Desecration of Dr. Babasaheb's political legacy

I am wracked by shame today. 

Ramdas Athavale, a minister in the Central Cabinet, leader of the eponymous splinter group of the Republican Party of India, added volumes of vomit to the overflowing bowl of embarrassment that is the zeitgeist. If you have not seen the "Go Carona" (sic) video, search it now. I will not dignify it by appending it to this post. 

Why am I ashamed? Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar evolved an independent political space for Dalits in stages: first by launching the Independent Labour Party of India, then, the Scheduled Caste Forum and finally, the Republican Party of India, which he announced in September 1956 but died before it was formally constituted. 

Why did he choose to name it "Republican Party"? I am speculating here but my hypothesis is this. For Dr. Babasaheb, the Reublic, where the Citizen was the Sovereign, where there was no greater power in the country than every last one of us, must have represented an even greater sociopolitical value than Democracy. By the nomenclature he chose, he was sending a loud and clear message: that the long oppressed Dalits were, henceforth, not merely masters of their own destinies, they were equal partners in being the sovereign rulers of India. His message to Dalits, "Educate, Agitate, Organize", critically emphasized "Organize". The organising principle was people's sovereignty and the Republican Party of India would evolve into the point of the spear. 

That incomparable legacy; of Education, Agitation, Organisation; was publicly destroyed today. By a politician who claims to inherit the great Babasaheb's mantle.

Then again, that is the price of the Faustian bargain that he made with the party which stands for "Uneducate, Oppress, Destroy".

Get-out-of-jail-free card for all the toxic isms

Racism, sexism, religious sectarianism, casteism and all assorted other isms if their ilk share a few characteristics.

Before I go there, a little rewind to the moment which triggered today's contemplation.

A bunch of us friends were witness, to a 70-something male, launch into a particularly obnoxious riff about what attracts women at different stages of their lives. This bloke, I understood from my friends, was a corporate mover/shaker in his halcyon days. He continues to serve on various company boards but otherwise lives a retired life in various resort-style homes. His authority may have been sharply diminished but the sense of entitlement and arrogance is as unpleasantly evident as his bulbous nose.

Our conversation soon moved to the wider canvas of everyday misogyny and normalisation of sexism at the Indian workplace, which stubbornly resists attempts to tame it, notwithstanding the law or public abhorrence, expressed, for instance, during the #MeToo moments of 2018. And that was when a recurrent theme popped up.

Apparently, men who have cabins or large, enclosed, offices, now rarely close their room doors when they are meeting a woman- colleague or business associate, individually. This is to prevent subsequent accusations of inappropriate behaviour behind closed doors and all the potential consequences which might follow. I objected, perhaps not too vigorously, to this train of thought but it never left my mind. A day later, I have marshalled my thoughts and, even as it reawakens the disquiet I felt yesterday about backing off too soon, it is important that I explain why I think so.

1. Women may have been a part of the workforce from time immemorial, but through those millennia, male domination of the workplace has gone on, unchecked. Even today, the gender pay gap in North America stands at 82%. Women work harder, and almost always continue to carry the bulk of the homemaking burden, to get the same place in the corporate, or even bureaucratic, hierarchy. And eventually, the glass ceiling comes calling.

2. Women will, almost without exception, experience sexual harassment at the workplace. It may be overt: demanding favours in lieu of advancement or advantage, or covert: lewd messaging, sexually explicit personal comments, or worse: non-consensual contact all the way up to its worst manifestations. If I was to hazard a guess, the reported, and hopefully, remedied, incidence is no more than a single digit percentage of what actually happens. This is after, and in spite of, laws on sexual harassment at work becoming almost a universal feature of statute books around the world.

3. Victim shaming is the first instinctive reaction, every time an incidence of a minor misdemeanour or a major infraction is reported or otherwise becomes public knowledge. You have already heard or read about all the shapes and forms which Gaslighting takes, so I don't intend to elaborate.

Which brings me to my disappointment with myself.

The very suggestion: that a woman may falsely accuse a male colleague or business associate of impropriety at the workplace, because she sees advantage in so doing, is horribly troubling.

1. Males routinely get away with their worst excesses under the catchall "boys will be boys". What makes it worse is this isn't even necessarily a blemish on a male resumé: he's just assumed to be a particularly virile, or perhaps raffish, chap. Sometimes this extends further. "Oh, if he hit on her, she must be special; he has discriminating tastes on the distaff side, you know".

