With Paresh Rawal and Akshay Kumar playing lead roles, the
film has been so Indianised that it does not look like a copy
of the English one. Before 1960, god-themed films based on
our puranas, epics and myths were popular, but this genre
later shifted to television as serials.
However, this is not important. In the Hindu religion, there
is this practice of pulling out god characters from their
original puranic, mythological context and form and putting
them into new, imaginary, creative incarnations. You can then
laugh at them, even make fun of them. Indic folk tradition is
replete with such stories.
Buddhist and Jain faiths are basically atheist. Jews and
Christians are strongly monotheistic. The Jews do not believe
in the concept of incarnation. In Christianity, Christ is God
’s son, but he is not an avatar or incarnation. Creative art
has now become so secular that the artist can portray or
colour the god according to his imagination and this poetic
license provokes no offence among people.
In Islam, God is formless, but his attributes are known --
that he is compassionate and merciful, for instance. So you
could say God sagun hain, magar nirakar hain. That is, God is
with attributes but he is without form. Allah is discipline-
loving, so there is no depiction of God anywhere in Islam.
Allah has no son and so there is no nabhi or Islamic symbol
that can take the liberty of portraying Allah in a creative
form. The issues raised in OMG are debates that have been
often raised about God and religion, but these are finally
buried in double-faced theism but in Islam, even this would
be surely unacceptable.
