Rashe Ram is a Groom Now

 

Rashe Ram is a so called ‘low caste’ landless young man. But he has his specialties. He is dark, muscular, works like a bull as agricultural labourer. He has no land of his own but has the unrivalled farming spirit. He is special in other ways as well. There are many who think he is dimwit. It sometimes gets verified when many a time he puts more physical effort like a bull and misses the small witticisms expected of even a 10 year old.

 

He stays in a 30 square yard stinking, hot, unplastered brick hovel, no ventilation, just one door. His father was Lame Dheere Ram, christened so because he limped and walked dheere dheere, so they started calling him Langda Dheere. Dheere worked faster than any two legged man. Most efficient of workers, he coked a snook at the society by going into drinking unchecked and then shouting through the night, targeting particularly an ex-sarpanch for what crime God only knows. We can only surmise that possibly that village headman had denied him a BPL card that would have entitled him to some government run charities and subsidies. He did a favour to his children by not dying somewhere else than the state road. So one night when he was hit possibly by the car of another drunk man on the wheels he had at least ensured that his family will get something in road accident claim. So they got a million rupee for the patriarch getting crushed under the car. One drunken man getting paid for another drunken person’s binge driving.

 

So Rashe has a 30 square yard house, one million rupees in balance, a strangely brooding mother whom people said is just marginally better than a mental house case, and a younger brother who appears better case for normalcy. On top of that he is of marriageable age now. But there is no bride for him in the conventional arranged marriage set up. In Haryana the sex ratio is very low. In such competition who will give him his daughter. But then without marriage what is the purpose of Rashe Ram’s life. Or of anyone else in India. So all his relatives gang up to purchase a bride for him.

 

India is teeming with unfortunate human beings. There are millions of Bangladeshi settlers in slums who just sell their daughters to the leftover grooms in Haryana. Then there are criminal gangs who abduct girl children to later either push them into flesh trade or semi prostitution while occasionally selling them to the ineligible bachelors in Haryana, old men still having the dream of an heir, or widowers still having dreams of domestic life. Generally these caged birds, the purchased brides, do not even understand the language. Right from the beginning it is a fight. The girl’s effort to run away and join back her gang to be later sold again as a bride. It is a good business. Smarter ones just vanish time and again, getting multiple few-night husbands and more money for the gang-keepers or even their own parents and relatives.

 

Having been squarely rejected in an arranged marriage proposal, Rashe’s anxious relatives and well wishers searched some middle man who would get them a bride at a suitable price. So the bride was arranged at INR 60000. Strangely, just a day ago a proud Jat farmer in the neighbourhood bought a buffalo at INR 83000. So it was considered a good bidding for the groom Rashe Ram. She was sharp eyed. Pretended not to understand even a single word of Haryanvi. Allowed Rashe Ram three nights as a husband and then in the wee hours on the pretext of going out for loo in the open vanished into the dark folds of night. Much angry the groom-side again approached the middle man. Threatened dire consequences. The ladkiwallas said, ‘See it was your duty to keep her within control.’ But they said since the middleman is strong enough to get you a second chance we will send someone else but you have to ensure that you retain her this time. So within a week Rashe Ram got remarried, the ceremony included just garlanding and then running away like they had abducted the girl. His second wife appeared on the older side. She was really docile and appeared keen to stay. Possibly she came from even more wretched surroundings. By now much spoilt Rashe Ram had an issue. He told something to his anxious relatives. All of them agreed she was not fit for now eligible Rashe Ram. They even took her to a doctor to explore the prospects of children. Population census of India waited with an anxious beat of heart till the doctor declared she could not bear children anymore. She had borne children in the past in her previous innings as somebody’s borrowed wife. ‘Even her stomach had been cut…there were stitching marks,’ they told the middle man again and complained of wrong delivery. Strangely he again got under pressure and promised to provide a better one. The golden moment of third marriage arrived just in a week. This time all concurred that it is the best option. So Rashe Ram thrice married, with dreams of children, his broken teeth smile and intangible words was again at the threshold of marital bliss.

 

I asked my mother why is she waiting so long to give bridal saugat to Rashe’s wife, a goodwill gesture as a fellow villager. ‘Let them finally confirm her as the real bride. Then I will put my 500 rupees to risk..who knows about these people!!’

 

PS: How I wish this post script had not come so soon, after all I prefer good times for my fellow villagers. The inevitable thing happened, just after three weeks. This third bride was the smartest one. She must have been sharply calculating the cost per night of her stay. When she found she was now going in losses, she just ran out of the house, early in the morning, but it being the day already, creating a noisy scene, Rashe Ram running after her to catch her. It gave the impression that she was running and howling to escape beating. Outside the village, on the road there was a police PCR van stationed. She just dumped her wife-beaten tortured self at the havaldar’s protecting feet. God, what oratory and mouth she had. She told uncountable tales of torture by Rashe Ram and his mother. They took both of them to the police station confirming that Rashe Ram’s budget for getting a wife will now increase by at least INR 10000. Paying this money Rashe Ram’s relatives brought back the forlorn boy from police clutches and she the free bird escaped to bring new happiness into some other brideless house. So my mother saved her money after all. The saugat money, do you remember? Also as a Hindu stamped with marriage status, Rashe will at least not become an evil pitr soul after death tormenting the lineage of his brother and cousins and also many in the extended family. Well, that of course, in addition to many nights with three women, is a good take away in lieu of INR 70000.    

