Ah yes, the Christian Taliban.
I had experience of such a regime from the age of twelve to fifteen. I was in a boarding school in India run by such folks; visiting missionaries were American and Canadian with a sprinkling of New Zealanders tossed in, too.
One evening, along with the rest of the boys in the establishment, I was sitting in the prep room doing my homework. That finished, I decided to read a book which I had imagined was safely hidden on my lap. I knew perfectly well that wasn’t allowed, and that staring blindly at official books once the work had been completed was required. Unfortunately, the eagle-eyed invigilator spotted me (he was a “guest” to the establishment) and reported me to the housemaster, and nothing happened. However, shortly after getting up in the morning, said master summoned me to his room and introduced my eleven-year old ass to his cane. Okay, I broke the rules, but was it more sensible to close my mind and go walkies looking at completed homework, or improve that young mind with reading something new? I hated those people and all they claimed to represent after that episode.
They also prohibited comics, movies, movie magazines and most music that wasn’t gospel. Dancing - had such a magical opportunity existed - would have been a capital sin.
I sometimes think that their beliefs were what drove me to becoming a photographer of women, a fan of rock ‘n’ roll and of almost everything else that that prison banned. Interestingly, several of my fellow inmates were the prodigy of missionaries: they were amongst the greater sadists that place housed, and total rebels against the parental way. I guess that their experiences had been worse than mine; at least I escaped back home every year from November until February, when the next dose of hell began, but for them, who knows which hell was the greater?
Yet, now, I have a faith. Not in prescribed versions of religion, but in a personal version of what I feel my God to be. It just seems the natural way of filling a need to believe in something greater, more noble than mankind.