2. A woman pays a very heavy price for calling out her tormentor. All efforts are made to silence her: bully, threat, bribe, legal gags. We are hearing a lot these days about the nondisclosure agreements which Bloomberg bound several of his victims under. Even if she does get her story out, her subsequent reputation is always marred by innuendo. "Takes two to tango". "Sleeping her way up the corporate ladder". These, and much viler comments adhere to her like indelible stains. If you are unfamiliar with it, this is a good time to google "Roger Ailes".

3. Subordinates seek closed-door meetings with their supervisors, or hierarchical superiors, only because they wish to discuss something which warrants confidentiality. A superior who will discriminate between his male and female subordinates in the manner of taking such a meeting, is grossly iniquitous. It reveals HIS incapacity to conduct such a conversation without risking language or action which will likely attract censure. In the meantime, the open door will effectively muzzle the woman's ability to fully discuss what she wanted to, in the first place, and grant the corporate seal of approval to hypocrisy and injustice.

What does all of this have to do with the other isms I brought up at the top? Everything.

Replace gender by race, religion, caste or sexual orientation; all the issues do not change a whit.

Victim shaming is our permanent get-out-of-jail-free card.

Blood on whose hands?

Someone said this to me yesterday. "If you voted for 56 in 2014, you could be forgiven for being gullible and succumbing to promises of "sab ka saath, sab ka vikas", or to express your frustration with a comatose government. or even the anti-incumbency, "These guys have been around 10 years; why don't we give the other guys a chance and see what they can do?". But if you voted for 56 in 2019, you did so with the full knowledge of what went down in his first five years, and the attack on JNU, the barbarity of Jamia and the carnage in Northeast Delhi is on you".

I'm now beginning to realise, that those who did, are actually quite pleased with all these manifestations of brute majoritarianism. I now see clearly that demagoguery has succeeded in amplifying existing inferiority complexes and weaponising them against the 'Other'. That this project rests on half-truths, fictions, fables and myths is utterly irrelevant. Demagoguery has successfully painted scepticism, rigour of inquiry and openness into effete obsessions of (another bad word) intellectuals.

They are seeing and reading the same news stories as you and I are. Several of them are all in so deep, that their Muslim hate, (I choose to eschew the term 'Islamophobia' as an unnecessary euphemism; let's call it what it is), is now worn as a badge of pride on their chest. The rest continue to practice false equivalence. "Offfoh, it isn't anti-Muslim, both parties are equally culpable".
People who have never read the CAA will keep telling you, "it isn't meant to take anyone's citizenship away, it is meant to GIVE citizenship to *persecuted minorities* from Muslim-majority neigbouring countries". Here is the act. http://egazette.nic.in/WriteReadData/2019/214646.pdf
No, there is no reference to either persecuted or minorities in the act. All it does it creates a religious test for granting citizenship, and this does not have precedent. However, it will BECOME precedent for "Reasonable Classification" in times to come.

India's Muslims are reading the writing on the wall; their right of citizenship is facing its greatest in independent India. You can parrot the propaganda, because it suits your prejudice; be more honest and accept that you really do want to see disparate citizenship rights; or see it for what it is. Not a traffic inconvenience in Southeast Delhi, or Mumbai Central. Not an ISI conspiracy to spread unrest. Not a paid assignment for pay-per-use intellectuals. But a brazen, frontal attack on our Constitutional paradigm.

Please read the promise that our wise Constitution makers made to our generations to eternity. That the Republic secured, for all its citizens:
JUSTICE, social, economic and political;
LIBERTY of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship;
EQUALITY of status and of opportunity;
and to promote among them all
FRATERNITY assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation

If you got all the way here, you are probably furious, one way or another. Either with me for being a gormless liberal. Or with the state of the nation.

Pick your fury.

Martyrs' Day 2020

Today is Martyr's Day. Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated exactly 72 years ago, today. This post is dedicated to all those millions, known and unknown, who built India.

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
From "Friends of Voltaire"- Evelyn Beatrice Hall

A common refrain I hear these days is "Liberals are really illiberal. They won't get into a discussion with people with whom they disagree. Is this liberal?"

Now, I can't speak for everyone who identifies as a liberal, but here is where I stand on this allegation.

