Technological Education in middle school was a lot of fun: the teacher was laid-back, we could finally use machinery that could eat a finger or two if we weren’t careful, and in the days where we weren’t allowed to have our phones on us, the Tech Ed room had computers we could use if we finished our work early.

One particular day, someone comes up to me and asks, “Do all of your gods have like twenty arms?”

And me being me, as if I haven’t been to enough temples in my life, decide to search up “Indian gods arms” or something similar to that. The results of that search is shown below.

Now, Durga, the goddess shown above is only pictured with eight arms, but other deities look a little more…interesting.

Growing up, I never really questioned why the deities I saw frequently had such an outrageous number of arms or why some gods have blue skin or why for some reason, one god has the head of an elephant but the body of a man.

Well, I don’t question the last one because I know why; Shiva, the god of destruction, decapitated a suspicious child who wouldn’t let him see his wife, only to discover that the child was his own son. Galvanized by his wife’s rage, Shiva then decided it was best to replace his son’s head with an elephant head. Of course, since this is Hinduism and Hinduism has a penchant for drama, the story is way more complicated, but nonetheless, the result of Shiva’s holy surgery is below.

Although religion isn’t a part of my life anymore, I look back and…don’t really understand. Hinduism has more gods than I can count and due to avatars (aka gods having more than one form), Hinduism get very confusing very quickly.

Of course, as far I as know, Hinduism doesn’t have rules upon rules to follow due to its status as a ethnic religion, but that could be my relaxed religious upbringing or my insistence to play on my phone whenever my parents took me to the temple.

I never thought about it in this manner before, but Hinduism reminds me a lot of the ancient religions such as Greek or Roman mythology, where certain gods had certain jobs. But even this explanation can’t really describe Hinduism since there are figures that seem more Jesus-esque such as Vishnu or Krishna (who’s an avatar of Vishnu), and others focus solely on one or two aspects of life, such as Kali (the goddess of death and time, but is also a mother-figure since she’s an incarnation of Shiva’s wife, Parvati).

Yeah, Hinduism is an winding mess and it gets even messier when you realize that people can choose which avatars they want to worship. Growing up, I mostly heard about the “big” deities such as Ram, Sita, Laxman, Vishnu, Shiva, Durga, and a few others.

But then, when I moved to Pittsburg in second grade, we started attending events dedicated to Krishna, who I mentioned was an avatar of Vishnu. I was never given an explanation to why my parents switched over (but it might be due to the pre-existing community that resided in Pittsburg who worshiped Krishna, which is rather interesting because that brings another facet of geographic location into the religion puzzle).

But all in all, in all honesty, I’m not quite sure why Hinduism has at least twenty different gods who seem to be the same person and why some people choose to worship one over the other. However, even though I’m not a religious person, it’s very eye-opening and interesting to try to understand why certain people follow certain religions and how religions themselves came to have such a profound impact in the world we live in.