The Broken Dream

 

Well, let us start with a bit of his biographical sketch. It had indeed been a tough ride so far, but he believed that every perspiring step had not been without big-big revelations. ‘The greatness lies not only in achieving lofty targets, but in dodging the failure as well,’ he found himself convincing during those moments that pinched him with the realisation that he has nothing to show as a proof of his tireless efforts. He had been doing it so long that the contradictory thorns dividing success and failure had melted and he tried his best to believe in the Bhagwat Gita sermon that only karma, the selfless work, is supreme.

 

Everybody believed he had all that requires to become a civil servant, so driven by this belief, he just gave the peak years of his life preparing for the civil services. Civil services, the much coveted government job whose exam syllabus is so comprehensive, formulated under the supposition that it will enable the prospective civil servants to know something of everything, that most of the aspirants are seen tiring out their souls like the Bihari labourers in the fields. It is basically a battle to test ones stamina, of testing the brain’s brawny prowess. In one year of exam schedule, running through the prelims, mains and interviews, it catapults a tired bunch of almost intellectually spent aspirants to take the responsibility of implementing the policies formulated by semi-literate or even illiterate full-thugs, semi-rascals, quarter-criminals,  half-rapists, three-quarter-mafia. Afterwards these young educated males and females expertly learn how to keep their lives normal by becoming part of the ‘system’.

 

Like a bull pulling a heavily laden cart, almost mindlessly, uncomplainingly, taking it as the only option, with the head bent down, he also kept on moving on the path. By cramming as many things as possible he got interviewed once. The real dilemma but started when he came to face the bitter truth of having spent all his four chances, allowed to the general category candidates, in comparison to the double number of chances available to the reserved category, which finds these panicked young talented souls hating the candidates from the reserved castes for being pampered like this. However, this final fall in the Indian Civil Services was not before a praiseworthy interview call that saved him from the severe jolt of self doubt. In the coveted interview he got 110/300. He knew he had not done wonders like someone who got 250/300. This candidate surely must have broken all limits of human personality performance to get such a high score. But the affably puffed up persona of Mr P K Banerjee, the former defense secretary of India and the interview board chairperson, had other thoughts about his personality. The chairperson smirked, enjoyed each and every moment of his being in the coveted chair, laughed too much, and that perpetual enjoyment and froggy grin intimated the already scared guts of the village urchin.

 

All judgements apart, it brings to the forefront the main problem in the Indian recruitment system: unquestionable authority in the hands of the interview panel. Unfortunately it is more misused than getting good administrative officers. He was a village frog. With sheer labour he got 1082 marks in the written examination, a decent qualifiable score. Oofs, what range they have in the interview marks--110 to 250. It has all the potential to make or break anybody’s fate. How the hell one will cover up 140 marks?! Nursing his wounded spirit and in philanthropic ways presuming himself to be an intellectual in making, he even suggested the remedies to himself, ‘This all marks possible power in the hands of the interview panel is the chief cause of corruption and facilitation. Let it be made mandatory that the interview board cannot give less percentage marks than the candidate’s percentage in the written part. It will weed out most of the possibilities of misuse of chairs and shadowy recommendations.’ But who considers such unsolicited suggestions from unrecognised common heads.

 

The Provincial Civil Services (PCS) was available to keep the flame of the undying passion still alive. He belonged to Haryana. As all of us well understand, our choice of the PCS is just limited to the home state, because the way state public service commissions (SPSCs) function it is the open most secret in India. Well, in India most of the corruption breeds from the safe corridors of constitutionality. State public service commissions function as personal fiefdoms of the ruling party. The Chief Minster handpicks his cronies as office bearers to carry out his instructions without ever questioning anything in any regard.

 

It was Mr. Chautala’s government when he put up his well polished claim for the state civil services. Easily he crossed the hurdles to reach the interview stage with very high marks. But the all-sweeping powers of the interview panel saw him being rejected with just 28 marks out of 75. The chairperson and his cahoots seemed all eager to quash his confidence, possibly they had already prepared the final list, and his name not being there now it was the fruitless endeavour for him to seek out the best out of himself, and more fruitful for the interview board to bring the worst as some justification for himself to be rejected. But he was at his best that day and gave his supper-best. Still does one have any proof of performing good or bad in the interview except the word of mouth which is no proof in the eyes of the law? Just like he could say that he performed better than his 28 marks, the scholarly politician Mr. T C Bangar (who later became full time politician from Mr Chautala’s party) could very easily say he performed even worse than the marks that we gave him. In the eyes of the law the latter will be taken as more correct given his better stature in making this assessment. In the same batch, there were cases where candidates got as high as 70 marks.

