Modern Rituals – How We Worship Without Religion

The Stage as Altar (Part 2/10)

I’ve sat in theatres many a times, and yet every time the stage comes alive, I still feel the hush settle over me. It doesn’t matter that I already know what’s coming. Rama will go into exile. Ravana will fall. The curtain of fire in the Ramlila will blaze as it always has. And still, I keep showing up.

I used to think performance was about surprise. But I’ve realised that what draws me back isn’t novelty – it’s the return. I’m not looking for a new ending; I’m looking for the same story to meet me in a new way. Each performance, though scripted, is alive. No line is ever spoken in exactly the same way twice. No note in a raga is ever sung with the same inflection again. The play doesn’t change, but I do – and so the ritual deepens.

The stage is, in that sense, an altar. The performers are not priests, but they serve a similar function: as mediators of memory and interpreters of myth. I sit in the dark not to discover, but to remember – to rehearse what it means to be human in tragedy and triumph alike.

There’s a comfort in inevitability. To watch Ravana fall in the Ramayana or Duryodhana fall in the Mahabharata is to submit to fate, knowing how it ends, yet needing to walk the path again. These stories have become my secular prayers: repetitions that etch themselves into me until I can almost recite them without words.

When the stage empties and the lights return, I feel as though I’ve been part of something ancient. Not entertainment, not diversion, but liturgy – the retelling of eternal dilemmas in human voice and body. And I know I will return again, because return itself is the point.

Isn’t that also what collective prayer has always been? The same hymns, the same chants, the same gestures, repeated until they sink beneath the skin. On the stage, I find the same rhythm: stories recited not to surprise me, but to steady me. Performance becomes prayer, a ritual of return where memory and meaning are renewed.

The Stage as Altar

I already know how the story will end.
Rama will go into exile. Ravana will fall.
And still, I keep showing up.

Not for surprise – but for return.
Because every performance is prayer.