Ramadan Modernized

The holy month is here with all its glories and blessings. A month supposed to teach us patience, endurance and understanding of the pain and anguish of have-nots. A yearly spiritual training to curb and control our desires and share the turmoil of people who live hand to mouth and have to go around working with empty stomachs.
But what I see is a month in which we conveniently ignore the real message and purpose and resort only to the ritualistic tradition of Ramadan. Revitalizing us for the next year by taking ample food and rest and tipping the scales beyond the red mark. It isn't a surprise to see the increase in the sales of myriad pills and syrups for assistance in digesting the heaps of food we stuff into our bodies. Doctors and hakims appear in media to remind people to go easy on food and don't let themselves carried away by the "spirit" of the month by eating too much and regret later.
Scores of food ads mar and diffuse the very essence of this month. It starts to appear like a month long food festival with all those cookery classes and ornate brands on the cable. Ever wonder why the prices of food items skyrocket? I am no economist but I believe, the more ravenously we devour food the more healthy it is for the pockets of our food industry. It helps them to make up their yearlong deficits or to generate some premium profits. Is this what the divine will and wisdom wanted us to do in the name of a month for soul, body and mind purification?
Patience, which is supposed to be one of the virtues induced by fasting, is strangled to death. Picture inside your minds the scene at the local food stall selling all the necessities ( samosa, pakora etc) of an aftar. Pulling each other's leg is no more an idiom and you can see it happening literally. It is ironical to see beggars and less fortunate around these shops, looking with their imploring eyes as we fight for our right of first comes, first serve. They are the people for whom the whole practice is supposed to generate empathy in our hearts.
Here is an example of how tolerant we become as a result of the much-boasted month of blessings. Just a few days as I struggled alone to move my car to the side of the road which broke down suddenly without any prior warning, the driver of the car behind me kept honking the horn and reminded me in a very crude language that he was getting late for the aftar. Perhaps the fear of pakoras going cold is too much to bear. May Allah forgive me for this heinous evil deed (Ameen).

Shortened office hours, less work and more food, all of this serves what purpose? It must have happened with you that when you request someone to do some chore during Ramadan, he gives you such a hurt-puppy look that you start feeling guilty. Even the routine work becomes an uphill task for people and the simple excuse, "I am fasting" does the trick. You cannot even dare to argue because here fasting tends to make people a bit extra sensitive, moreover who wants to be labeled a kafir?
There definitely are the brighter aspects of the whole exercise in ritual-cum-feasting. Those empty mosques once again welcome the long forgotten faces. Cable operators suddenly realize that the music channels showing vulgar and lewd dance numbers are immoral and not fit to air. But unfortunately as soon as the month folds in, the evil face of the society once again resurfaces which hypocrisy had smoothed during these 29 / 30 days (The sighting of moon is not even touched here which creates a wide gulf between the faithful of the same nation).
Everything considered to be immoral transforms into acceptable. The thin veneer between right and wrong cracks and we fall back into the slime of same abyss, of which we climbed momentarily.
We need to realize that God can't be fooled by resorting to the ritualistic aspects of fasting and coining our own ways of ego boasting. It's time that we reconsider our claims on piety.

28th September, 2007. Published in Us Magazine, The News.