Upset Hindus are urging Filipino-German musician and former beauty queen Imelda Bautista Schweighart to apologize and replace cover of her album “Fuccboi” emulating Hindu goddess Kali, calling it highly inappropriate.
Distinguished Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada (USA) today, said that goddess Kali was highly revered in Hinduism and was meant to be worshipped in temples or home shrines and not to be used for selling albums with vulgar names. Inappropriate usage of Hindu deities or concepts or symbols or icons for commercial or other agenda was not okay as it hurt the devotees.
Celebrities should not be in the business of religious appropriation, sacrilege, and ridiculing entire communities. It was deeply disrespectful and trivializing of divine Hindu deities to be ill-used in scenarios like this; Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, emphasized.
Hinduism was the oldest and third largest religion of the world with about 1.2 billion adherents and a rich philosophical thought and it should not be taken frivolously. Symbols of any faith, larger or smaller, should not be mishandled; Rajan Zed noted.
Zed further said that such trivialization of Hindu deities was disturbing to the Hindus world over. Hindus were for free artistic expression and speech as much as anybody else if not more. But faith was something sacred and attempts at trivializing it hurt the followers, Zed added.
Goddess Kali, who personifies Sakti or divine energy, is widely worshipped in Hinduism. She is considered the goddess of time and change. Some Bengali poets described her as supreme deity.