Ganesha and Spiderman - in a Child's Mind two equal Superheroes!

Of course I don’t only like to watch the people around me and their reaction to children but also the young ones themselves. I have many friends with children, both in Germany and in India, and of course have quite some experiences with the children who are living with us. In this whole constellation there is something that I have noticed several times: Indian children, growing up in this very god-conscious country, think god is some kind of superhero, just like Spiderman. I guess I will have to explain this thought.

It doesn’t matter whether you practice religion at home or not, your child does not have any idea of what people call ‘god’ until you tell him or her about it. The concept of god is not something like hunger, a feeling that a child knows from the very beginning. It is something man-made and it is the surrounding of a child that installs the ideas of how this god is in the little one’s mind. If you tell a small boy that a statue is god and he sees you do your worship in front of this statue every day with everything that belongs to it, he will have this statue’s image in his mind whenever you talk about god. You tell the stories of your religion’s scriptures and the child learns about that god’s history.

In Hinduism, as you may know, there are a lot of different gods and some of them are very attractive to children. There is the monkey god Hanuman for example or Ganesha, the god with the head of an elephant. These gods are very well publicized! These days there are not only scriptures but comic books, little figures and, most popular of all, cartoons on TV with these gods as the main protagonists.

So parents these days put on the TV for their children and there the kids watch how Krishna and his friends save the world or how Hanuman flies with his supernatural powers across countries to fight injustice. The next program on the same channel is Superman or Batman and the child sees how these characters do exactly the same thing! They set out to save the world from evil powers, to protect the innocent and do cool stuff that just nobody else can. They all are invincible, they all have great friends, they all always succeed and do so much good.

The mind of those children sets your gods on the same level as Superman, Spiderman or Catwoman! I have to say I find that rather amusing, as for me all of these characters as well as your gods are clearly fiction – but now you go and try to tell your child that Superman does not exist while Hanuman or Ganesha does! No, no real person can transform from a normal human into a spider-like creature like Spiderman – but yes, a dead person can be resurrected by putting an elephant’s head on it, like Ganesha!

Nowadays the cartoon characters have entered religion so much that on Raksha Bandan, when sisters show their love for their brothers by tying a thread around their wrists, you can now not only buy those wristbands with Ganesha depicted but also with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck!

I love it – modern society makes it more and more difficult for religious people to maintain their illusion that the fantasy stories of the scriptures are actually real. Hinduism and Disney, God and cartoon heroes, everything melts into one in a child’s mind.

Unfortunately until now religious parents and people around them take a lot of effort to set that religious fairytale of Gods and their powers straight again. For now, they seem to succeed but we will need to wait for this generation to grow up in order to see whether they will understand that Ganesha is just as real as Santa Claus and Minnie Mouse!