"God lives elsewhere"

The president and the prime minister of this so called "secular" country inaugurate an opulent and ostentatious temple. As if we don't have enough temples already! It is shameful. Tehelka has an angry editorial by Amit Sengupta:

So how much space does god need to call it his home? How many crores does god want us to spend on him so that he can possess a swanky, sprawling mansion which dominates the skyline? So what will god do in this huge expanse, move from room to room? Looking for what, inner peace, outer silence, inner silence, bitter truth? Or will he play golf or ride a horse and gaze at the distances of the private property he possesses, till the eye can see, like landlord-princes in old European paintings? Is god terribly afraid of darkness? Does he suffer from insomnia? Is he a sleepwalker? If not, why does he need hundreds of jazzed up lights all night in a city so starkly short of power and in a nuclear power country where half the population still don't have electricity (or enough to eat, below that mythical poverty line)? So why does god need this rolling-in-wealth real estate?

While it is not wrong to criticise the construction of temples on utilitarian grounds, as Sengupta does, still I think there are sufficient reasons to hate temples on artistic and aesthetic grounds as well. These temples, specially the modern ones, are the most fertile grounds for that horrendous evil called Kitsch. I have never understood what kind of feeling those showy and shallow designs or those hideously corny statues are supposed to evoke. I almost always cringe in embarrassment at such stupid, crude and sentimental display of pieties.

P.S. More on Kitsch from Wikipedia here. If you are wondering why I called Kitsch a horrendous evil, then read Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He explains the nature and origin of Kitsch really well.