Sunday 9 August, 2009

fair play or chance ..?

Ever since I was child I have heard elders say that this universe is just. They said that deeds are like boomerang, though not so flamboyantly, they do come back to you soon or later. Good deeds are rewarded and evil punished, well I don’t know what happens to the grey area. If you plot evil you will have to bear the brunt of it someday. They said it with all the conviction that there is, that the all mighty upstairs has a log book (maybe he uses SAP now) to keep track of our white, black and grey deeds. “Nothing goes unnoticed, my child. The Lord is watching you every second”, was what my second grade school teacher had told me. As a naive young boy I believed in everything they told me, partly because I thought so too and mostly because they believed so strongly in it.

For fair portion of my life I have believed in it and to a great extent I still do...

But lately another chain of thought has been culminating in my mind; what if this is all bull-s**t and there isn’t anyone who one really keeps scores. I have never really cared if my scores were kept by ‘Bharma’ or by a ‘Flying Spaghetti Monster’ (http://www.venganza.org/), but always believed that scores were like a provident fund, you can en-cash someday. But what if instead of a balancing algorithm it’s a random number generating function. We speak of a just and fair world and yet accept all the despicable acts of violence, calamities, rape and death everyday as if it were somehow a part of that balancing act. A six year old died in a car accident, her clock stopped ticking and we were sad :’(… chooo chweet. I do not believe that in the 2190 days she lived, she had enough time to gauge how the world works leave aside the possibility of her committing any act as atrocious as to receive a death penalty. And then we say, ‘ God works in mysterious ways ’. Well he sure does.
The point I am trying to put forward here is that maybe it is all a matter of chance, more like a dice rolled than balancing weights. When you flip a coin or roll a dice you just hope to get you desire and leave the rest to fate. The child dying example is only the tip of the ice berg, we find numerous examples everyday depicting how perfectly innocent people were sacrificed to this game of chance and nobody questioned the log keeper.
But if chance is all that prevails then why put up a facade of fairness and boomerang analogies. Probably because these analogies have a much higher purpose to serve. When an individual fears in the power of log book he thinks twice before committing a crime. I man driven by lust think a million times before he commits hideous acts which degrade the human nature. His sense of morality and fairness help him overcome his unrestrained animal instincts to violate another human being. He believes that he will have to face a similar situation someday and redemption will be upon him that day.
Now imagine a man who fears no one, he believes in chance. He can go cheat, swindle, kill and still walk free because he will get convicted based only on chance. There is no stopping such a man. And looking at the justice system, his beliefs may turn out to be true as well. But I am not talking about the police convicting him; I am talking about the universe making him back based on the log kept upstairs. If people stop believing in the log keeper, there will utter chaos in this world and morality will lose its meaning in due time. Our sense of right and wrong will soon be hazy and everything will merge into one big grey area for which no one accountable.
So, as much as I hate to believe and see people believe in the idea of a log keeper, I think it is for the best that our rational mind has chosen something as irrational as morality than the rational nature of chance…