A priest, a rabbi, and a sadhu walk into a bar...

I finished a draft of my report yesterday, and spent today working on a power point presentation for tomorrow (side note: I hate power point. The frequency with which it’s used in law was a more significant downside to entering law than I usually care to admit).

It’s strange to write about religious rights here. The conception of what constitutes religion is not conceptually clear under international law, and courts aren’t very good at analyzing what the right should protect. Even more troubling, religion functions here in a way that is fundamentally alien to my conceptions of it.

People don’t go to services or anything like that. Outside of the big festivals, religion is simply part of daily life. If you stop by a shrine, you might pray or give an offering, and shrines are often in the streets.

Yesterday, I went to see a shrine near my office (my co-worker said they had monkeys.) One of the shrines (it was actually a series of shrines) was flimsy structure hidden off a main road in a garden. In the back were houses, and cows, with kids playing soccer.

I asked one of the babas if I could look around (I’m not sure what the difference between a baba and a sadhu is, but he called himself a baba). The garden was overgrown and filled with monkeys and cannabis. The babas sit around smoking chillams of marijuana and hash mixed together. The baba lectured me about god for a while, and then asked me some questions about my religion. In most circumstances, explaining Judaism is complicated enough here. To an extremely stoned baba it’s even harder (he first thought I meant “Christian,” and then “Muslim.” It was a difficult conversation.)

Trying to write model constitutional provisions on religion, I keep finding myself more and more distrustful of judicial competence in the field. One of my co-workers (an American, no less) asked me today if I was a Republican. Law school may have made me more conservative about some things, but I didn’t realize it was that bad…

Pictures of the shrines are here. (My Nepali is not good enough to ask the babas politely if I could take their photo, so there’s only one, from a more sober temple, of any of the holy men.)