Skip to main content

When God Said Cheers




Anurag Kashyap’s play, When God Said Cheers, was staged in Delhi recently.  Reading about it in the Metro supplement of today’s Hindu newspaper [14 Feb], I wondered why God couldn’t actually be a person with some sense of humour.

All the gods I know are dreadful bores.  They are too grumpy, or jealous, or bloodthirsty.  I’d love a God who would share a drink with me in the evening and engage me in a light-hearted conversation peppered with occasional bouts of laughter.  I’m sure God will burst into laughter when we discuss his priests and their religions.  I can imagine the tears that God will try to hide behind the whisky glass when we will discuss His believers killing other people in His name.

And God will tell me a parable:

In one of Hitler’s concentration camps, a group of Jews put Yahweh on trial.  They charged him with cruelty and betrayal.  There was nothing that could be offered as a defence for Yahweh.  No extenuating circumstances.  No benefit of doubt.  Yahweh was guilty indeed. He deserved death as punishment.  The Rabbi pronounced the verdict.  Then he looked up and said, “The trial is over; it’s time for the evening prayers.”*

And God will laugh raising the whisky glass to his thin lips.

And I will join the laughter forgetting my environment.  The Hegemon will come hearing the laughter, God’s and mine.

“Don’t you know that you’re living in a sacred place, a temple of the goddess of knowledge?  How can you laugh...?  Oh, I see, you’re not only laughing but drinking too.  Such shameless immorality!”  The Hegemon will pronounce the verdict.  I’ll lose my job.  So, dear God, I can’t share a drink with you yet much as I would love to hear you say ‘cheers’ with a twinkle in your eyes.


Notes

* This story is borrowed from Karen Armstrong’s book, A History of God.

Hegemon (from Greek root which means leader, guide, commander, chief): one who exercises hegemony

Comments

  1. How true! Having listened to Kathas (holy stories) during my childhood recited to propitiate different deities, the least sacrilegious conclusion that I could arrive at was that God is goddamned blackmailer. You miss a ritual and you are absolutely destroyed! No, I am not an atheist but I have made my own peace with the God. Wish you well in your drinking rendezvous with God.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Uma, I'm not an atheist, either, in spite of my knowledge that there is no God of the type that religions teach. The God I visualise is the same as the one I've portrayed here: my own creation. I create God for my psychological consolation. My God has a profound sense of humour. He is humane enough to share a drink with me. He is intelligent enough to understand that greed, jealousy, and many other human weaknesses create more problems than a drink and pleasant companionship.

      Delete
  2. No matter how grumpy etc. God is, He apparently makes for good company for billions of people. Unfortunately, you are not one of them!

    RE

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. True, Raghuram, I'm not one of them. But I make God give me good company because my God is my own creation. An alter ego - without being presumptuous.

      Delete
  3. There are countless others for whom God and religions are 'opiums'...

    But if u really want to share a drink with God, u r welcome to Thane (Mumbai). I am always available. I have been playing God to so many I don't mind bending my back forwards once more; just for old times' sake in PGT Hostel in Shillong and then in other 'havelis' while u were penning articles for Shillong Times.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'll be in Thane next summer, thanks for the invitation. We can indulge our nostalgia.

      Delete
  4. I didn't really get the joke but I don't know much about the context either. The rest of it, I absolutely loved and could relate to. In the last year and a half, I have started leaning towards the same concept where you say "I'm not an atheist, either, in spite of my knowledge that there is no God of the type that religions teach. The God I visualise is the same as the one I've portrayed here: my own creation. I create God for my psychological consolation. ". The problem with teachings about God are just like human problems, where you set something up so high on a pedestal that the distant it is, the better off you are. Humans when strangers offer more comfort. But when you know them up close, you see faults. We accept humans with faults but we aren't allowed to see God that way. And then, if we do, I guess God becomes somewhat human and is no longer a God then! I think I am more comfortable with the idea of God rather than specific Gods and Goddesses from teachings of various religions!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for your wonderful opinion.

      The joke, in short, is: "God is dead, Long live God!"

      A friend of mine sent me the following message after he read this blog: "When I read the story of Yahweh on trial, in the camp, I was reminded of a humorous remark by karl Marx on the Germans. He said that the Germans, as a nation, could not launch a revolution, unlike the French, because, if they went in all their anger and protest, to picket and blast a railway station, first thing they would do is to stand in queue and purchase the platform tickets."

      The only God that makes any genuine sense will be the one each one of us discovers for ourselves within ourselves. Mahatma Gandhi said the same thing when he said his Rama was not the Rama of the epics...

      Delete
  5. Hi sir, Nice post, i came to know u r working in radha swamy satsang. one of my collegue also working in that, but in hyderabad.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Satish, I work as a teacher in a school that has recently been handed over by its real owner, Mr Sitaram Jindal, to the Satsang. My employer keeps changing according to the whims and fancies of the owner of the school!

      Delete
  6. Very well written. Your blog reminded me the way John Lennon has described God in one of his songs "God is a concept with which we measure our pain".......

    ReplyDelete
  7. Thank you for adding yet another dimension to this blog. God is a good palliative.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

Two Women and Their Frustrations

Illustration by Gemini AI Nora and Millie are two unforgettable women in literature. Both are frustrated with their married life, though Nora’s frustration is a late experience. How they deal with their personal situations is worth a deep study. One redeems herself while the other destroys herself as well as her husband. Nora is the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House , and Millie is her counterpart in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version . [The links take you to the respective text.] Personal frustration leads one to growth into an enlightened selfhood while it embitters the other. Nora’s story is emancipatory and Millie’s is destructive. Nora questions patriarchal oppression and liberates herself from it with equanimity, while Millie is trapped in a meaningless relationship. Since I have summarised these plays in earlier posts, now I’m moving on to a discussion on the enlightening contrasts between these two characters. If you’re interested in the plot ...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...