Nowadays, with all the time in my retired world coupled with the ‘stay at home’ order, I am sitting around and thinking of Covid-19 (what else?). And in my crazy mind with its penchant for thinking ‘outside the box’, I suddenly felt a renewed acceptance of the ALMIGHTY. Please note that I did not say ‘God the Merciful’ or ‘Our Loving Father’. What I am getting at is the realization of total helplessness on our part. And that, when we were sailing in ‘super-confidence’. We felt we could do it all – everything was within our powers. We could study the minute details of our Universe sitting at home. We can send and receive messages within seconds. We could diagnose and treat numerous hitherto untreatable diseases often without invasive surgeries. Our missiles could hit specific targets on the other side of the world with remarkable accuracy. With all this, who needs a GOD?
Then comes this humbling experience, the Covid-19 pandemic. We are far from sure how it started; there is no definite consensus on it yet. But what is more disturbing is that we, with our pools of knowledge, have little verifiable knowledge about how long the menace is going to last or if and when a sure-shot cure for it will be discovered. We cannot even guarantee that it is not going to come back in the near future (assuming of course that the menace will abate some time in the near future). My mind does not want to accommodate that this monumental menace could be caused just by chance, a quirk of statistics. I thus submit to the existence of an omnipotent entity, the Almighty. Can it be synonymous with the God of our popular perception, who is also associated with an all-embracing benevolence for his supposed creation? In my limited mind, I cannot see any redeeming features in this pandemic, however much I try. Even when it ends or significantly abates itself, it will leave huge destruction on its wake, which will likely take a long time to recover, if ever. All this prevents me from associating this all-powerful Almighty with our popular visions of a benevolent, merciful God, the epitome of justice, much as I try. I wonder if my empty mind – the Devil’s workshop – is kicking itself into this convoluted thought process.
The pandemic has thrown us all on the same boat – people from all corners of the globe and all walks of life. In particular, it has made no distinction between the ardent believers and the confirmed atheists and agnostics. The believers are praying to their chosen deities in right earnest. They want to believe that it is another of the periodic mega-catastrophes like the plagues and the famines and it will blow over. Over the past week, I listened to several swamis of the Ramakrishna Mission, who talked about abandoning fear and resorting to faith, citing slokas from our ancient scriptures. My mind was assuaged for brief periods, but it came back again to where it was. I just could not see the end of the tunnel. And even if there was one, there are warnings that another tunnel will likely follow soon. I do not see our benevolent God jumping in and coming to our rescue. Now, what about our agnostic and atheist counterparts? They often seem to wear their belief on their shoulders as badges of honor, as a testament to their intellectual superiority. I wonder where they are now. Are they still steadfast in their belief that this is another quirk of statistics that will blow over? Or are they looking for any answers like me?
Finally, I can perhaps be a bit thankful to this Almighty; it may have slipped through his consciousness, assuming he has one. It is a broad area of information and communications technology. So much of ‘normal’ life can still go on with the telephones and computers. Thanks to the “work from home’, the online services, the telephones helping us communicate the world over with our near and dear ones, and the rest, we have been spared of a much greater gloom. I dread to imagine what it would have been like if our Almighty had moved this pandemic up by just twenty or thirty years. Where would we be now without our telephones and computers? Our world would have been in much greater disarray. A positive thinker will surely rejoice at this little bit of silver lining in the otherwise heavy dark clouds