 

Anyway, he learnt a few political lessons, so during the next recruitment, he knew exactly well how to go through the interview stage. But believe it or not, it did not involve any money going out of his already famished pockets. So, all cheers! He went comfortably home with an SDM rank and the future all bright. Everybody knew that nobody deserved to have his/her say in any type of favour done to him, because he thoroughly deserved the post. The destiny was but darkly chuckling because he was one of the 102 candidates of the ‘deer’ fame pitted against the ‘lions’ as we saw in Lion and Deer of the Social Jungle.

 

However, like Mr. Chautala proposed, Sonia’s Wazir, Mr. Hooda, in Haryana disposed with equal relish. Before he could join, the central government had the chief election commissioner of India dashing down to Chandigarh, announcing state assembly elections, putting all appointments on hold under the election code of conduct. And during this time, the type of wanton drama played by the Governor, state principle secretary and everybody else, it does not even deserve to be narrated to the civilized beings like the readers because it will further erode their trust in such high chairs. The Congress came to power in the state. Elsewhere in India, Sonia Gandhi had already started pulling strings from behind the curtain: the sage of the great Italian puppeteer and the made-to-dance economist Prime Minister.

 

His appointment denied and after entering the precincts of Punjab and Haryana high court he realised what a powerful entity the state is. It is a big behemoth. The way proceedings were monopolised in the court it made him feel helpless and victimised by the same state that was constitutionally obliged to protect his rights as a law-abiding Indian citizen. But here he was paddling like a skinny dog, trying with his meagre financial resources—the candidates continuously pooled money to get the best advocates for their case—to beat the mighty power and reach of the state. Is judiciary fair? He always had doubts. But with each day, the realisation dawned how fascistically the system of justice works. Who appoints the judges in the first place? Directly indirectly the politicians hold the strings of the puppets dancing on the judicial stage. Each day for a talented unemployed youth is torturous. Here after spending hundreds of thousands all they got was a few minutes stay in the house of justice. For two years the Lord of Justice did not even open its ears to their ever increasing clamour for justice. And then the verdict came, it had all the loopholes to make them sit out of employment for as long as possible. They went to the Supreme Court, lost without much noise, safely and silently. He had no hesitation in harbouring seditious thoughts that like the state high courts are playing puppets to the state governments, the citadel in Delhi is also always under the influence of the central government. After all who appoints and promotes the judges at all levels. It’s just a well oiled machinery of mutual benefits, that’s all…nothing else.

 

Mr. Chautala had been wrong in installing his stooges in the HPSC before being voted out of power, because many board members were made to resign just in the middle of their term and new faces installed in fresh chairs to sit for the next six years while the other government ruled. So when Mr. Hooda came to power he found a board full of the members with terms for the next 6 years. One unconstitutionality gave rise to another. The new iron lady of India easily got the ever-convenient Lady President to issue a notification suspending all the HPSC members. Meanwhile, while all these stronger wheels clanked on the high road of power, ego and what not, the candidates’ poor heads rolled in the tar and clinker of the pot-holed dusty common road.

 

The Congress said Mr. Chautala had manipulated the selection process. However, the ever vigilant state vigilance team looking into the case did not find the tangible proofs of the earlier government’s misdoing even after best of its efforts and they just continued eating more and more time. His soul silently asked them what you have been doing all these five years. For one wrong of Mr. Chautala you have ended up doing tens. In both supreme and high courts, the government of Haryana gave the plea that it had not any vacancy to accommodate the new batch. But see what they did. In a suitable month of the same year, they put up the notification for fresh recruitment. Wasn’t it the contravention of their own pledge to the court that they do not have any vacancies? Who cares, because the state cannot be wrong! The batchmates went to get a stay on the fresh recruitment because it was contrary to what the government had pledged in the court that there were no vacancies. And if at all there were vacancies then this duly selected batch should be given priority and allowed to join because the government had failed to present any proofs of malpractices in the recruitment process. But the great legal luminary—having the infinitely open-ended space to write anything suitable for whatever ends he might deem fit—just smartly said no, the government can do as it likes.

 

Now Mr Khattar from the BJP is at the helm of the affairs. Three governments; three majestic eras in the political history of three political parties; and just one dark endless night in the lives of hardworking candidates who are now moving towards middle age with a broken dream. The new Chief Minister can just walk over the issue, claiming he or his government are not a party to the issue. Moreover, there must be so many in his party almost dying to get their wards selected as PCS officers feeling left out and cheated for so long. The government also must be itching to put some lame duck members in the HPSC to work as their recruitment facilitators.

 

Now, having robbed of a decade of his penance for the civil services cause, he slogs out in the private sector. His pain is unbearable because as an educated and law-abided citizen of this country he always had this notion—born of his bookish knowledge—that state is there to protect his interests and courts are there to save his skin from the larger forces. He but stands robbed of this fundamental belief. It’s not just a matter of losing a job; it is the matter of losing one’s identity as an empowered citizen of an independent country. Now when he slogs out in most crowded buses, where getting a foothold is as precious as getting bonus from the government, he certainly doesn’t feel like an average country-loving Indian. He feels like an emigrant in his own land. He refuses his office colleagues when they try to put the tricolored flag on his desk on the occasion of Indian Independence Day. He even feels sorry about it. However it is his tiny revenge against his own state. Somehow, when terrorists strike against the state in any part of India, against all his wishes and rebukes by sanity, he finds himself groping for the causes why they are doing this, not being able to condemn it as an outright act of blatant violence.

