If God Made Them Too, Now What?

To love one’s culture is to love the hands that fed you, the language that first held your thoughts, the festivals that stitched colour into your childhood. It is not an abstract position. It is personal. It is memory, it is the smell of home and the sound of your own name spoken with affection.

But love that refuses introspection becomes fragile. I do not believe culture needs protection from questions. If anything, it becomes stronger when we are honest with it.

I can honour where I come from and still admit that not everything inherited is sacred. Respecting another culture does not weaken mine. It simply recognises that I am not the sole centre of meaning. A nation can give me belonging. A government can give me structure. Neither can demand my silence when dignity is at stake.

Religion complicates this further because it speaks to our deepest loyalties. If there is one Creator, one originating intelligence behind all of this, then that source did not create selectively. It created multiplicity. The people I understand and the people I do not. The practices I cherish and the ones I question. The faith I hold and the one I struggle to comprehend.

Advaita Vedanta says something radical and tender at once. It says there is Brahman, the indivisible reality beneath everything. And that the Atman, the self within, is not separate from it. If that is true, then the other is not truly other. The lines we defend so fiercely are real at the level of experience, but not ultimate.

This also unsettles the way we speak about destiny. If everything is written, if it is all divine will, then even what we call evil exists within that same vast design. That does not excuse injustice. It does not make cruelty holy. But it does challenge selective outrage. If I claim total divine authorship, I cannot then deny the legitimacy of the parts I dislike. The caste, the culture, the religion I demonise would also be within that same creation.

So what is left for us to do ? Not fatalism. Not superiority.

For me, it is loving detachment. To act firmly without hatred. To critique without humiliation. To serve without ego. I think of chardi kala, that steady inner optimism that refuses to collapse into bitterness. Not naive positivity, but disciplined hope. The kind that keeps working for something better even when the world feels fractured.

And what is better…

Good cannot mean control or sameness. Good must mean that respect is ordinary. That dignity is not conditional. That joy is not a luxury reserved for a few but something structurally possible for all.

If Brahman is the substratum of everything, then every human being carries equal worth. If there is one Creator, then exclusion makes no sense. If destiny is invoked, then humility must follow.

I can love my culture deeply. I can practise my faith sincerely. I can belong to a nation fully.But none of these should cost another human being their dignity.