1. You have the right to believe in, and say, whatever you want. If you believe that India belongs, primarily, to people of a certain religion; adherents of all other religions, and atheists, are required to know their (subordinate) status, feel free to say it. If you believe that women are the inferior gender and the world really belongs to men, say it. If you believe that the 'Aryan' race is the superior to all others, say that. If you believe that people born to poverty are only paying for the sins of their previous lives, and deserve the privations, indignities, squalor and disease which comes with it, say that too.
   
   DO NOT, HOWEVER, EXPECT THAT I WILL BE PREPARED TO ENGAGE YOU IN A REASONED CONVERSATION ABOUT ANY OF THESE, OR SIMILAR, PROPOSITIONS. YOU ARE A DISGRACE TO THE WORLD, AND I HAVE NOTHING TO DISCUSS WITH YOU.
   If, in contrast to such brain-dead bigotry, you ask questions about any of these issues, are uncertain or unclear, I am always willing to talk to you at length.
    
2. When I was rather young, my politics was described, variously, as Marxist, Communist or Leftist. With time, I moved away from the notion of violent overthrow of the established order, and was appalled by the tyrannies which the real-world manifestations of Marxist societies had produced. My positions began to shift away from every form of totalitarianism, whether it emerged from the Left or the Right. Individual rights, particularly those of equality before the law and an independent judiciary, free thought and expression, fair representation in legislative/executive arms of government, practice of religion, ownership of property (subject to reasonable restriction), conduct of business or profession (with caveats) became the keystones of my view of the world.
   
3.  The great George Orwell showed the way, to me and goodness knows how many others. I identified, by my late 20s as a Social Democrat, with a tilt toward a more statist political economy, particularly in sectors like infrastructure, education, healthcare and social security. This position has broadly defined my sociopolitical identity ever since.
   
4. The world, goaded on by the victory of free-market capitalism over communism with the collapse of the USSR in December 1991, moved decisively towards unfettered primacy of corporate, and increasingly, global capital flows.
   India had begun her own march towards economic liberalisation, earlier that fateful year, in the face of looming fiscal collapse. My cohort, of people who came into the work force starting the early 1980s, were the biggest beneficiaries of the tailwinds created by India's liberalisation, which propelled us to almost unimaginable prosperity, as compared to our parents' generation, even as it also lifted millions out of poverty at the bottom of the economic pyramid. I will readily admit that the next two decades were hardly about politics. Accumulation (of all sorts) and the responsibilities of building the household defined my life. Politics, at best, was only instrumental, sometimes as a catalyst, at others as a dampener.
    
5. I am older now, and the self-centeredness which defined my last thirty years, has made way for restoring at least some part of the idealism which informed the awakening of my political consciousness in my teens and early twenties. In the meantime, the go-go 90s and noughties turn out to have been drivers of unprecedented polarisation along every axis. More wealth now lies in fewer hands than ever in recorded history. Politics has ceded all middle ground and shifted, sans challenge, further and further right. Wealth, particularly in its most egregious form, and political power concentrated with a handful, have colluded and coalesced into a creature which now brandishes the State itself as its proprietary instrument. Demagoguery, fear-mongering, bullying and the often-brutal silencing of dissent have become commonplace, from the Philippines to Brazil and all points in between. We know it too, right?

Still with me?

I cannot be silent any more.

I cannot be indifferent any more.

I am NOT A LIBERAL ANY MORE.

Let me step away and end with lines written by the great poet, Ramdhari Singh "Dinkar".

तिमिर पुत्र ये दस्यु कहीं कोई दुष्काण्ड रचें ना
सावधान हो खडी देश भर में गांधी की सेना
बलि देकर भी बलि! स्नेह का यह मृदु व्रत साधो रे
मंदिर औ’ मस्जिद दोनों पर एक तार बांधो रे

समर शेष है, नहीं पाप का भागी केवल व्याध
जो तटस्थ हैं, समय लिखेगा उनके भी अपराध.

Cindy's Mole?

It seems to be received wisdom these days that you must “earn" the right to criticize a person in public office or a political entity in electoral majority. How is the right earned? By paying compliments. This credits valuable coin into your emotional bank balance with said person or entity which you are then allowed to expend on criticism. In the absence of coin, your adverse comments carry no weight and must be dismissed as incoherent rants.

This wisdom is often yoked to another- invoking precedent from the putative adversary, thus ensuring that no assessment of a present-day event is possible absent reparations for the original sin: “He that is without sin, let him cast the first stone".

This power trifecta is completed by a slam-dunk. “Do you have a better idea”? Speak now or forever hold your peace.

