Of belief and belonging

"If you think about it deeply, everybody makes their own faith. No matter what faith they are from, everyone finds their own journey, their own truth, and they may mix and match things from different elements of different faiths and see what is true to them. Hinduism and Buddhism tend to be away from any springboard of certitude. They are more amorphous; you can make God whatever you want. A lot of people would say that the beauty of Hinduism is that it is not overly prescriptive. It is a different matter that some are trying to change that now. Still, its an organic religion. I wanted to contrast the various shades of it through the people that I interviewed and through the culture in which I had grown up. Even if you are non religious, religion and faith encumber everything in our country. It's not just politics but also in everyday things like going out for a meal and asking a vegetarian friend if it's ok that you eat meat, in how ritual ties into caste and how caste ties into identity. All of this we know but I wanted to go into it in a granular way and so this became a big book in the end! 'Tripping down the Ganga' is about the nature of everyday Hindu faith. It is a memoir; it is my journey and you can't separate the observer from what he or she observes. It is a subjective journey, in that sense" — Siddharth Kapila, author, Tripping Down the Ganga, talks to Manjula Narayan about going on yaatras with his mother to pilgrimage spots along the great river from Gaumukh to Ganga Sagar, the believers he met along the way, the experience as a liberal, city bred Hindu Indian of being both an insider and an outsider, the faultlines of caste and gender, and the sense of ecological doom that now hangs over many sacred spots in the Himalayas that are key to Hinduism.