I'm an Atheist and this is our Puja Ghar (Thakur Ghar) maintained by my Mother. I cannot remember the last time I entered this room. Today I visited to take this pic. Why? In search of an Answer to a question. Does any Temple, any particular structure alone symbolise Hinduism? I do remember when she started waking up early in the morning, in all seasons, cleaning the Thakur Ghar and doing her Puja. My grandmother left passing responsibility onto her shoulders as my late father was a Communist, an Atheist. The PUJA never stopped. Does her Thakur Ghar be less Holy than any temple? N.. O.. NO. There was never a particular grand fixed sacred place for Hindus. From Tirupathi to Kedarnath, from Kamakhya to Kashi Vishwanath everywhere Deities have been served, worshipped. But none of them ever claimed to be the Prime, the main, the only. Did any? Visiting a Temple was never the fixed criterion like visiting a Church for Christians or Macca in Islam. There was never any uniformity, a religion scattered, full of nuisance, different Gods, different rituals. Here the Bhagwan becomes the child of Vasudeva, a friend of Sudama, lover of Radha & Mother of Ramkrishna. Here the Bhakt & Bhagwan get along, mixed into each other. Make it more beautiful, coloured. Why do they want to bring uniformity to it, deform it? Is it acceptable? I'm watching the deformation of a Religion that despite attacks from the outside by the Muslim & Christian emperors, invaders in the past never allowed religious revenge, It equally found the existence of God in Islamic & Christian structures. Tell me did you never do Pranaam seeing a Mosque or Church in your childhood? I know u do not do it now, neither you remember or want to accept it even if you remember it. A religion that has had no existence of any religious trustee in its past, but today a political organisation claims it. They want Authority to achieve their political goal & the larger Hindu mass falling into this trap without realising the fact that this political clique is hypnotizing you for their total control of the polity of this Country, to rule you, to make you a slave. Your religion gives you freedom to practice the way you want, adore your God the way you want to be, they are taking away that freedom by changing it into a Semitic, monolithic religion, forcing uniformity in it as they know it well RELIGION as a weapon is impossible to defuse gives power to rule for a longer period without answerability. What are the contributions of Temples Largely? The Caste vocation. The system of graded inequality. This is what temples largely represented for thousands of years. The inequality, grievous discrimination, not allowing Dalits to enter the temples considered them impure. Not allowing women to enter during the menstruation period to retain the sanctity of the Temple premises. Attempts to make one Temple the symbol of Hinduism & similarly the attempt of the opposition parties to hold Sankaracharya as the highest position of Hinduism for their political sake are both ridiculous. No, in my childhood I was not at all aware of Sankaracharya, nor my local friend circle. Sankaracharya may be at the top of a section in some regions but not of the Larger Hindu Mass. How did this country get shaped? This country was shaped by the struggle in which their stalwarts never participated. They copy pasted the foreign ideology of Nazism, the ideology of exclusion to counter Islam & Christianity and kept practising it. Never attained the larger struggle for independence. This country came into existence through the scar of partition on religious lines but the nation-makers in the Constituent Assembly who were more than 80% Hindus, many Hindu scholars didn't accept any state religion, they upheld the constitution that did not favour any religion, or colour, race or class. The latter part accepted Islam as the state's religion and see where it is today. Do we want to become like that?