Janmashtami is not merely a festival of celebrating child Krishna through idols, sweets, and rituals. It is an invitation to confront the ego, attachment, fear, and ignorance within. The idol, scripture, and guru are mirrors meant to reveal the truth about oneself. The real birth of Krishna happens within when one surrenders to truth, faces inner conflict, and moves beyond limited identities toward self-knowledge and freedom.
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Originally published in The Pioneer on 05 September '26
The images arrive every year, each a little more elaborate than the last. A tiny Krishna is given admission to a school, with a printed interview by the principal. The same infant deity is taken for a heartbeat check. He is dressed, perfumed, laid in a little bed, fed, rocked to sleep, addressed as mera laala. Somewhere else a human tower climbs fifty, sixty, a hundred feet, so that one young man can risk his neck to break a pot of curd and earn, it is said, some merit.
A temple priest brought all this to me recently. Not a skeptic, but a man who installs idols for a living, who has given years to thakur-seva. He had begun to see something in his own hands that he could no longer stop seeing, and he asked a plain question: can service of this kind, offered to the symbol, ever help in aatm-vigalan, in the melting away of the ego? Or has the deity himself been turned into one more object of craving?