 Between these triple punches, it must seem that all dissenting voices will be stilled. Any adverse comment, having been added as a post scriptum to elegiac paeans, will be reduced to the metaphorical equivalent of Cindy Crawford’s mole.

The word “Democracy” a portmanteau of two Latin roots: demos (people) and kratos (power), points to the relationship between electors and the elected. The elected serve, and serve at, the pleasure of their electors. The power and badges of privilege they enjoy are not birth rights or entitlements; they are perquisites meant to facilitate the work enjoined upon them. While this is the formal democratic construct, its real-world manifestation is rather different, particularly when a particular elected official is repeatedly reelected into the same office, or, as is often the case, successively more powerful offices. The longer this streak continues, the more likely it is for the incumbent to start associating the power and badges with herself, the person, rather than her elected office. Interestingly, this metamorphosis is bilateral; the electors begin to posit the person at a higher plane of existence than the one they inhabit and frame the relationship in terms of their gratitude rather than the official’s accountabilities. Indeed, even when such officials begin utilising their authority coercively, electors don’t merely condone it; they applaud it as decisiveness and fortitude. Parallely, elected officials, having the bully pulpit of office at their disposal, can use it to stoke anxiety and fear, amplify voices calling for assigning larger and larger gobs of personal discretion to themselves, and stifle even the slightest querulous note.

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a morality tale which reminds us of the very short path in elected office from humility to hubris. It makes pointed references to the shared culpability of the vast assembly of citizens in elevating one among their own into a plenipotentiary above them all. Democratic societies on every continent have elected strongmen into office over the last decade. In each instance, a vocal minority of electors, willingly provide an elaborate apologia for the excesses of their caesar and work in concert to drown out discordant voices.

With this, let us go back to the popular wisdom trifecta with which we began this essay. If you are a citizen of a democratic jurisdiction, you are a shareholder in the societal power which places people into elected office. This, in and of itself, gives you the right to express your views about elected officials: favourable, indifferent or unfavourable. In contemporary discourse, the implicit assumption is that the exercise of the right to vote is the sole opportunity for voicing opinion about those aspiring to office. Nothing can be further from the truth. The duration of appointment is not, and should never be, devoid of an ongoing feedback loop which conveys the ebbs and flows of public opinion to those in elected office. These feedback loops can take many forms. Social media allow anyone with a smartphone, a data connection and a Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/Blogger etc. account, platforms to air their views. Regular news outlets such as newspapers, news broadcasters on TV. radio or digital media are collectively labelled "Fourth Estate" in acknowledgement of their role as the watchdog over the other three "estates"- legislature, judiciary and executive. In some countries, regular opinion surveys monitor citizens' approval or disapproval of their presidents, prime ministers or monarchs. The Gallup Presidential Approval Rating traks how Americans view their president, week after week. In India, we are used to local or state elections being described as referendums on national leadership, particularly when the state is ruled by the same political configuration as the centre.

A range of ideological alignments point to wide differences in views about the devolution of economic, social, cultural and administrative power across the society. I am not obligated to ever agree with a single prescription or policy direction of those in office; indeed, a vibrant, plural political discourse demands that such differences exist. The incorrigible sceptic is not anathema to democratic polity, she is its strongest pillar.

Politicians become adept at the arts of deception and deflection. It takes little imagination to rake up real, and often imagined, injustices committed by someone else in the past, as covering fire for behaving atrociously in the here and now. Today’s atrociousness can even be framed in terms of rebalancing the scales and writing wrongs. This sets the hapless electors up for an infinite regression of finding and fixing old iniquity and creating brand new inequity for redressal by a future demagogue of the opposite persuasion. Invoking the past is a surefire way of perpetuating atrociousness.

Finally, an eye for critical evaluation is not equivalent to an eye for creative imagination. It could even be argued that critiquing requires the diligent patience of an auditor while creativity requires the uninhibited voyages into the terra incognita of future possibilities. In 1915, Einstein came up with his General Theory of Relativity sitting in a patent office in Bern. Several dozen astronomers and astrophysicists then provided the first conclusive proof of the theory when a solar eclipse came along in 1919. This is how it should be in democratic polity too. Officials must exert their minds and imaginations for best acquitting their official responsibilities. And ordinary citizens must constantly probe their prescriptions for vulnerability or ineptitude. Officials should encourage and stimulate critical evaluations, so they are not blindsided by the law of unintended consequences.

