Entreaty, trust and Godmen-By-Kumar Bahukhandi

When we objectively analyse certain activities which supposedly please God, their true nature can be realised only then. Take a man who is wishing for a large amount of money. If God grants him this gain it will be only on account of another's loss. After all, that money has to come from somewhere else.

Then, why should God favour that man? Is it because he is a good person? But good is a relative term. And the theory that God favours good people disproves itself every day. On the other hand, if God favours only those who pray to him, then he is no different from a politician or man in power who helps those who constantly flatter him.

When God helps a man, that is praised as greatness, but when a man in power helps someone, he is accused of favouritism. Yogis and babas are respected and worshiped. This isn't because of their magical abilities like making objects materialise out of thin air. The same trick performed by a street corner magician goes unheeded.

What sets the babas apart is the way they behave, dress and their talent for public speaking. By the way they live, Godmen create a mysterious aura around themselves. The sleight of hand combined with their other qualities, earns them the fear and respect of the people. Just talking about God doesn't contribute to their sway over the people. For example, if a baba arrived at a meeting on a Honda bike wearing jeans and a T-Shirt, with an iPad player at his waist, to preach about God, would anyone listen to him?

When we hear from reliable sources that a widely respected politician is, in fact dishonest, we immediately despise him. That's because we had respected the politician only because we thought that he was working for our good. But in case of God, if we expect something from him and he does not give it, and on top of it, he aggravates our misery, we still continue praying to him. We feel our prayers will be answered some day. To draw an analogy, that's like buttering the boss constantly at our workplace even though he is rude and blacklists us for no apparent reason. We keep hoping the boss might just end up recommending us for a promotion some day. Hope keeps us going.

At times, people say that they came to believe in God because they were saved miraculously from death. Take the case of a man who has fallen overboard from a ship mid-ocean and is terrified that he will be eaten up by sharks. At the last minute, he is saved by another person. Yet he is convinced that he has been saved by the grace of God.

If that is so, then would the sharks be justified in despising God for depriving them of their food? And should they turn into atheists? Think about it.

Between God and Evil

This is an excerpt from some thoughts I wrote this article when doing my MA in English ...When the promoters of God were questioned about why there was so much misery in the world, they were in a fix. After all, they had themselves proclaimed that God is responsible for every activity on earth.

A catch there, the promoters had to be more specific. So, they quickly rewrote their marketing script. They declared that God is a force which is responsible for all the good things that happen around us. And the evil force is responsible for the misery in the world. Good is a much-desired element which gives pleasure, and bad is obviously that much-detested element which causes pain. Pleasure and pain are the two extremities that human beings are bound to experience during their lifetimes.

If we examine an act of rape, we see that the victim suffers and the rapist derives some perverse enjoyment. In this case, the act is sexual. What does this mean? In this act, God cannot have taken the side of the rapist who derives pleasure. It is equally absurd to believe that the evil is on the side of the woman in the form of pain. By the promoter's manner of reasoning it would seem that God and evil have joined hands in this venture. This can be the only ridiculous conclusion we can arrive at.

In any act, pleasure and pain go hand in hand, for the simple reason that one's gain is another's loss. For example, when a man kills a bird and eats it, he gets pleasure whereas the bird gets pain. So, here too, God has taken the side of power and caused misery to the bird. The man could have easily avoided the act. To satisfy his hunger, he could have surely chosen to eat vegetables. But because of his carnivorous instincts, he killed the bird. Thus, in proportion to the amount of pleasure he desires to obtain, he causes misery. Gain in pleasure is directly proportional to the loss in pain.

What I believe that there are no two polarised forces: one good and one evil. If I am to believe in God, there is only one force which is responsible for every act — good, bad or ugly around us. To be honest, I began thinking of the concepts of God and evil, nearly a decade and half ago, when I was working Crime Reporter for a English Daily in Jammu and Kashmir . Obviously this was much before I had even dreamt of becoming a writer .

When I read this stuff — which I wrote in the form of notes way back, when I was in College only — I am frankly surprised by the clarity of my thoughts and the way I could conceptualise them even back then. Sure enough my language and some of the examples seem too simplistic and I had primarily written this back then to impress a girl named Deveika Menon a friend of mine . The tragedy is that she never read this essay of mine because she got bored in the first para itself. I am super sure that quite a few of you will either share her feelings or feel pained by my thoughts. But then I got immense pleasure while writing down my thoughts. So If you are pained by my pleasure then you decide who you should blame – God or Evil?