I was in grade 8, when I had my first encounter with an ‘harvester of souls’, she was a British woman, painfully thin and bony, dressed in a cheap dress. She was lurking outside our school compound. She accosted students on the way to the school and handed us some pamphlets, cheaply printed brochures that spoke about ‘Christ, the Saviour’. ’Take this.’ She said, thrusting a few booklets in my hands. I was too young to realise what the pamphlets really meant. She also gave me a coupon, and said ‘Fill it in with your address and post it. No need for any stamps. You will get nice books from London.’ I faithfully carried the brochures home, my father took one look at them and said, ‘we will use these to heat the bath water’! Next day, some parents accosted the woman, and that was the last we saw of her! Years later, in Mumbai, I was waiting for a bus in the scorching afternoon heat at a bus-stop in Andheri. There were a couple of other people waiting as well. A woman in a coarse white cotton sari approached me and said in Marathi, ‘you look like an intelligent person, you should read this’ and placed a pamphlet in my hands. She distributed the pamphlet around. It was a bilingual booklet in Marathi as well in English. By then, I was well aware of the proselytisation carried out by the ’servants of Christ’. I calmly took the pamphlet, tore it into little pieces and handed them back to her. She erupted into spectacular abuse, accusing me of being a ’Saitan’. I threatened to call the police. The other people at the bus-stop supported me and she beat a hasty retreat. A few years after that, I had another encounter. I lived in Delhi at the time, and had gone to Delhi Haat. A couple of girls from one of the North Eastern states approached me out of the blue and handed me an invite. ‘Our church is having a Christmas retreat. Please come for a lecture. It will change your life’, one of the girls said. ‘Does the lecture have anything to do with the ‘word of Christ’? I asked. ‘You are harassing me. I am calling the cops’. The girls looked scared and slunk away. Even now, I have cyber evangelists flooding my ‘other’ inbox with messages about how Jesus ‘loves’ Me and how ‘Jesus Saves’ and how I should consider myself ‘lucky to receive this message’! This despite my publicly expressed views!! If people like me can get harassed like this, can you imagine the plight of poor, uneducated, illiterate Hindus that these ‘servants of Christ’ feed upon? Missionaries are allowed to proseletyze even in Hindu holy places like Tirupati. Even during the Hindu pilgrimage of the Waari, you find missionaries distributing their pamphlets. I have come across evangelists from the Baptist Churches of the US in remote areas like Kinnaur in HP even, trying their best to ‘harvest souls’! Via:Shefali Vaidya
