Freemasons to come out of closet

This silence covered the fraternity with a shroud of secrecy. So, the Grand Lodges, which are the organisation’s offices, were called bhoot banglas (haunted bungalows) and the people who frequented it were supposed to be connected with witchcraft.

“The open house session we are having on Sunday is an attempt to tell the people about what we do,” says Brother H.P. Mathur, Grand Master (head) of the Grand Lodge in Delhi. “No activity of ours is a secret and we feel that people should know about the charity work we do and the essence of Freemasonry.”

The first chapter of this demystification begins hundreds of years ago, around the time King Soloman was getting the Temple of Jerusalem constructed. There were skilled masons working on the project, and training under them were apprentices, who not only learnt the trade but also a few lessons on being “good” people. As the lessons on life became very popular, the number of people attending them also increased. Only now there were more people who wanted to become better people than becoming masons.

The different guilds became one organisation (hence the name) and the process of making better people began. Actually, it only makes good men better men. There are no women in this organisation. Why? Because women were never masons. The other explanation is that “women understand values better and don’t need to be reminded of the inherent goodness in them”. But for those who don’t buy this argument there is the Order of the Eastern Star, an associate organisation for women which is active in other countries in the West.

In India, for now, women will get to know about the philosophy of freemasonry. They will know about how the pen can teach you a thing or two about being a good person.

Mathur explains: “We do a lot of symbolic teaching. Take the pen for example. We tell our members that they should associate the pen with the line it can draw. We then tell them that the line is the limit we must never cross. The entire philosophy revolves around deriving inspiration from things around us.” So, the plumb stands for upright behaviour, a compass for the limits of good and evil, and so on.

To be a member, a man has to approach the organisation on his own and has to have faith in God. “We don’t have recruitment drives,” says Freemason Subhash Chawla. This system hasn’t affected the number of people who become Freemasons. In fact the list of personalities the fraternity boasts of is impressive: Swami Vivekananda, C. Rajagopalchari, Motilal Nehru, Fakhurudin Ali Ahmed, Winston Churchill, Clarke Gable, Rudyard Kipling, George Washington, Neil Armstrong and all the Kings of England are part of this long list of celebrity Freemasons. But they never talked about it.

Today, there are High Court judges, businessmen, Delhi University professors, architects, doctors and people from different walks of life, all ready to stand up and declare that they are Freemasons.