Just Another Job

I cursed as I braked. I just missed the green light. It was now red and it would take another 156 seconds before it turned back into green. It was peak traffic time. The weather was very chilly and even the inside of my heater-less car was freezing. It was the usual route. And she was the usual beggar girl doing the rounds knocking at the windows of the cars. They avoided the two-wheelers - they didnt expect much from them.They had a carefully targeted consumer segment. So what did these beggars sell? They sold you the satisfaction that you did a good deed today. That you've been kind and generous.

It had been a bad day for me at the office. And missing the green light wasn't helping to calm me down. The beggar girl knocked at my window. I shoo'ed her away. She wore scraps of cloth and was shivering as if she was going to collapse and die any moment. But that was just a trick to make you feel more sympathetic. I knew that. The greater the pain, the more you pay and the bigger is your consumer surplus. She went to the car in front of me. The sucker started to give her a coin.She took it with a pained face. Of course she was acting. But I'm sure the sucker got his money's worth out of that class act.

The light turned green. I was impatient. I honked rudely. More so coz the car ahead was delaying by paying that beggar girl. Was I being cruel?

The girl quickly hopped and sat on the pavement laughing and giggling with her other colleagues. That made me madder! But then, with a realisation, I sported a crooked smile on my face. Its just another job and they're good at it! Even though their boss - God - has not been very supportive.

I drove on. A bit placated.

PS: Read Peter Foster's interesting blog post on this topic.

Sylvester

He was sweating profusely from the hot May sun of Delhi. He was dark with a hard lean body and working hands with age touching forties. He had a pair of common leather chappals on his feet; dark tan and dusty, but strong. He was in a pair of indeterminate coloured trousers. I couldnt tell whether it was beige or white gone dirty. I think it was chocolate coloured! In his right hand was a slip of paper with my address on it. With his left hard he was carrying a tool case - patent leather, quite old though, but again quite strong. His eyes were bloodshot. I wondered if he had been drinking or if he was ill.

I heard his name - "Shrivastav". Well, I thought, he looks like a 'Shrivastav' enough, a north Indian Hindu. Later, I was quite shocked to know that it was actually 'Sylvester'. I could not imagine a Christian electrician working in Kotla Mubarakpur. But he was! Guess I did not know enough about socio-economic demographics in such commercial areas. And guess what, I was also quite surprised to know that the previous electrician's name was 'Aslam' But I could imagine a Muslim working in Kotla Mubarakpur.

I am a die hard secularist and multiculturalist. So I felt strange and in some ways guilty about my feeling surprised. Was it sub conscious bias or pure statistical evidence that was behind my finding Sylvester and Aslam odd in their contexts? Maybe a bit of both.

I could not place Sylvester. I mean I could not tell whether he was a North Indian Christian or a South Indian one. They differ a lot actually, though they all look purely Indian. I revel in the variety of India and love coming across someone who is so far removed from me and yet swears allegiance to the same Constitution.

Sylvester looked like quite a serious kind of person with no smile on his face and a droning voice. But once he started working I found him quite talkative. And I joined him with my 'Ahans', 'Ohs' and 'OKs'. He was not intrusive or curious, he just liked to talk - to speak, not speak with. I felt a shade of sadness leaving him alone to work. But he was ok with that - he talked to himself.

