The futility of our elaborate plannings became evident when this Deepawali, as I reached home, I received the news of an untimely death of someone I knew. It was a road accident – the usual case of a truck driver assuming the road to be his dominion.
Man proposes, God disposes. To me it appears to be a quote off The Dark Knight peppered with subtlety: “I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.” Probably God thinks on the same lines as The Joker: “Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair!”
Talking of God, I remember reading somewhere: most animals have been gifted with just a basic level of memory. They rely more on their instincts. This means that some time after a herd of deer has been hunted and a member killed and consumed, the survivors forget all about the incident. This actually helps them survive. They don’t live under the constant shadow of death and yet are wary of their predators owing to their instincts. (Imagine what would happen to your appetite, if you knew you were soon going to turn into somebody else’s morsel.) The Maker does have a sense of humor and he gave a lot of thought to this world in its making. He didn’t give humans a short-term memory probably because we are meant to do a lot more than just surviving (It’s a different issue altogether that some of us still choose to do just that.). But he gives them hope beyond reason and the ability to move on.
Life is fragile, snuffed out in an instant. Still, with all the inevitability of death and the evanescence of life, it is the latter that is the stronger element of the two and has been cherished since the forging of this world. And beneath all this randomness of the post there is an order now in my thoughts and I am glad… I live!
