Gods and Godmen of India (5 page)
“It is correct that during the last few years some bitterness has cropped up between Hindus and Sikhs in the Punjab, but I believe this tension is only a passing phase. Outside Punjab, however, such strained relations do not exist. Perhaps politics is responsible for this evil. But irrespective of that, liberals among the major religious communities of India should strive so that the various ethnic and other groups may live in peace and harmony.”
10/4/1982
O
ne Sunday morning in Lahore, pre-monsoon showers had cleared the air of dust and a cool pleasant breeze was blowing. I rang up my friend Manzur Qadir (later foreign minister and chief justice of Pakistan) and suggested taking out our families to the Lawrence Gardens and giving children ice-creams at the Gymkhana Club. He agreed enthusiastically. We parked our cars at the Cosmopolitan Club. I had brought a red rubber ball with me. With our two families outings were enlivened with games and refresher courses on names of trees and birds. The game was simple. Manzur or I tossed the ball into the branches of high trees: the children competed against each other in catching the ball as it bounced off the branches. So we went from one tree to another towards the Gymkhana Club. At one tree the ball got caught in a cleft of two branches. We hurled stones and sticks to dislodge it. After half an hour we gave up the ball as lost and proceeded to the club. We spent over an hour eating ice-creams and sipping coffee. Then we set back towards our cars. We passed under the tree and saw the red ball still lodged between the branches. I proclaimed very loudly, “If that ball drops down on its own, I will believe there is a God.” A gentle gust of breeze shook the branches and the ball dropped directly into my hands.
“That should teach you a lesson!” said Manzur. “God has now manifested His presence to you as you wished. It should silence your doubts forever.”
I was shaken but stood my ground. “It was a mere coincidence,” I said. “The only lesson it has taught me is that I should not treat serious problems like the existence of God as lightly as I do.”
God and religion were perennial topics of discussion between Manzur and myself. He was more concerned with spotting contradictions in the Judaic, Christian and Muslim scriptures than with God and His prophets. Neither of us observed rituals of our respective faiths nor attached importance to religious dietary rules. But we never imposed our views on others. Both of us were described as agnostics but both retained our socio-religious identities. Though non-believers he remained nominally Muslim, I nominally Sikh.
Discarding religious belief and practice, though hard enough, left many questions unanswered, most of all belief in the existence of God. Often in moments of solitude watching a star-studded sky, like everyone else, I asked myself, “What is all this about? Where did it come from? Why? Where will I go when I die?” Much as I thought about them, consulted books of wisdom of different religions and entered into dialogues with religious leaders, I found no answers. I refused to be bamboozled with words and formulas like ‘the truth is within us only if we seek it’. Or ‘the body dies but the soul is imperishable’. I came to the conclusion that they knew no more than I. And I knew there are no answers to these questions. We do not know where we come from, we know not the purpose of our lives on earth and we do not know where we go when we die. Instead of believing in fairy tales or Genesis and the Day of Judgement or equally baseless stories of reincarnation, why not be honest and admit ‘I do not know’?
I was confronted by examples of what has come to be known as the ‘Unknown Hand’. There was the case of a man who fell on the tracks of the London underground railways as a train was approaching the platform. The train pulled up just as its wheels touched the man’s legs. The driver swore he had not pulled the brakes. The emergency chord had been pulled by someone who could not possibly have seen the leg on the track. Who was it? They never found out. Somewhat similar incident happened with me. I bought a new Maruti car and took pains to park it under the shade of a mulberry tree outside my apartment. One hot afternoon I was in two minds about whether or not to go for a swim. A storm seemed to be building up and I was not sure whether it would be worth my while stepping out in the heat. Ultimately something made me overcome my lethargy and take a chance. I had hardly gone a hundred yards when the dust storm swept across with great fury and tore a branch off the mulberry tree. It came crashing on the spot where I had parked my car. If I had been a minute late my new car would have been smashed. If I had been in it, I would not have been writing this piece. Was there an ‘Unseen Hand’ egging me on to leave for the club? It could very well have been a coincidence, a matter of good luck.
Thousands of people will tell you of similar events; like they missed a flight and the plane crashed or they happened to be outside their houses when an earthquake brought the roof down and killed others. Equal number of instances could be cited in which people lost their lives or were maimed because they undertook errands they need not have undertaken. This further led to the question: if there is a God, is he really Almighty as well as just? It is difficult to equate omnipotence with fair-mindedness because far too often good, God-fearing people who have harmed no one suffer and the evil-minded who create havoc in other people’s lives prosper in good health.
Why Do Bad Things Happen To Good People?
is a well-argued little book by Rabbi Kushner whose young son was stricken by terminal cancer. His pleading in favour of the existence of a just, all-powerful God left me unconvinced. Among my closer friends of later years is Nirmala (Nimmy) Gupta, an attractive headmistress of a school in Mathura. She lost her only child, a boy in his twenties, in a car crash the day he had been confirmed in his job. “I didn’t asked for a child; God gave him to me. He gave the lad talent to write poetry. He was well-loved by everyone. And suddenly one evening He takes him away from me. What had I done to deserve this cruel treatment?” This continues to be her theme many years after she lost her son. My response is: “I do not believe in God and cannot be called upon to justify his actions.” Her only answer is a flood of tears.