Power has been shown, repeatedly, to be a desensitiser of self-awareness. Healthy democracies take the job of keeping elected officials on their toes seriously. And democratic societies that stifle critical voices must be mindful of Plato's insight, proven repeatedly in the real world, of the unfortunate propensity of democracies to morph into tyrannies.

Part Farce. Part Tragedy. All Aadhar.

My son decided to get enrolled for Aadhar.

Having little else on my schedule for the day, I offered to accompany him to an enrollment center. We knew it was going to be a time-consuming exercise, given the anecdotal accounts of strained facilities, long queues and disorderly customers, and we had lots to talk about.

A Google search had listed the Mumbai General Post Office as an Aadhar Seva Kendra (Aadhar Service Center). This stately edifice lying South East of the magnificent Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus had been on my list of Mumbai buildings to check out for a while and this Aadhar agenda was a perfect reason to combine business with pleasure. The cab decanted us at the GPO gates at 8.58 a.m. and we were rather looking forward to the next few hours under that great dome when we walked up the security bloke at the half-ajar gate. "Bahut der kar di aapne", "you are terribly late", he said. The GPO Aadhar center apparently processes only 15 (you heard that right, fifteen), customers a day and he opened a dogeared notebook that already had 16 (sixteen) names on it. The sixteenth chap had pleaded with them to keep him on standby banking on the possibility of there being a dropout from those ahead of him. "These customers came and booked their place between 4 and 6", he explained. 4 and 6? Yes, 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. aka the darkest hours before dawn. Not one to be disheartened by one snub, I strode out and demanded more options from Google. The Mumbai Collectorate, a complex of government offices, was just a km south of where we stood. We didn't dilly. Nor did we dally, but marched off to this other oasis that promised what we sought.

The Mumbai District Collectorate presents a rather characterless front enlivened ever so slightly by its unusual, oblique orientation to the road before it. The grand stairs of the Asiatic Society and the fabulous Horniman Circle that constitute its immediate neighbourhood, erase even an infinitesimal possibility of a second glance. But we were not to be distracted. The policeman at the guard post confirmed that there was a functioning ASK (acronyms, acronyms), right inside and thither we proceeded. An elderly couple sitting all by themselves on a bench in the main quadrangle indicated that they too had been drawn there and we took them along to a spot further inside the bowels of the complex to finally come upon a hallway with a vinyl sign tacked on that announced Aadhar Seva Kendra. A couple of gents had beaten us to it and they were happy to confirm that we had, in fact, reached the Jerusalem we sought.

It was just past 9.15 at the time. Barring the six of us (ibid.) there was nobody around. Even the safai karmacharis (janitors) had not swept past yet. Indeed, as the picture reveals quite vividly, the ASK vinyl sign had become some sort of a magnet for garbage left behind by the previous day's (week's?) aspirants. The clever ASK staff love suspense so there was no indication of when the doors to the sanctum sanctorum would be thrown open for us dawdlers. Nothing to it, in other words, than to settle down and begin a wait of indeterminate duration. There's a fellowship of shared discomfort which sparks bonhomie amongst strangers and soon enough, backstories of what brought us there were tumbling out. The senior citizens having been incessantly harassed for 'Aadhar seeding' (why does it need such reproductive nomenclature anyway?) by their banks, insurance companies and vada pav wala across the gulli had finally decided to throw in the towel and get enrolled. The other two gents were seeking modifications in their records; a new mobile number, a name spelled incorrectly.

Aadhar on their minds

The original 6 had now burgeoned to a round dozen and the doors remained as unyielding as ever.

10.30 a.m. Our prayers were to be answered after all. A young lady arrived with a bunch of keys, strode purposefully to locked door and a decisive turn of the key and slide of latch later, the ASK's doors had been thrown open for another productive day. (Stop right there. Not so fast).

