We are so used to watching the hero and villain duke it out on screen and cheering for CSK vs RCB on twitter that we have developed no other means of conflict resolution whatsoever. We are so used to being just the audience to performances that we view even war through the same goggles. The movie ends, the match gets over and the participants and the audience return to their normal lives. War is no movie and we are no mere audience in this scenario.
I did not notice the fish tank in the background until much later when I was going through the photos we took that night and this was inadvertently caught in one corner. The absurdity initially did make me chuckle as I thought to myself what the fish must feel like stuck behind a glass pane and having to watch other dead fish day in and day out. Is it sad? Is it glad that no one’s killed it yet? However, the current scene in India with the back and forth strikes at the Line of control and the whole country praising war through memes on social media (So much 21st century in one sentence, amirite?), it got me thinking – We are all that fish silently watching other fish die from behind glass panes we so conveniently carry in our palms.
The question of whether God exists – if there is a supreme consciousness behind the cosmos – primarily belongs to the collective realm of human thought and is in no way exclusive to religion. Early man looking at the stars, modern physicists working on the unified field theory and your best friend with their eyes closed right before taking an exam are all, in one way or the other, trying to figure out God. One uses thought and inquisition, or philosophy, one uses sequential logic and tangible data, or science and one uses faith and will, or religion. There are countless such ways to ponder over this very fundamental question of what was there before everything and man vehemently continues to do so using every tool at his disposal with philosophy, religion and science being the most prominent. At least, most men are. The pioneers of religion – one of the most subjective of these tools, seem extremely content with their answers in spite of having multiple contradicting theories and have deemed this search complete. They seem to be quite impatient people who do not want to wait for the others to catch up but rather want them to quit their pursuits as well since after all, the answer is already here. While God may or may not exist, organised religion most definitely does. Making things worse, it’s infiltrating the ranks of government and things are not going so well.
What fourth wall ?! 