Skip to main content

Brownian Motion and Karma


Fiction

The first thing that greeted Govinda as he stepped out of home early in the morning was a spider web which stood right at the entrance to his house.  He had come out, as usual every morning, to pick up the newspaper that the delivery man would throw into the yard from the road.

The spider web brought out the philosopher in Govinda.  His mind went on a contemplation trip. 

Why did nature create spiders?  Just to make webs and trap insects.  Insects are created to be trapped in spider webs. What a fate!  What a futile life!  To eat and to be eaten.  And reproduce.  How redundant are these creatures?  Govinda wondered.  How redundant is life itself by and large?

He thought of people.  Most people meant nothing to him: like the passengers who travelled in the same compartment in a metro train, for example.  They just jostle us along: into the compartment at one station and then out of it at another. And then we go on.  Jostling.  The jostling becomes more personal at the workplace.  More intimidating.  Like the spider and the insects.  The boss and the staff.  Among the staff, there are those who are close to the boss on the one side and those who don’t know how to get close on the other.  Jostle becomes hassle. The push eventually comes to shove and the spiders win.

Govinda had once asked Karunasagar Guru about the futility of such a life.  “Life is an illusion,” explained the Guru.  “The result of our karma.  The self is the only reality and it is one with the infinite.  Aham Brahmasmi.  Those who don’t attain that level of realisation are destined to be reborn.  As spiders, insects, anything according to their karma.”

“But spiders eventually win, don’t they?” Govinda asked.

“When spiders are themselves illusions, maya, what does victory mean?” answered the Guru.  “Maybe, such victories necessitate the incarnation of God to put an end to the mounting evil.  Sambhavami yuge yuge.”

Govinda never liked that idea.  Even those gods who incarnated to put an end to evil were themselves deceptive and malicious.  He could never justify many of the things that Krishna, the god of Karunasagar Guru, did.  He perpetrated much duplicity during the Kurukshetra war.

“Bindaas!”  Leslie Pereira would say.  Leslie was a recent addition in Govinda’s office.  He loved music, wine and women.  In that order.  “Never in excess,” he would warn, “unless you want to be knocked out of the Brownian motion.”


Life is nothing but the Brownian motion.  That was Leslie Pereira’s philosophy. Jostle and hassle.  Push and shove.  Some win and some lose.  Naturally.  But the motion goes on.  Inexorably.  Relentlessly.  Without any purpose other than the fun in the push and the shove.

Govinda was awakened from his contemplation.  The newspaper was still lying in the yard. 

He stood before the spider web that stood between him and the newspaper.  “Karma.  Brownian motion.”  He muttered to himself as he cut the anchor threads of the spider web.

The spider became alert.  It moved a little and then stopped.  Even the spider knows how far a push can go to become a shove.  It retreated. 






Comments

  1. You write really interesting content. Lovely story. I can relate to it so much in my everyday life. Yes life moves on no matter what :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks. Look forward to more of your presence here.

      Delete
  2. Interestingly, spiders and ants teach much to little kids. The last bit was a little cruel though - haven't heard before of Brownian motion before - guess that random events are not so gentle 🙂

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That last bit is not really cruel, Sunaina. The character does not kill the spider, he only cuts off the web which blocks his way. That's the 'way' of the world, isn't it?

      Random events are not at all gentle most often. One of my beloved writers, Albert Camus, saw the universe as hostile.

      Delete
    2. Cruel enough for me - cutting the path, blocking the way, killing the creation - way of the world yes, but not a good way really.....:)

      Delete

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

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

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...