How to find network

Two young gentlemen followed the young lady and took their appointed places behind spartan desks equipped quite prominently with table lamps. These luminaires weren't to be taken lightly: they provided the illumination for capturing the stipulated facial image biometric. Soon, one of the two gents left, laptop in hand and trailing considerable length of critical looking cable. Technical difficulty, we surmised and got back to waiting. The man, though, had not merely stepped away for a brief interlude; he appeared to have 'proceeded on leave' as we like to call it. About half an hour later, I ventured in to ask the now solitary occupant, the original young lady, about the missing gent. "We have a network problem here", she acknowledged, "and the day's data acquisition cannot begin until we log into the central system". The particular section of the complex where this ASK is housed is separated by a wall from the Indian Navy's Western Naval Command HQ. There are hushed whispers about signal jammers and, as even I can confirm, mobile data is pretty much non-existent. Like a diviner with a wand or a dowser with rod, our dauntless champion was wandering around in the vicinity for his client to ping the server in the cloud (does have a metaphysical ring to it, doesn't it?). Later, much later, the mystic handshake having been completed, young man came back, much the worse for wear. It was well past 11.30 and if I'd been walking around hoisting a laptop and a dongle and a bunch of cables in the unforgiving outdoors, I'd be a wreck too.

The wait had given us more time to discover many more travellers' tales. A gentleman representing his 90 year old mother was wondering if she could be registered without clearly discernible fingerprints. There were plenty of incorrectly recorded addresses, mobile numbers, email addresses and misspelt names. One story stood out for egregious misery. A couple had travelled from Jalgaon, 

Mumbai 420 km

over 400 kilometers or 10 hours by MSRTC bus, to attempt to reverse an error of particularly dreadful proportions. Apparently, when they were first being registered, there was a major misattribution of fingerprint records, their being scrambled across a bunch of enrollments done around the same time. The error came to light when they were both misidentified while trying to 'seed' (there it is again) their Aadhars at their mobile service provider. They went back to the Jalgaon ASK where they had first enrolled, only to discover that it was shut or dormant. While Nashik would have been a less onerous journey, they decided to take no chances and come all the way to Mumbai.

And eventually, it was my son's turn to hand over the reins of his identity to a faceless, unaccountable deity in the cloud, the inscrutable UIDAI. It will probably be weeks, possibly even months, before we discover what the elven folk have done with his data. And whether his iris scan now identifies him as  a 34 year old businessman from Ranchi and his fingerprints have been assigned to, well, me for instance.

I could do a lot of inferential stuff with what I witnessed first-hand at the ASK this morning. You can too. But do ask yourself this. How confident are you now that Aadhar is a secure, stable, error-free unique identity system.

Theists aren't believers enough

Life as an atheist is uncomplicated. Let me speak in the first person here, as an atheist of at least 4 decades. I do not believe in a personal god. Indeed, I believe in no divine being that lies beyond the laws of science. Creation, existence and dissolution are phenomena arising from the laws of thermodynamics, the nature of space-time, the interaction of matter and energy and so on. Morality and ethics are neither motivated by nor subordinate to holy books or scriptural ordinance. They arise from evolutionary impulses for the healthy continuity of the species, an idea explored, with great scholarship and erudition, by Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene". A moral compass rewards me richly in the one life that I have without having to rely on fantasies of an afterlife filled with milk, honey and mind-blowing sex. Above all, I have an abiding sense of breathless astonishment and wonder at the workings of the Universe at both ends of the scale- the gigaparsecs that separate us from the quasars and the infinitesimal dimensions of the superstrings that lie orders of magnitude below quarks. Even a passing thought of the workings of the world around us is enough to make me pause in wonder and leave me humbled  blow me away.

Believers seem to come broadly in two stripes. Those who consider themselves more evolved will talk about "a force that looks out for me, guides me, is all powerful". Less complicated believers frame their faith in images and rituals. The mini shrines on car dashboards, the taweez/amulet/ring that protects them or brings them good fortune, the pilgrimage to places of worship near or far, the prayers to be offered to <insert divine entity here> to secure <insert desired outcome here> are visible giveaways. For this lot, religious faith is as simple as a matter of accounting. They are virtuous ergo they win brownie points ergo divine entity is happy and rewards them. They do bad things ergo their brownie point balance is reduced ergo they need to make extra efforts to mollify deity with offerings and observances so that the equation may be set right again.

A peculiar feature common to both sorts is the willingness to privilege place/direction/time as more propitious and a deity that is personally interested in their welfare. 

Bringing me to my point. A human scale deity with human scale emotions isn't much of a deity. What could an insignificant, individual mortal do that impressed or perturbed a being that spans gigaparsecs in a blink and consumes a dozen galaxies in supergiant singularities? Conversely, how powerful is a deity that can be lured with puny blandishments or possession off by my sexual orientation?

Come on, believers. Your God, if she's there, has to be a squillion to the power of squillion times more powerful than a prescriber of vertical/horizontal caste marks, ritual genital mutilation or compensatory self-flagellation.