his /her universe. To us Hindus that difference is not highly consequential, if these beliefs lead their followers to find positivity, direction, and strength in their own lives, and help develop a loving society.

This conversation jogged her memory. She told me about a beautiful interview she had watched some time ago between two men – a Christian leader and….. a Hindu leader (she thought). She couldn’t remember the details. Search as she tried to do, she did not find the name of that Hindu leader. She noted how the two men, coming from very different backgrounds, were able to find love in their hearts for each other.

I could relate Love knows no religion to that idea, I explained. If the two men related with each other on a spiritual level where they knew they had the same source and did not focus much on the differences in their beliefs (which, by defintion, cannot be known since they are not knowledge) then such love was possible. I ruminated that in the world today, the focus was on arguing who was right about their beliefs, and that causes strife. She seemed to agree.

She grew curious. She wanted to know more about Hindu beliefs on Heaven and Hell. Did we believe in such a thing? This has been a topic of another blog I wrote previously – Can Hindus Ever RIP. Heaven and Hell are merely an accounting system for our Karma. What we do right, according to our considered obligation as humans, opens the doors to heaven where we could enjoy the fruits of our Karma. What we do wrong – unethical, inhuman or such – gives us an entry pass to Hell. We must bear the consequences of all our actions.

But Hindus also believe in something else – reincarnation. This is akin to the idea that our universe is cyclic. It arises out of ‘nothing’, sustains for a while (a long while, which feels like an eternity compared to a mere 100 yrs of our lifespan), and then dissolves back into The Source. Look around…. every natural phenomenon is cyclic; most obviously we know how spring brings nature back to life year after year. We know that the earth goes around the sun in cycles, and results in a repeating cycle of seasons. We have learned about the rain cycle, the carbon cycle, and many others. Is it hard to imagine that our birth and death are cyclic in a similar sense? Karma & Reincarnation Cycle

Hindus believe our soul cycles through a variety of forms before it exits the cycle. Our bodies are just temporary housing for it (I did not use the word ‘Atma’ with her, since I would still need to resort to the word ‘soul’ to explain the ‘atma’ concept, for which there is no parallel in the western culture). She immediately could relate to the idea of permanence and repeated something similar from her religious beliefs.

Then, my explanation continued, our souls simply go from one body to the next, taking several births over many lifetimes. Hindus’ ultimate goal is to liberate from this cycle of birth and death of the bodies we are trapped in. When that is attained, we return to eternal peace, to The Source we all came from. This explanation fascinated her.

Feeling that my explanation may have been somewhat tedious, I inquired about her work – she had mentioned earlier in passing that she still worked – I found out she was associated with a Jewish service organization. More conversations revealed that we shared an interest in mental health of the community and were working in our own ways to address this. She invited me to her next monthly meeting on the topic. We exchanged contacts and are now looking forward to the next steps. Hopefully, we can follow in the example of the two people who she had earlier cited.

She left as her little doggie got up on her hind legs and, with a bark, informed her that she’s had enough of being a bystander in this long conversation. She wanted to move on.

Just a few minutes later I saw her back in the pavilion. She had returned to share the picture of the Hindu man she spoke of earlier. It was the current Dalai Lama’s photograph. I did clarify that he was a revered Buddhist leader but felt glad to think that we are all Hindus if we simply live spiritually, looking at what is the essence of our existence rather than dwelling on the differences in our own mental creations.

The Morning After – 1981 Winnipeg

Posted on October 3, 2021October 12, 2021 by Mukul Saran

The day had come… more accurately, the night – around 1:30AM in Winnipeg, Canada in late August of 1981. The mind, the body, the universe was confused. Time-zones do that to you. My would-be Ph.D. supervisor was not there this late at night. The university’s India students association had no welcoming service. Google was born only in 1998, a full 17 yrs after the fact. Cellphones were in a pre-natal stage (the first commercial ones came out in 1983). No family or friends, an unfamiliar country! It felt foreign – the airport, the people, the phone-system, the transportation system – everything! At 22yrs old, I found myself struggling as a freshly-landed, lonely foreign student in Canada.

The night marked the end of a maiden flight that had taken me straight out of my native India. My previous international travel was as a 16yr old accompanying my parents on a bus to Nepal.

Clueless about my whereabouts, it only made sense to stay put at the desolate airport for the night. As the sun came through, the pocket phone diary my parents had handed me yielded a contact. This gentleman had been a professional contact of an uncle of mine, many years prior. How I made the call on that coin-operated rotary phone in Canada dodges the memory, but it turned out to be a lifesaver. He and his wife very kindly picked this stranger up from the airport, fed good hot breakfast, and then dropped me outside Tache Hall. Exhausted, I did not notice the beautiful colonial design of the dorm building.

That breakfast surely helped me break an unintended, prolonged 18+hrs fast. I had given up eating food a few hours after taking off from Delhi on Air India flight to NY. Whenever the air-hostess brought the meals my confused body rejected them; the body clock had lost its rhythm. Emotions had consumed me; this separation from my family and my land was going to be a long and uncertain one. My parents have had to borrow money just to put me on that flight. The finality of the moment dawned on me as the excitement of travel in previous days yielded to home-sickness.

