HOW PROPHET ISAIAH ENRICHES THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS

HAPPY Christmas, dear readers, I am going, as usual, to Christmas lunch at the home of dear Christian friends of decades.

- RENUKA NARAYANAN

I have also been to Midnight Mass with them in previous years and robustly sung the hymns and carols, all of which I knew by heart. In my childhood, I would go every year to a Christmas party held by my Mina Mami. We would gather around her piano and sing as she played carols and hymns. After that we would be treated to a splendid Christmassy dinner.

When I lived in Bangkok for some years, I would go on Sundays to the Ruamrudee Church. The Hindu temple was too far away and for me the church, too, was a house of God, where I liked to go, listen to the sermon and sing. Perhaps I learnt this from my father who was visiting New York one year. My mother's shraadh or death anniversary occurred during that visit.

My father did not trouble anyone in a foreign land to find him a priest to conduct a puja as he did for her shraadh at home. He slipped quietly into a pew in St Patrick's Church and murmured the beautiful twenty-third Psalm-"The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want".

But that is one of the treasures of being Indian. Religion and culture, ideally, are like a gigantic box of chocolates in which we can all dip freely and share each other's traditions. In the lead-up to this Christmas, I found myself thinking of the prophet Isaiah from the Old Testament in the Bible.