On Chain Mails

I was going to tell you about an incident that happened to me a long time ago. I think I was 4th or 5th standard (grade) at that time. And I have always been god fearing (or at least god respecting, as now). I was more so then. One evening (we were in Calcutta then) I had gone to the local market with my parents. As I was standing on the pavement, a short ragged looking man with pock marked face and brownish dry curly hair came upto me and handed me over a leaflet, a single thin page of printed matter on one side only. I took it expecting some sort of advertising material or SALE announcement. I started reading it. It was a yellowish paper with black broken lettering in Hindi. It started with a logo featuring a well-known Baba. As I proceeded with the reading, it explained the greatness of the Baba and his miracles. Then it requested the reader to pass on the message by printing hundred new leaflets and distributing it to hundred new people. Then it went on to list the immense fortunes that accrued to the people who did exactly as told. Till that point I was happy for the people who got so much in return for spreading the Baba's word and so on. But then came the clincher. The leaflet went into a totally different zone, a different galaxy, warning of untold damage and misfortune to the people who failed to do the bidding of redistributing the leaflet. Men who lost their businesses, children dying, wife going mad, cyclones ripping apart homes, money turning to ash, blood vomits and all sort of graphic violence you can imagine. When I was finished with the reading, I was numb. I was having pins and needles all over my body. I was scared to death. I knew I could not do what was written in it. I didn't have that kind of money. If I told my parents, they would scold me for taking that thing from a stranger. I didn't want all those bad things happening to my family. Yes I was more concerned about my parents and brother than myself. It is natural for me to love them more than I love myself. And at that time, my whole existence depended on them. I was seriously freaked out. I folded up the leaflet and we returned home. After a few hours and after considering a lot, I went to my mom and showed it to her. She took it calmly and asked me to keep it near god's pictures in our wooden temple and pray for forgiveness. I pushed the leaflet deep inside the drawer of the temple and prayed hard. "Please god and Baba, forgive me and do nothing to my family.” After a year or so after considerable sobering up, one day I found that leaflet while cleaning the drawers of the temple. I promptly tore it up into minute pieces and threw it in the trash bin. Nothing had happened so far. So gods must have forgotten the whole thing. But I still believed in that mechanism and was generally afraid of getting another one of that by mistake. By the time I was sixteen or seventeen, I had matured enough to understand the conning effect behind those chain mails. Most of the pseudo-religious chain mails in India and across the world derive their momentum from fear rather than the love of god or temptation for money. Fear is more powerful than moolah. We still get chain mails by post occasionally. Rich, powerful, educated, men and women indulge in it. Maybe because they are superstitious or immature or plain stupid. But fear still is the driving factor. Most of these postal chain mails are anonymous and don't have a "reply to" address. People forwarding them know that the receiver wouldn't like it. The receiver will surely hate the sender for setting him up. Since quite many years, I've made it a principal not to forward chain mails. And I stick to it. The ones I forward do not have intimidation or baseless lures or false claims. And are e-mails only. Nowadays whenever we receive a chain mail by post, I read it slowly and surely and completely, like one would read a humour piece. Then I smile. And then I laugh out loud, pitying the person who sent it. Then I enjoy great ecstasy in shredding the mail into smithereens. Then I get back to work. Chain Mails = Bullshit!

Culture, Heritage and Tradition

Culture is the scientific and sociological stage of development of society. Heritage is everything beautiful man had ever created. Tradition is a state of stagnancy of culture - it is when we have got stuck on a particular culture, when culture does not evolve with scientific innovations and psychological development of a people. Tradition is a state of comfort, a fear of change, an avoidance of experimentation, a refusal to ask questions, and a preference to carry on with old methods which may not be appropriate for the the current state of society.

Confidence

Confidence is something that most people despise when it is in someone else. Many others are simply in awe of it. But whether one likes it in others or not, no one dare challenge it. Only confidence challenges confidence. And of course, foolishness.

Opium of the Masses

"Religion is the opium of the masses.” If Karl Marx had been alive today, he'd be more specific. Religion is the Prozac of the masses, or better still, Extasy.

What prompted Marx to compare one of the foundations of the civilised world with a banned drug? In all times, there have been some people who are smarter than others- maybe because of a fortunate genetic combination, or practice, or habit, or circumstances, or maybe because of sheer mania. And in all times, these smarter people felt irritated by the stupidity and the chaos created by the less smart folks (viz. 'the masses'). The smarter people of the world devised codes of conduct called religion to reign in the chaos created by the normal people. All the religions in this world to the greatest extent are codes of conduct specifying how mortals should behave and how they shouldn't. The primary objective of religions has always been to bring order to the civilised world - to give a direction. This direction depended largely upon the fertile imagination and fanciful thoughts of the guardian or high priest of the religion or the messiah or prophet, as one would call them a different matter. All prophets were benign souls having a sense of mission and thoughts of well being for the world. It is later through the years when the religion spread that somebody finds out that this religion stuff could be a great power tool and started exploiting it to make people obey him and fulfill a very human craving of his- for Power. He then started being called the successor or the reincarnation or the heir of the prophet. (Bullshit!) It was but natural that politicians- the Entrepreneurs of Chaos- would find out about the potentiality of this immense earthmover called religion.