 

Sorry, but it’s as natural as this. Just wanted to say something about him. Thanks if you have borne the trouble of bearing with this little story brow-beating the cause of a common Indian! All in all it’s just a terribly manipulated democracy in India, manipulated by our own stronger brothers and sisters. Like him I also feel that we might be just puppets dancing on the make-believe stage while the real game is behind the scene.

Dance on Chance

 

If we consider success and failure (the outcome or the result) as the twin sides of a spun coin (effort behind the result), we need to consider the difference between landing headwords or tailwords as the result born of the last moment’s extra swing, spin or any other momentum or movement tilting the scale on this or the other side. Now, there can be three factors involved in this extra force deciding the winner and the loser:

 

1.     The coin spinner or the tosser (subject).

 

2.    The revolving coin itself (object): if we suppose the object to possess some vague, mysterious, inexplicable factor born of its inanimate freewill.

 

3.   Some abstract entity (negotiator or referee): functioning either in the form of physical or natural laws like the atmospheric elements or in the shape of supernatural laws to either act/favour on behalf /or against the subject or the object.

 

As per the above supposition, the success or failure in a toss of coin—or our luck or bad luck in drawing a card from a pack—becomes a very subtle and nuanced game of multitudinous factors hidden in the simple act/result of the coin landing on this or the other side.

 

Everybody is well aware that purely mechanical laws of physical sciences defined by the input and output process do not completely cover the range of occurrences coming across in real human lives. Human lives come across too glaring loopholes to allow the application of scientific principles to human endeavours taking them as simple inputs and outputs. Oftentimes, mountains of work irrigated with the human will power, blood and sweat do not fetch even tiny molehills. On the other hand, sometimes an anthill of an endeavour fetches the mountain of a result. This mere incongruity in the outcome validates the point of including the subtle role of the outside agents (either in the form of physical things around us or the beings, things and forces whose working laws we have not interpreted and explained so far).

 

The role of the ‘outside agents’ is unreasonable to the persons of logic and reasoning. They will shout, ‘It’ll leave us as mere helpless pawns shifted and shoved on the chessboard of destiny by paranormal forces.’ Let the logicians huff and puff with their explanations. The mysterious factor still haunts, and those who believe in luck, fate, destiny and the most common denominator God will continue to shine as the superbly carved beads in the same string held by the cord of belief in the supernatural. They will continue to flaunt the divinely held string till the theoreticians break it with the pull of their proven hypothesis. The onus is on the latter for their path is made of either proving or disproving. The former meanwhile is just happy in surrounding itself to the misty, hazy, cavernous pit of unexplained, inexplicable, only to be realised and felt factors.

 

Even if we choose a most clinically collected set of mechanical skills (standardised and equalised) and put them in competition, we still have the position of one outperforming the others, i.e., we still have a result in the form of winner and loser. So if science cannot avoid the emergence of a winner from among the set of equally equipped instruments, we have to accept the futility of classifying winner and loser. It is a very lousy shortcut to define the helpless termination of a phenomenon—a mere hypothesis such as time (Einstein said there was no real time, it is just relative realisation) that has just been coined to meet a tiny, practical end. It operates in a chosen utilitarian, abstractly chosen set of possibilities and choices, so that the one category or group of players falling into it is defined as winners; while punishing the others with the yardstick of failure. If you remove these carefully chosen set of conditions and eligibilities—that are purported to remove chaff from the grain—every endeavour becomes beyond the tortuous segments of loss and gain to become a pure work, a complete phenomenon, existing unblemishedly in the fabric of happenings.

 

All of us work for success. Victory is the favourite child of all endeavours in the universe. Failure is the shameful, unwanted, depraved bastard born of misfires and mis-hits accruing from some fault, either this way or the other, born of invisible or invisible factors. The role of those who genuinely took part in the race is irrelevant; the ones whose fierce competitive urgency catapulted the eventual winner to draw out the last ounce of strength to emerge victorious. When the winner hits the finishing line it is just the culmination of a phenomenon, the whole phenomenon of race. We but just pluck out the winner like we take away a ripe fruit, while putting in the dustbin of failure the crushed windfalls that lie on the ground, the unwelcomed testimony to the process of ripening when chancy windfalls saw many being dropped onto the ground. The fallen ones but become the groundwork of the victorious, the one completing the race of ripening. Unfortunately, the whole set minus the ripe and victorious is cast away as the scrap in the process of hatching a victory: the long and wordy, sweat laden steps carrying one onto the top. These are the oblations and sacrifices to the Goddess of victory. The Goddess chucks up their flesh and takes big swigs of their blood, leaving no vestiges of those struggling sinews whose failure gave us our soul-satisfying winner!