There are millions of people for whom belief in the existence of God gives meaning to their lives. It is impossible to shake their faith. And not necessary to try to do so. When I first put my ideas in print in the
Indian Express,
10-year-old Supriya, daughter of Rajmohan Gandhi, then resident editor in Madras and now Janata MP, wrote to me in Washington where I then happened to be. Supriya’s letter ran somewhat as follows: “Dear Uncle, I read your article in the
Express
this morning. So you do not believe in God! You are wrong. God exists. He comes to our garden everyday. He talks to my mummy and my daddy. He also talks to me. So there!” I was charmed by the child’s outburst of faith in God’s existence. I wrote back to her: “Dear Supriya, I am glad to hear God visits your home regularly and He talks to your mummy, daddy and you. He does not talk to me. Please send me His telephone number so that I could also talk to Him.” Supriya did not bother to reply. I met her father a couple of weeks ago and asked him about his daughter. He sadly admitted that Supriya, now 15, had ceased to have dialogues with God and had turned agnostic.
The closer I get to the time of meeting my Maker the more sceptic I become of his existence: Most people accept Voltaire’s argument, “We can scarcely believe that there can be a watch without a watch maker”. Every effect must have a cause, they say. However, no one can get round the conundrum that if God is the cause and universe the effect, who or what was it that brought God into existence? What was the primary cause, the
Causa Causans?
No answer.
What should clinch the issue about God is that belief in his existence does not make a person a good man nor disbelief in his existence make him a bad man. I have known more saint-like people among agnostics than I have among God-fearing believers. In the personal religion I expound there is no place for God.
12/7/1992
S
ome months ago I quoted an English lady friend, Cedra Castellaine, about the continuing pursuit of God. He is said to be omnipresent but no one has seen Him; religious teachers bamboozle us by asking us to look within ourselves and we will find Him in our hearts. People like me don’t know how to look within ourselves and therefore cannot find Him. They say He is the creator of the cosmos. When we ask them who created Him? They reply, no one. He created Himself. Now, that does not make sense as nothing is created by itself: that is the inexorable law of cause and effect.
Cedra Castellaine has written to me again saying that “an epidemic of God has broken out in the West and even the most rigorous of scientists are tracking God.” With her letter she enclosed a clipping from a newspaper about Professor Paul Davies who was awarded the Templeton Prize of £650,000 for his book
The Mind of God
for furthering religious understanding. The article is entitled
Getting to Grips with God: Science and the Superbeing.
Davies writes:
“Historically science has been regarded as a demoralizing and alienating influence, implying a majestic but pointless universe. But an increasing number of scientists are drawing very different conclusions from their discoveries.”
He goes on to exhort people to discard primitive religious concepts:
“In the popular imagination, God is a sort of cosmic magician who sits somewhere beyond the sky and from time to time works miracles. As a scientist, I find the very notion of miracles repugnant, while the concept of God who is just another force at work in the universe, whimsically moving atoms about, strikes me as childish. I would rather suppose that the laws of physics operate unfailingly throughout the physical world.”
How then did the universe come into existence? Was it with the Big Bang? What was there before the Big Bang? Who created the Big Bang? No answers. However, scientists are in hot pursuit. Einstein gave convincing proof that time is an integral part of the physical world and can be manipulated in a laboratory by motion and gravitation. But theologians put God beyond this. He is
Akaal.
At some point of research, scientists also throw up their hands, Davies writes: “Many scientists are content to accept the order in nature as a package of marvels that just happen to exist. Those like myself, who are intrigued to know where the laws of physics come from are impressed by a key fact. The laws do not have to be what they are; they could have been otherwise. Moreover the actual laws seem to be special in several respects. For example, not only do they permit the universe to originate spontaneously from nothing, they also permit it to self-organize and self-complexity to the point where life and consciousness emerge, including sentient beings who can understand the working of nature through science and reflect on its meaning.”
Davies concludes: “The word God means so many different things to different people that I am loath to use it. When I do, it is in the sense of the rational ground that underpins physical reality. Used in this way, God is not a person, but a timeless abstract principle that implies something like meaning or purpose behind physical existence. It is my impression that many modern theologians have in mind something very similar.”
Are we any closer to finding God? No. I take shelter behind the Urdu couplet:
Too dil mein to aataa hai
Samajh mein nahin aata
Bas jaa gayaa teyree pahchaan yahee hai.
(I have you in my heart
But do not comprehend you,
Maybe that is the best way of knowing you.)
22/7/1995
W
e are told that more things are wrought by prayer than the world dreams of. Indeed, if it be so, why has its power never been explained? Osho Rajneesh has his own unique explanation (with which I concur).
In a compilation of some of his sermons
Walking in Zen, Sitting in Zen,
he says: “It is such a stupid world! Mohammedans pray in Arabic, which they don’t understand; Hindus pray in Sanskrit, which they don’t understand; and now Buddhists pray in Pali, which they don’t understand – for the simple reason that priests have been very much insistent on keeping the dead language because those prayers are very poor if they are translated into the language which you understand. You will be at a loss – you will not be able to see what there is to pray in them; they will lose all the mystery. The mystery is because you don’t understand them. Hence Latin, Greek, Arabic, Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit – dead languages which nobody understands any more. Priests go on insisting that prayers should be in those dead languages.
“You are saying something the meaning of which is not known to you. What kind of prayer is that? To whom are you addressing it? You don’t know anything about god. And what you are saying is not arising out of your heart, you are just being a gramophone record – His Master’s Voice.”
2/2/2002
F
rom reasons unknown, and results unverified, every religious scripture has passages which its followers endow with magic powers of healing or protection against harm. Such passages then gain importance in ritual, get inscribed on tablets, amulets and are recited in moments of crisis. We have a memorable example in a beautiful psalm: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul; he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”