Friday 10 July 2015

The alternate Secret

“When you want something, the entire Universe conspires in helping you achieve it”

This sort of statement can only be made by an incurable romantic or an unscrupulous author who wants to sell his book by appealing to the inherent romantic nature of most people. The blatant nature  of this statement is so obvious that it would be almost specious of me to attempt to refute it.

       This entire ideology is built upon the assumption that the universe exists on the laws of 'natural justice'. Ask that from half a million children who died in Iraq due to US hegemony. Put that question to more than 16000 dead & more than 5.5 lakh maimed residents of Bhopal and you will get the answer. Ask that from 6 million Jews who were smothered in gas chambers in Nazi Germany . Please put that question to children in slavery around you, to the billions of human beings living in hopeless squalor, to millions of women forced into prostitution, to a father who cremates his child in war zones all over the world every day. I tell you, if you do that, it will suck the last vestige of hope out of your beaming brain and leave you with the same utter despair that this world is actually experiencing while you have a good time with nice company, fancy cars and glitzy lifestyles.

 The call for the justice of the universe is a cruel joke which makes the fate that all these people met with, all the more tragic and ridiculous, isn’t it? And yet, apparently a lot of addle-headed people actually do believe in this sort of arrant nonsense, which explains the fact of so many. In fact, most people in this world are romantics at heart till they encounter the 'real world'. They believe that the universe is essentially a benign, rosy, Eden of justice, where each of your actions are carefully scrutinised and evaluated and subsequently either rewarded or punished depending on where they lie on the scale starting from infinite goodness and extending to infinite evil. They believe that there’s something called Fate or Destiny that watches over them, takes care of them, and essentially wishes nothing but eventual good for them. All this of course, as a moment’s reflection will show, is total rubbish.

Of course the Universe is governed by laws. But they are not laws of justice. They are impersonal, implacable laws like Gravity, Thermodynamics, Relativity and other shit that is found in Physics and Chemistry. And I’m perfectly sure that none of these laws is remotely interested in us individually or as a species.

But I see that you are sill not convinced. This is because you believe in someone called God. The God who supposedly created this Universe and its laws, made the conditions that made life on Earth possible, and who wants us all to be good, sweet, kind, creative and loving human beings. You believe that this God wants justice to reign in the Universe, to ensure that goodness, industry and talent are rewarded while evil, slack and cunning are punished. This God stands like the final wall of defense protecting the rosy bubble of your romanticism in which you dreamily float through existence.

Life is governed by the rules of Physics, Chemistry and Biology (and of course your wife). It is like a regular bollywood movie – without any script. No higher force watches over you or takes care of you. There is no inherent justice in the world, poetic or otherwise. All the events in your life are either random or brought about by either the conscious planning of your mind or the subconscious undercurrents of it.

Goodness seldom triumphs in the world and even when it does, it is as random as the throw of a dice. Cruel, cunning savages like Genghis Khan, Stalin and Mao rule it. Good people like Gandhi are revered as saints or Gods while they are useful to the Nehrus of the world – thereafter only their statues survive as empty shells of their heritage while their souls are discarded into the dustbin of history. There is nothing good or bad about this process – it’s just the way of the world.

Movies and novels make us believe in romance and destiny – that an innate sense of justice is woven into the fabric of the universe. Authors of motivational books also reinforce this belief. Because they all want a piece of your money, your bloody money. They are selling you a psychological crutch to help you wobble your way through the senselessness and brutality of life, a sort of magical trick that conjures up a bubble of apparent security around you. They fool you, and they succeed because you are willing to be fooled.

The Universe is not a benign, loving place which exists to help you find your desires. It’s an impersonal, grand theatre that gives you a stage on which you can prance and caper for a while if you are lucky enough to survive any random holocaust or catastrophe , until it’s time to give way to other actors like you. There is no script in this play. Nobody directs it, except you and your fellow actors. And it’s a brutal, bloody, senseless, meaningless play.

So dear romantics, you better understand that the glasses with which you see the world aren’t actually rosy– they are actually RED with the splattered gore of the bloody passage of history.

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