 

It's high time we include the losers in the over-swapping concept of victory. Like the rocket fuel burning and turning to ashes while catapulting the victorious satellite into the required orbit, the fellow competitors also fuel the race. If not for their pushing with their best competitive spirit someone would not have been driven beyond limits to achieve some victorious feat. The losers are thus contributors to someone's success. Let's change the concept to make it more humane at least!  

Why is it so Tough to be an Atheist?

 

Well, the debate about God has been a long and wordy one. Millions of logical arguments fall short of defeating one single word ‘faith’. Our daily experiences, daily haps and mishaps, inexplicable occurrences, now rapidly explicable natural and biological phenomena, fossil researches with solid proofs of natural evolution, scientific theories about the origin of the earth (in addition to the solar system and the universe as a whole), profoundly inexplicable natural symmetry (the balance of forces holding the universe in a revolving, periodical, harmonised symmetry), all these and more keep us in wonderment about the possibility or impossibility of a creative design behind all this.

 

Given our varying situations in life, we rush either to the Darwinist evolution concept or the concept of creative design, both occupying their extreme positions. Most of the time with titbits of scientific facts in our puzzled heads, taking cursory looks at the Darwin end to do justice to our modern educated selves, we blindly, helplessly move to the extremity of faith. The latter with its swiping injunctions of mysteries of life, with one solution pill called ‘belief’ makes life far less complex. It gives respite to the hassled logic-laden senses as well. It is a good addiction to this blind supposition. Religion indeed ‘is the opium of the masses’!

 

Let us first take the religionist theory. Drawing inspiration from the mythical clues (vaguely and always open to interpretation in convenient ways) in the yellowed and much hallowed pages of scriptures and holy books, it maintains that this beautiful planet dazzling with life and much more has been created by the Lord or the God Himself or an all potent entity for some Godly purpose. Believers maintain that the faith has to be unquestioning and blind and beyond the reach of all our senses, except one super-sense of ‘faith’. The belief cannot be made to stand in the witness box to be questioned by the pinning arguments of the so called atheists in a court presided over by an indifferent agnostic judge.

 

Since we are not animals, we with our evolved brains possess the faculty of seeking the logical foundations to our blind ‘belief’. However very cleverly the act of mere questioning anything holy has been termed as heresy, a nice nipping in the bud, a nice way of bypassing all the arguments that might at a point leave ‘the defenders of faith’ at the dead end. It is considered sedition against the Omnipotent, as if the all absolute, the all Potent Potentate is an unsparing monarch demanding unflinching loyalty from the subjects without ever giving any clue about Himself. Since he has allowed us to evolve with an evolving brain, the reasoning by the same organ cannot be a taboo. A thing created by Him, or at least allowed by Him to take its present shape, doing what it is just supposed to naturally do cannot be a taboo and sacrilege. So we are allowed to follow the path of reason (gyan marga) to seek proofs leading to His existence or nonexistence. The institutionalised religion but seems to be a game stopper in this venture.

 

Religion with its tools of sin (and consequent loss and punishment) and pious deed (leading to profits and His blessings) seems insufficient in providing a logical backdrop to our actions, reactions and the outcomes if we drop the further conditionality of the past (previous birth with its unknown summary of good and bad deeds) and the future (with its yet to be list of gains, losses, punishments and rewards). These two unseen voids have enough space in them to eat any ‘what, when, why, how, where’ questioned by the present. If we just analyse the present we find glaring incongruities: mountainous efforts ending in molehills of achievements; tiny actions resulting in sky high rewards (like a lottery draw); a person born in a slum and dying in a still dirtier gutter; someone being born with a golden spoon and dying in a still more glittering palace; some nice fellow getting a disease inexplicably and suddenly; a wretched human being with his still more wretched deeds continuing to enjoy perfect health; sufferings and tears incessantly striking a life even though nobody has a word to justify the victim’s punishment of this nature; amazing and unjustified profiteering and consequent happiness showering upon somebody against whom many can point out hundreds of reasons to make him eligible for punishment instead of this blessed state.

 

To cover up these mocking loopholes we have this account book of sins and pious deeds full of unknown statistics of the previous birth, the ones belonging to the present, and to be carried onto the next birth in future. These are but grossly hypothetical conditions to shut down the voices of protest against His justice (or injustice) by condemning unjustifiably suffering nice human beings for the unproved, unknowable misdeeds of the last birth and warning the unjustifiably fattening and prosperous piglet version of a human through punishments for his misdeeds in an unknowable, unproved next birth or afterlife. With these two open-ended eventualities at the extremes in the past and the next birth, we need not even question any state of affairs on the earth. These are the super dead-ends for any kind of logic or reasoning. It literally means to shut down the basic faculty of the questioning brains. Then we have other protective layers in the religiondom: it is a series of immensely pacifying nouns like luck, fate, destiny! This series further patches up any remaining loopholes in the believers’ fabric. In religion with its indefinitely unfathomable dark seas of the past and the future, beyond our time span on earth, the boat of reasoning just falls short of any chance to reach the coast with any proof to the contrary.

