Boom!
The bang was big, time was unknown and something came out. It was nothing before but something just apparated. Thin air started materializing, or was there any air at all? It started expanding as water splattered on the floor, silently, enormously, like a huge something. Who did it?
I am an Indian. Born and brought up in a Hindu family and what is the most interesting thing about Hindus is that they have answers. ‘Who did it?’ was the question, right? Well, Hindus have an answer. What we see in front of our eyes is done indirectly and what goes beyond our funny little silly yet pretentiously mystical brain is done directly, by the one we localize to areas best suited to our activities and freedom – God.
This enormously long line looks like I am a staunch supporter of ‘God Delusion’, well I’m not, none at all. I am just an ordinary boy, standing by the side of the giant’s foot, trying to look further, upon whose shoulder once Sir Isaac Newton stood and did that. I like to call myself a science geek (just to sound cool, of course) and it would be a disgrace to my pretentious demeanour if I do not expand on Sir Isaac Newton or on science.
Sir Newton, now lies in peace, in Westminster Abbey, London and is in great company with Darwin in the next house and Hawking in the other. If the afterlife is a thing, I wonder what these people discuss looking at our plight. Not the poverty or the pandemic, these by God’s grace shall pass. But the stuff that concerns us the most.
A girl, 14 or 15, goes into hiding with people she did not quite fraternize with, for two long years. It is said that at the end of a dark gloomy tunnel is an open-end, to light, to warmth and hope. But this girl got trapped on her way, boulders shackled her, crumbled her and she went to rest in Alexander’s blossom. Why did it happen? Let us try to build our answer.
Religion seeded the tree of hatred which bore the fruit of holocaust. Millions were killed, butchered like anything. Jews, hapless, helpless, hopeless, lynched, writhed, puked blood and yet believed in their god, that he would save them from their miseries. The god messiah though did not come. He was quiet, sat in his heavily embellished heaven, did not move an inch to help and yet stole all the credit for the Jews who survived, at last, thanked him.
The Holy Bible says – ‘Not a leaf falls without God’s will’, so what should this episode be characterized as? A conspiracy? That God made it so happen that in his name millions be mercilessly slaughtered, that they begged, beseeched, implored to him to come and save, that those who survived, at last, thanked him and his following ever increased.
I am not an atheist; I am a believer. I believe in questioning. I believe in scrutinizing. And I believe in God, not the one they made but the one who made us.
Hawking’s idea is the best I have come across so far. Remember the Big Bang? Nature did that. The expansion? Nature did that. Every microbe formed, leaf grew and fell, animals came, we came not because of god’s grace but because nature did that. Nature is god. No god was ever too small to be confined in a small temple. Neither is he too weak to seek justice from us. I am proud of the god who made us, not the one which was manufactured by us. But interestingly, the latter is more famous.
Imagine the strength the real god had, for he did a thermo-nuclear explosion unimaginable in physical terms, made such an enormous universe out of nothing and maintains its existence till date. Our earth is just a speck in comparison to this cosmos and we are small pathetic creatures wandering about around the clock, being hardly significant to the enormity of this universe. We would die tomorrow and not a second will halt to bid adieu yet we are self-proclaimed conquers of this cosmos to whom the great god would come to ask for help.
In reality, we are nature’s own creation which turned against it. We abandoned our mother, abused her, made another god and started marketing it. We are salesmen. We have an extraordinary gifted power of selling and we’ve our set of vices to sell the god. We exaggerated and personified statues and turned an ignorant eye towards nature. We assaulted it, insulted it, and when it struck an ambush back at us, we retreated to the god we made, we purposefully made use of our creation to bring home the bacon even in times like these. Indeed, we’re the best creation.
Religion was invented, it did not come from the heavens, it was invented by the most brilliant brains of that era. It was invented to lay out a code of conduct for humans. I am not questioning the genuinety of religious texts but I am questioning the interpretation of the same. Did Lord Rama exist? I don’t know. I am too small to answer that but his principles should exist. Nobody saw Christ’s crucifixion but we believe it.
We believe that the Neelkanth drank that for us, we believe that Kali killed him for us, we believe that Guru Nanak transformed into petals for us so that we live peacefully. So that we understand the power of harmony, the ultimate might of unity which coronated us as the ruler of this world. But what have we done? What kind of place have we turned our Earth into? Remember the line ‘we don’t inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children’. But what have we done? We have labelled it as our own estate. We have killed the other inhabitants; we have tainted the skies and contaminated the lands. We have besmirched the name of the human race and our pace is unmatched.
We have deliberately ignored the teachings of our holy texts. But let me recapitulate them. Shiva is incomplete without Shakti; Yen is nothing without Yang. Similarly, there is no left without the right. Our journey should not be from the extreme right to the extreme left. Our destination should be somewhere in between and that is where our power lies. The power to grow unanimously. We need to acknowledge this power and the responsibilities which come along. We need to question our deeds, introspect our existence and shape our tomorrow.