Keep Walking

So me'z back after a pretty long hiatus.
The truth is I’ve never had such a hectic period in my life as I had in these 2 months. 15 hour workdays for 2 weeks at a stretch are no jokes, yet when you come to know that all this hard work might not cause the least bit of change in either your appraisal ratings or your onsite chances(hence your remuneration), it does cause a little disappointment. To top it all, you’re supposedly given a paltry 100$ reward (!) for all your efforts while your colleagues who haven’t contributed 5 % of what you’ve done, are given 800$ just because they’re your so called ‘seniors’!
Duh, this world reeks of politics. Sometimes it’s disheartening to see the lengths to which some people would go to in order to serve their purpose. Ethics and morals seem to have ceased to exist anymore. I sometimes even wonder if these people have ever had something called conscience in them at any point of time, coz I bet if they did, they wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.
But then sensibility demands that one takes it all as just another lesson of life, and as Johnnie Walker says…”Keep Walking”.

I’m reading Dan Brown’s ‘Angels and Demons’ this week, and I’ve been really taken aback by this 1 particular dialogue that takes place between the leading characters in the book, Robert Langdon (the main protagonist who is a Harvard professor of religious iconology) and Vittoria Vetra (a pretty Italian scientist).
Vittoria: Do you believe in God?
Langdon: A spiritual conundrum. Well, I want to believe. (The intellectual suspension of disbelief that was imperative if one were truly going to believe had always proved to be too big an obstacle for his academic mind)
Vittoria: So why don’t you?
Langdon: Having faith requires leaps of faith, cerebral acceptance of miracles- immaculate conceptions and divine interventions. And then there are the codes of conduct. The Bible, The Koran, Buddhist scripture… they all carry similar requirements – and similar penalties. They claim that if I don’t live by a specific code I will go to hell. I can’t imagine a God who would rule that way.
Vittoria: Mr. Langdon, I did not ask if you believe what Man says about God. I asked if you believe in God. There is a difference. Holy scripture is stories….legends and history of man’s quest to understand his own need for meaning. I’m not asking you to pass judgment on literature. I’m asking if you believe in God. When you lie out under the stars, do you sense the divine? Do you feel in your gut that you’re staring up at the work of God’s hand?

Langdon: Well, as a scientist and the daughter of a priest, what do you think of religion?
Vittoria: Religion is like a language or dress. We gravitate towards the practices with which we were raised. In the end, though, we are all proclaiming the same thing. That life has meaning. That we are grateful for the power that created us.


Hmmmm….now that’s surely some food for thought! I’ve always been fascinated with theological history myself and have always been perplexed at why do people have to kill each other over something that has a universally common goal….to acknowledge and thank the higher power that created us. Be it the persecution of early Christians by the Jews, or the bloody massacres of entire villages of Jews and Muslims by the Christian Crusaders who were encouraged by the Roman Catholic church for over 400 years, or the holy war called 'Jehad' started by followers of Muhammad which called for the slaying of all 'Qafirs' or Infidels as the holy duty of every devout Muslim, and which continues to this day, or be it the mindless killings of Muslims in Gujarat by Hindu fanatics justifying it as revenge for the Godhra massacre; all of them are equally deplorable barbaric acts of a few twisted minds who bring a bad name to their entire communities. These people obviously miss the bigger picture, that all of them have been created by the same higher power which can never endorse the destruction of one part of it's creation by another.

Science and Religion have always externally been like the opposite sides of the same coin, with 1 using rationale and reasoning as the basis of all theories, and the other relying on faith, legends and beliefs to try and explain the workings of this world. Yet, these 2 cornerstones of human understanding do often come at crossroads where the postulates of 1 vindicates those of the other.

Every major religion agrees to the basic law popularly known as Karma, - “As you sow, so shall you reap”, “What goes around, comes around” etc. etc.
Newton’s 3rd Law is eerily similar in it’s proclamation – “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”.

Even science fails to explain the cause of the “Big Bang”, the cosmic explosion out of a miniscule subatomic particle, out of which this entire universe is supposed to be made of. Who or what caused that explosion and what was there before it, remains unanswered.

“Let there be Light”

E = mc^2

Energy and Mass are interconvertible. - Einstein

Your body is transient, only the soul is permanent. - Ancient Hindu saying