Travel from NY, onward to Toronto, allowed no breaks to eat. The US immigration officer looked perplexed as he examined my papers. I had no US transit visa to enable ground transport to LaGuardia, a connecting airport several miles away. My travel agent had not advised of this detail. The officer drew me aside and went to get his associate. He came back with an African-American lady officer to escort me out of the airport. She walked with me to the bus station, sat on the bus through to LaGuardia, navigated to the check-in counter for NY-Toronto flight, and accompanied me through security until I had securely boarded the flight. Had it not been so, I’d likely be stuck in NY that night! Thank the travel agent!

The final flight from Toronto to Winnipeg was uneventful, but it was too late for any food service. That breakfast in Winnipeg had ended the forced, prolonged fast.

It was Friday morning that I flung my bags on the bed in the dorm, and went into a deep slumber almost immediately. The morning after, on a beautiful Saturday, I woke up again. I had literally slept for nearly 24hrs since the last breakfast. Hungry and weak in search of food, ventured out of my room on the University of Manitoba campus. Not a soul was in sight. Coming from a hugely more populous place buzzing with a constant din 24/7, I had never seen a place so desolate. A single car parked outside another colonial structure on campus – later learned it was called the Admin Bldg – gave me some hope.

The owner emerged nearly 30mins later. In my unpracticed Indian English, I mustered enough courage to ask for help. “Nothing on campus would be open for the next 3 days” I was told. It was the Labor-day long weekend. It was also my first encounter with this vocabulary. He was a kind man. He dropped me off at a McDonald’s a few short kilometers from Campus.

I had never heard that name before. For almost all of us Indians, Canada was a far away fantasy land where Eskimos lived in Igloos. No internet or Google existed to help us know any better. That McDonald’s went into the history book (my personal one!) when it fed a hungry, vegetarian Indian kid his first meal in Canada. Of course in 1981, neither McDonald’s, nor Tache Hall, or for that matter even the city of Winnipeg or the province of Manitoba, would know what ‘vegetarian’ means. Nevertheless, found enough to fill me up – some French Fries and Vanilla milk-shake! I was happy that the meal only cost a couple of dollars; my total cash assets of a few hundred dollars was all I had. That’s ALL the foreign currency that India could afford to let international students take out of the country, including their fees.

As a side note, years later McDonald’s declared that their fries were not vegetarian; they used ‘formula 47’ which included beef tallow. I felt corrupted. Unwittingly, a lifelong vegetarian Hindu boy had enjoyed the fries at the cost of the cows slaughtered for his eating pleasure.

How the next few days passed on campus remains a complete blur. I only recall not having enough mental resources to seek out the Physics department or my PhD supervisor for another three days. When I did finally reach him his relief was palpable; he had finally found his lost student. It became clear that he did visit the airport to receive me but returned baffled that I was not on that flight from Toronto. He had misread my telegram “arriving at 00:00hr”. He went to the airport a full 24hrs later!

My parents in India had no inkling of these 36+ hrs, or even whether their son had reached the destination, until over a month later when my first hand-written letter reached them in Bhopal. It leaves me bewildered as I think about how they might have felt not knowing for all those weeks. I will never truly know.

The ability of humans to survive through much worse situations is incredible. Thankful I am well equipped to write about it today!

The Onion Profile

Posted on October 6, 2020October 8, 2021 by Mukul Saran

My friends are really confused! I mean the facebook friends. For years they have seen my face in various shades on the facebook profile. They don’t quite know what to make of an onion that has sprouted a few strands of the green blades as my profile picture. This is also kind of unlike my personality – linear, direct and simple. If the profile picture must represent me, it should simply show my face. The expression in the picture would convey a sense of my personality and create whatever impression it does on a viewer – a serious, contemplative person in nerdy black glasses or a fun guy dressed up as a ‘mafia boss’.

But what on earth does an onion, nesting among oranges and bananas, perched on a

decorative fruit-plate above a counter top mean? That has been confusing my friends.

And I know. Since my profile-name also no longer spells out my actual name, for an average user it is rather difficult to identify me. Often, I have been ignored for this reason.

The story of this profile begins with the discovery of an onion lost in a dark corner of a kitchen cabinet for an unknown number of weeks.

How could it stay alive, sprouting new life without soil, water, or sunlight after weeks of neglect? A novelty for me for sure! The beauty of this unattended, natural growth had to be displayed! What better place than a counter-top, where this resilient creation could be seen and admired.

It soon became salad. How could one resist the urge to taste the fresh onion greens? Where the green shoots were clipped and taken away, new ones developed and grew back rapidly as if urging us to take more!

When the darkness envelopes our lives, when the loved ones neglect us, when we face a paucity of life’s essentials we humans can still thrive, much like this onion. There is something inspirational in this growth. It is natural, it is resilient and it is beautiful. It deserves to be seen and emulated by one and all.

For the onion it comes naturally. Humans must strive to develop it – a generosity that is willing to give away all our material growth. And then be happy to give away some more.