 

If we accept the validity of the preordained law, guiding every activity (right from the littlest movement of a tiny sapling from among the millions of others like it), we need to accept that not a littlest step in our life is caused by our free will. We then become slaves and puppets in the hands of that invisible player doing puppetry with invisible, untouchable cords. But how much of puppetry is sufficient for the invisible actor? Isn’t He ever bored of the play across billions of years?

 

Suppose we have to draw a card from a pack. What are the factors that define and control which card lands in our hands? The mathematics theory of probability (with its assumptions of limited number of players and elements) makes it look like a subtle nuance born of the free will (of touch me, touch not others) of the static card and the free will (will I touch this or that one) of the hand controlled by the brain.

 

Religion says there is no chance factor in the phenomenon of an unknown card landing in the hand that just moved uncertainly. If it is accidental, the phenomenon becomes more important than the players (card, the hand, the brain). If the chance factor is assumed to be valid at all hierarchies (stretching up to the utmost question of our very existence and the existence and origin of the universe itself), we can vaguely surmise that the creation has been an infinitely mammoth chain of chance phenomena spreading out in a chain reaction constituting a series of accidents. But as a series of accidents, why does not it get annihilated? Why does not it abruptly end in a collapsing chaos born of a momentous slipup in the sustaining chain of infinite chances and the chosen causative chances (like the sudden emergence and bursting of a bubble)? Possibly it is a cosmic bubble born of some accidental coupling of chance phenomena and it will burst out without any reasonable causative factor, again a bigger destructive chance factor.

 

Why do we believe in God? Generally under the burden of circumstances we have to drop our reason to take shelter under the tree of faith and save our skins from the scorching sun of realities hammering down merciless hot rays. Reason is very heavy. Blind belief is very light. Under the bombardment of uncountable forces beyond our control, we are bound to feel left out in the race of life. We are supposed to get depressed about many whys and whats. The reasoning with its cold hard ramrod of objectivity is a poor comforter. It’s like a cactus in the path of a tired desert traveller. It has no water. It has no shade. It has just prickly unlikeable facts. So the tired traveller follows a mirage to reach an oasis, an oasis of blind make-believe faith where he gets shade, solace and cold water. A perfectly reasonable human being deprives himself of the luxury of all these weightless fruits of ignorance. Once the heavy sack of reason is dumped it becomes easy to glide through the testing times. The simple elements involved in a God-believing head just pay a small-time lip service to the achingly grinding realities and the world beyond.

 

Fear is the reason why we cannot carry forever the atheistic load. The fear of uncertainty. The fear of loss, pain, disease and death. With so many negative possibilities it is difficult to carry a scientist’s brain all the time. The reason leaves you all alone in the dusty blizzards, the chancy falls, the accidental winds that may strike you, your possessions, your near and dear ones. We thus seek a divine guard. We are habituated to His presence, as a word, as a never seeable, just feelable (decided by us how to feel it) entity. This surreality is strongest of any provable reality around us.

 

Every living cell is led by the natural instinct of survival undermined by a fear of mortality. From the savage times to the present civilized ones, the fear of the one beyond our comprehension (rather than the love and devotion of it) has been the driving force in institutionalising our surrender through reverence and rituals. The nerves of the institutionalised religion throb with the lifeblood of fear. The strength and girth of our reason depends on how much capable or skilled we find ourselves in our fight against the unknown or the unknown forces. Lesser insecurity means stronger footing of the reason and the vice versa.

 

The world of believers teems with various tools to appease the Almighty to save us from the unseen perils and fetch us boons and blessings. It is utmost selfish give and take relationship with God: give us your blessings and we will pay back in the form of reverence. The mountain of belief has too broad a base and too high to be broken down to pieces with the tiny hammer of reason. Religion has been a multi-pronged weapon all through the ages of our evolution. By the way, was there religion during the times of single celled amoeba in the primordial sea? Or the God was just happy without the pompous ritualistic show? Quite wonderfully, religion has been an all nice type judge between the exploiting classes and the exploited ones. It has maintained itself pretty well I must say. Both the exploiter and the exploited have received equal solace from it.

 

When no worldly human help is coming forth, the feeble flickering otherworldly light steadily burns inside that pitiable creature who drops his reason and falls on his knees to pray. It is the oasis stay for the worn out desert traveller. Reasonless, beyond earthly justice and injustice, smitten with a meek acceptance before the pleasantly hallucinating light, he becomes oblivious to the present’s pains. His heart mellows with genuine tears of repentance for those unknown, unprovable past birth misdeeds. He has bargained to get something in future. He has accepted his unidentifiable culpability in lieu of a blessed and gainful future. It helps him in wading through the foaming and furious desert sandstorms. He constructs this strong, illogical, unreasonable check dam to cut down the furious lashes by the circumstances. It provides him strength and solace (this unseen brother, father, mother, patron in the unseen, unapproachable world) without being there; he being the only witness to his own prayers. He thus is able to take those steps that he won’t have taken otherwise in the absence of his never-to-be-seen friend. The idea and concept has gone so deep in our biology that even in its surrealism it has acquired more concrete acceptance and shape than a stone pillar just by our side which we can touch and kick to verify.

