INDIA

In India, religion takes a major part in people dayly life. India is an entity composed of persons from different religions. The main religions are Hindouism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Most of the Indian inhabitants are hindus. Hindu religion is practised by mostly 80% of the population.

Hindus deeply believe in reincarnation, it means that when someone dies, he will re-birth in another body, on another continent. The soul of a creature is alive for ever. It is only her body who gets old and dies.

Hindus venerate their gods in many differents ways. Some of them go to the temple to offer flowers and fruits as a sacrifice, or bring flowers and sweets as offerings. Others have a little temple in their own house, usually in a corner of the kitchen or in a separate room, where each member of the family prey. Some hindus do neither one. In Hinduism, going to the temple and venerating God is not mandatory.

As many Western people, Hindus believe that good engender good and evil engender evil, but Hinduism goes further in faith. The moral law of cause and effect relationship, that Hindus call KARMA.

For a Hindus, ritual acts are part of their lives. From birth to death, an Hindu gets involved in different ceremonial acts.

The cow is considered as a holy animal. Hindus venerate cow as a divine mother. As a matter of fact, eating beef is forbidden. In Hinduism, each god is related to an animal. The cow is related to lord KRISHNA, the elefant to GANESH and the bull to SHIVA, and the peacock is related to MURUGAN, and so on. This association of gods to animals is one of the reason why Hindus are vegetarians.

India : a hierarchical society

Taditionally, hindu society is divided into four classes called castes. These last ones are based on the kind of works people used to do in the Antiquity.

This caste system still largely rules the organization of the society. Reality is in fact an endlessly more

complicated situation as they are thousands of sub-castes all over India.

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