Upset Hindus urge
ex-beautyqueen Imelda apologize & replace album cover mimicking
goddess Kali
Press Release
November 26, 2020
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.
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.