Honest to Pod: My faith, defined in a podcast

When I was growing up, I enjoyed going with my parents to the local Hindu temple at their behest. I didn’t understand what religion was or what it meant to be a part of a particular religion. I understood Hinduism to be a collection of related stories — a fascinating, supernatural series like Magic Tree House or The Boxcar Children.

Hinduism is a broad, diverse religion with no central doctrine. It features numerous spiritual texts, varied belief systems and hundreds of denominations centered around different gods.

My family wasn’t part of a specific denomination, but the main way we practiced the religion was through the Ramayana, a spiritual epic. It featured the story of Rama, a human incarnation of the god Vishnu, who must save his wife, Sita, from the 10-headed demon Ravana with the help of his brother Lakshmana.

My favorite character was Hanuman — a human-monkey demigod who helps Rama along the way. There are many stories about Hanuman throughout the Ramayana, but the one that always stuck with me was the tale of how he saved Lakshmana from a battle wound. A medic said he needed a specifc herb from a Himalayan mountain, and Hanuman — because of his extroardinary ability to leap all the way to said mountain — was tasked with bringing them the herb. When he arrives at the mountain, Hanuman can’t figure out which herb is the right one. So, with his godlike strength, he decides to bring the entire mountain back so the medic can pick out the right herb.

It was stories like these that made Hinduism fun for me as a child. It was Diwali, the major Indian holiday I associated with partying and gifts, that celebrated (in the tradition of Diwali that my family practiced) Rama’s safe return to his kingdom with his wife Sita. It was my family comparing me to Kumbhkaran when I would sleep in on Saturday mornings, because (along with my name being a part of his) Kumbhkaran was an enormous demon popular in the Ramayana because of a part of the story in which he went to sleep for six months before waking up.

From my point of view, the Ramayana wasn’t any different from the stories of Junie B. Jones or Encyclopedia Brown. In fact, the stories were even more engaging than the books I read, because my whole family was part of the experience, and we got to celebrate the characters’ birthdays and major events from the story.

When I got older and began to realize that what Hinduism meant to my parents and most of the people around me who practiced it was a belief in the existence of supernatural gods like Hanuman or demons like Kumbhkaran, I grew incredulous, and became less enthusiastic about going to the temple every week.

On top of that, I was growing up with an education and in a culture where my perception of religion in general was a negative one, associated with wars and violent conflicts, defined by governments who used their power to impose their religion on others.

So I became disillusioned with the idea of religion entirely. I would protest going to the temple, and refuse to participate in prayers or pay attention to the readings from the Ramayana.

My parents never tried to force religion on me heavily, which I appreciate now. Once I became less interested, they took me to the temple less often, until our visits eventually stopped.

For most of high school, I considered myself atheist and thought of religion as a negative institution in human culture.

That was until I discovered Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. I’ve been a devoted, obsessive fan of the Harry Potter series since I began reading it at the age of seven — so discovering a podcast that was based around meaningful conversations about Harry Potter trumped any qualms I had with it also being a podcast about spirituality and faith.

And the insightful, instructive commentary that co-hosts Vanessa Zoltan and Casper ter Kuile bring to each chapter of the Harry Potter series through themes like “forgiveness” and “vulnerability” were everything I didn’t realize I needed.

But they did it through spiritual practice — something I told myself I didn’t want to be associated with. They introduced methods used to read the Bible or the Torah like “sacred imagination,” where you read a passage from a text while imagining yourself in the passage, whether as an observer or as a major character, and thinking through the moral values and lessons you can take away from the experience, even if it’s a mundane paragraph in the text that appears unimportant.

I loved the meaning and moral value that the hosts found deep in the lines of a series I had adored for years, and applying the lessons found in the series to conversations about how we can live our lives day to day. The podcast quickly became something I looked forward to every week.

And the more I listened to it, the more I realized how similar what Kuile and Zoltan were doing with Harry Potter was to what my childhood spiritual practices did with the Ramayana. We were talking about fictional stories, and taking lessons and moral values from them to practice in our daily lives.

Until faith and belief in gods became a part of my understanding of it, I loved religion. Harry Potter and the Sacred Text never asks its listeners to believe that Hogwarts is real or that Harry is a divine being.

Because of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, religion is no longer something I see as negative or harmful. Religion doesn’t have to be about believing in a god or following the rules of an established institutional religion.

Instead, I define religion for myself as any practice that you do regularly to establish and perform your morals and values — whether that’s through an established church or through reading a text like Harry Potter with intention.

Now, religion is something I aspire to. I haven’t quite found my personal sacred text yet (don’t worry, Harry Potter is definitely still in the running), but I hope to find something I can use to guide my moral compass sometime soon. And who knows? That sacred text might even end up becoming a podcast.

Karan Nevatia is a freshman majoring in journalism. He is also the news editor of the Daily Trojan. His column, “Honest to Pod,” runs every other Friday.