Why are the religions of this world so distant (mark it, I'm not saying different)? The distance between the major religions is literal. Geographical if I may say so. And the difference is merely artificial. It is my firm belief that if all human beings had stayed at one place since the inception of thought, then there would have been one and only one religion in this world (Exception - some smart jack-ass power maniac selling his own brand of religion - "cleans your sins cleanest, purest!"). Religions are not different. Never were. This is so because, the smart guys who first created them believed in the most basic humane values - kindness, love, sacrifice - and all that stuff (you know all that!!). The difference is only in the manner and type of the make-up that is applied. A different shade of lipstick, some mascara, a new hairdo, a little blush, a pair of coloured contact lenses - and lo and behold! You have a completely new object of affection, the 'other religion'. The core is the same, the presentation is different.

Now, the presentation is very important. People just won't swallow what you're serving them unless it is coated with sugar candy or is accompanied by a cane stick. People will not know or do what is correct for them. This is the main idea behind creating religions. And dictatorships. Whoever said, -"99% of people are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of getting infected" - had the strains of a great leader in him (maybe a messiah, maybe a dictator). Whether it is prophets or military leaders, presentation of ideas in a manner in which people will swallow it, nay, gulp it down hungrily is paramount. Perhaps more important than even the idea itself. A good idea by itself does not make a good leader.

The one greatest tool that religion has always used is GOD. I call it chance element; statisticians call it Probability. For some it is money, for some others it is Rock 'n' Roll. Mostly people know GOD as Jesus’ father or Allah or the entity Moses talked to. But to be true to the thought, I must stress that God is a concept. And as a concept it is an extremely potent psychological tool that has proved very very valuable since the beginning of mankind. The God concept was not created by any religious leader. I think God would've been created even if a single man lived on a lonely island since his birth. God is so basic. There are just so many things that man can still not control and so many other things that man can still not explain, that man has to give an excuse for all this. Man has to attribute these to somebody or something, somewhere. Man has to think of someone who can explain all this and who can control all this. That somebody is God. God is an escape. God is a portable shrink. God is your mother's womb. God is the top shelf of your storeroom where you shove all the things you don't have the energy to deal with right now. Neither do you have the wisdom. God is the personification of the uncertainties, fears and comforting thoughts of all thinking beings.

Questions Questions

Are we born on the face of the earth for our own enjoyment, or to carry out some duties or to let fate and god take their own turn, or to just while away our time, or to create our own paradises or our own hells? What is that enjoyment we are seeking which is the ultimate joy? Self esteem, ego, pride or self actualisation? Do we necessarily need to etch our names in the books of history for times to remember us? Whose names are we going to put in? Is this name which we are using - with this flesh, bones, muscles and the face we are using as a guise - the real us? If yes, then how is this going to help us become a part of history if all this is not going to stay forever? How are we going to enjoy history remembering us if we are not around to see that happening? If this is not us then who are we? What really qualifies us as an individual? Our consciousness? Our soul? Or our brain and the electricity in it? Are we humans in some way immortal and omnipresent and continuing forever in some form or other? Or are we just a tiny passing phase in the history of the earth and the universe? All this intellect we have, all this thought process and shredding of issues so analytically really something unique in the scheme of the universe? Or is it a primitive form of brain functioning when seen from some other's point of view? Do we need to know where we came from or do we just try to stay alive and exist? Why do we want to exist? To be immortal? Why are we afraid of dying, terminated? What happens to 'us' after death? Will I ever find a solution to these questions, or I too, like thinkers of the past, have to live with a compromise solution? Is physically, mentally, spiritually possible to find when all this began and where all this will end, without making any compromises, hallucinations or self fulfilling prophesies? Did Buddha really find out something or was it just another compromise solution rationally justifiable to ordinary men? Do ordinary men need to find an answer to these questions or should they simply take life as it comes?