The Karma of the Commandments

The Ten Commandments originally may have been carved on stone tablets, but currently they are all over the place, in the newspapers, on TV, and on people's minds with the recent Supreme Court ruling that displays of the Commandments in public places could be allowed in certain cases.

To be honest, I haven't really thought about the Ten Commandments for a long while. Not since I last saw the Hollywood epic in a rerun on TV. In fact, I've lost track of the number of times I've seen the movie, but my first time was certainly during my growing up years in India, and it had a lasting impression on me.

As a young Hindu girl educated in an English convent school in New Delhi, as many of the children of the upper middle class were, I was certainly open to the Christian faith. We easily moved between the Hindu and Christian worlds of home and school. Nuns, who sometimes rapped us on the knuckles with a wooden ruler, were a part of our daily life. We'd kneel down every day for midday mass, and I could recite The Lord's Prayer at the drop of a hat.

Although I've often browsed through Bibles during my stay in motels, I've never read one from cover to cover. What I know of the Ten Commandments is from the movie, and each of the commandments, delivered with a bolt of Hollywood lightening, certainly has a place in my heart.

After all, who can argue with such great commonsense edicts as "Thou Shalt Not Kill" and "Thou Shalt Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself"? These are teachings embodied in all the great religions of the world, and yes, all human beings, whether they are Christian or not, can takes these commandments as a guiding star in their lives. Even the injunction to worship but one God is fine by me, because as a Hindu I know there is only one God, but with many different names.

But now the Ten Commandments are back in my consciousness-and not in the most pleasant way. Why do I, who regard them as so benign, still feel uncomfortable having them displayed in public spaces? Kentucky-the site of one of the two cases decided by the Supreme Court-is a long way off, but even if I were to go into the local post office or a courthouse in New York and see a monument to this essentially Christian teaching, I would feel somehow imposed upon. As an immigrant and a Hindu, I would feel a little less welcome, a stranger in the neighborhoods that are now my home turf. And this is multicultural New York, a city with people of all faiths living together.

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