 

Religion also is the dustbin of our wrongdoings and sins. Many of us take shortcuts to bypass the pious injunctions to follow the path of suitability, practicality and efficiency; getting those pin-prickings and chidings by the conscience. In lieu of hundreds of intentional and unintentional wrong-doings we try to counterbalance the negative karma through some willing unwilling charity, pilgrimage, prayer and even meditation.

 

There is no fixed religiosity. We adapt our faith to its suitability to our lifestyle. Our God is our own making. So rituals and the means of appeasing Him are even more directly manipulated by us. To meet diverse demands, we have hierarchy of Gods and Goddesses ranging from ancestor and corpse worshipping, animistic deities of the savages to the new corporately branded, more powerful, more beneficent, more cultured and cleaner Gods of the uppermost class.

 

If we take our reasoning to the extent of denying God’s existence, we need to contrive a whole new hypothesis to explain the glaring inexplicabilities tonking their heads against the firm, proven walls of science. Science has not been perfected. Till science gets perfected, the concept of God will remain relevant. Moving backwards on the path of evolution with its sequential linkages of cause and effect, passing through millions of interlinked causes and effects across the billions of years of time and infinite distances of space, we arrive at the final entity—the Big Bang, the so called first event to take place in the primordial vacuum from whence our notions of space and time flow outwards.  This is what our astro-physicists try to make us believe. How can but we assume a primary cause without no further preceding cause or causes? A commoner like me is plagued by such neighing doubts.

 

Just have a look at the vast and infinite fabric of the sky at night and you just marvel that no it just can’t be the simple handiwork of some suitably fallen chance on the event horizon which explained by the scientific parameters has resulted in the infinite network of astronomical (heavenly) bodies. A mere thought about the perfect balance of the forces in nature is sufficient to make one again fall prey to the hand of some Superiormost designer behind all this. The nearer you look around you, the more proofs you get to become an atheist. The farther you look, belief sneaks into your wondering eyes and puzzled mind.

     

Just like we have tried scientifically to define the edges of the solar systems, is it possible to take our know-how to the outermost edges of the universe? Suppose we succeed in accomplishing this one day, what will lie ahead to explore. What beyond? Will we reach God then?! 

        

Astro-physics is based on the space-time model mostly dependent upon the emanation of light travelling at the speed of 300,000 km/sec. With our rapidly improving telescopes we are peeping farther and farther into the space to retrieve the light travelling to us from the farthest possible body. Will we ever reach the farthest source of light—the last primordial flicker at the farthest most end? If we provide some representation to the God, I think this final object has to be the one.

 

Lost in our inability to either prove or disprove His true nature, we have contrived this immensely utilitarian hypothesis that like all other man-made systems has immense usage for the humanity both at the individual as well as collective levels. I don’t know what will be the nature of this argument once artificial intelligence starts its path of inevitable evolution further down the path of scientific progress when most of the natural functions (having a long and arduous trail across millions of years) will be replaced by metallic, mechanized short-cuts; when the artificial intelligence will learn to sustain itself without the control of its erstwhile master, the man. Possibly in his quest to know the truth and the consequent booms showered on him as a result of utilitarian science, man himself will one day become all powerful possessing super-intelligence. May be then the debate about God will come to an end as science will pluck out one mystery after the other; we will overcome one obstacle after another that during the previous generations had forced us to become helpless leaving us in a state of dumping our reason to surrender before the blind faith in some superpower; a time when the all powerful reason will become so strong that the vulnerable soft skin, warm blood and the heart’s mysterious sensations will turn obsolete; when we will harness the full potential of the brain’s billions and trillions of neurons to be further aided by the artificial intelligence to peek in every nook corner; may be then the present shape and size of God will become obsolete and outdated (like we condemn the savages for animism).

 

During that era of cold, hard, steely reasoning, the man will himself achieve (in what form the species will be then we do not know) the Godly status and turn himself into an all powerful entity matching the supernatural hypothetical entities of the present. Whatever hypotheses mankind has contrived over the ages, he has always surpassed it and proved yesterday’s fiction into tomorrow’s reality. Then may be the fiction of God will be made a reality by the man himself, making him capable of performing supreme feats that we presently ascribe to the Almighty. All along we have believed and prayed to the God to become as powerful as Him. Or the God of those times will still be a more powerful being because the concept of God is in our genes? It just might adapt to some new form! 

 

Looking at the Bloodied Hands of Communism!

 

Darwin says all beings, across species, and the related phenomena across various natural processes, are propelled by the survival instinct among the constituting elements. In this tussle between the superior and the inferior, the nature evolves in its multitudinous forms comprising tragedies, ecstasies, pleasures and pains. It is basically a class struggle both at the intra- and inter-species level. Both in natural and human systems (we humans now operate almost in exclusion of nature), the fittest ones adapting better to the plummeting circumstances are the ones to take a lead in either milking the resources or in laying the framework for the overall system to function.

 

The human system is a big behemoth, intriguingly evolving, following the parameters of the jungle in its human variants. There is basically a fight for individual and even collective interests. Of course to make us believe that the human society does not follow the raw principles of nature (like the lion eating the deer—unsinfully—to survive), we have interposed the institutions of religion, morality, ethics, concept of good and bad, sin and pious deeds, karma, etc. However, as per the principle of social selection (derivative of natural selection), the human society moves ahead over time defined by clash of interests at various levels in different fields. If we remove the differentiating layers and levels in the society; if we remove the hypothesis of sin out of this struggle—like we have removed from the struggle between lion and deer—the leftover will simply boil down to a struggle between the more skilled and the less skilled. Out of the numerous levels of interests (ranging from individual, family, religious, state, earth,….), one clash of interest is at the level of the upper and the lower class. From the start of the known history, human affairs have been shaped directly and indirectly by the class struggles (between the upper and the lower), among individuals within a particular class on the basis of their less or more suitability, and even among the individuals of different classes. Although with changing times, the fields of struggle have changed as well. This broad overarching struggle contains many sublevels to trickle down to the tiniest triumphs, humiliations, wins, losses, exploitations, etc.

 

The communists have been tonking their ideas and ideology infested heads against this almost inevitable defining differential in the society that seems to be pushing the motley mix of minority’s triumph and the majority’s woes. As a counter to this, one might say that the Western liberal democracy might reverse the ratio. However, it comes at the cost of an invincible super state which with the purpose of safeguarding the majority’s interests has to be a still exploitative institution that mightn’t exploit its own have-nots much but then it can very easily do so to the teeming millions in the third world.

 

Taking up cudgels from the famished majority’s side, the communists thus unite the working class interests to make it super-strong so that it can suddenly go berserk and break apart the centuries old system of exploitation and its supportive elements. For this reason the communist movements are called ‘revolution’. Earlier it was against the monarchy, nobility, aristocracy embaling in them what we call ‘luxury’ aesthetically and intelligently supported by the religion. Religion, for its pious injunctions seems to be more effective in stopping a poor person from seeking alternatives than stopping the exploitation by the upper class. So the revolutionaries as atheists pluck out the sinews of long-held beliefs, convincing, providing solace and sympathy to the underclass. A Godless person is less accepting; carries immense prospects of imposing his will through covert and overt means. Hence religion is held culpable by the revolutionaries in the sense that it forces people—makes them habituated to their woes as the will of the divine forces beyond their control—to become adapted to their ill fate rather than putting the same time and energy in remedial measures. Religion, of course, for centuries has been good, sympathetic, solacing companion to the masses helping them in licking their wounds and swallow the sorrows. Thus the revolutionaries break its façade, terming it stagnant in its principles and in cohort with the exploitative classes. Religion too unfortunately demands its share of glitter and glamour that only the upper class can provide. After all, a poor person’s God is a lesser God. The religion of the poor with limited resources is even termed as animism.

 

Once the revolution led by the newly pious injunctions of classless society tears out (generally in a bloody manner) the ancient system, the interests of the former upper class are either hijacked by a dictator or an all powerful super-body—polit-bureau or the central committee—which in itself replaces the empty seat of godhood; a tiny blackhole type superforce to root out the still surviving differences of any type. Unfortunately, differences are bound to crop up somehow. So they keep on nipping the buds. This sudden rush of purgatory blood leaves gory tales far more horrible than the ones committed by the former system over centuries. Their tales of atrocities committed in just years outmatch the ones perpetrated across decades or even centuries by the earlier system. It is just like a helpless group of sufferers running away from the semi-lethal teeth of a wolf into the shelter of a hungry lion with super-strong claws. In this religionless weeding out for the cause of the supreme ideal, the religious tools of mercy and pity do not exist to act as the check dams. After all, religion has been constructed to function as a check dam to save a situation where ‘the lion eats the deer’ principle is allowed to operate in milder nastiness in the human society. In a Godless state all hell breaks loose. After many bloody strivings, the communists much to their chagrin find that the divisive curse of the selfish, individualistic interests still survives in one form or the other.

 

Capitalist, socialist, liberal democracies on the other hand are less glaring and more subtle in their deeds, because here the old exploitative forms have been redressed as modern principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. It is a subtle and white-blooded exercise: the old forces in their more acceptable avatars. It also promises to provide ample opportunities to the masses to struggle through the lawful checker work to move up the capitalist ladder to reach the class on the top. It believes in conversion rather than coup born of the clash of interests.

 

However hard the communist regime might try the class differentials will persist in one form or the other; simply because we are human beings, cast in so unique and numerous ways with billion ways of thinking; and not just same colour factory product.

 

PS: Something away from the main discussion in this topic! The reason why a democrat politician, an industrialist or a dictator occupies his/her influential position can be—among others off beat factors like luck, fate, destiny—that the said person is stronger in getting his conscience unchained from the restricting principles of good and bad in the game of survival. It boils down to: Who is more skilful? It is just a matter of more or less skills.