Skip to main content

End of the World

Painting by Adolph Hiremy Hirschl

I grew up listening to a lot of stories about the imminent end of the world.  Jesus spoke pretty much about it and we listened to those biblical verses in the church often enough.  The romantic dreamer in Jesus conjured up a vivid image of “the Son of Man” coming in his glory on the final judgment day, escorted by all the angels.  In that glorious vision, God is a King ensconced on a glittering throne.  The entire mankind will assemble before him.  No one is given a choice, of course.  The King will weigh the virtues and sins of each person and accordingly assign heaven or hell.

It was my childish fancy that the gala event would come soon and I would escape from the misery of life on the earth.  I don’t remember whether I gloated about sitting in heaven and smirking at all the sinners burning in hell. 

As I grew up I realised that Jesus had imagined all those things long ago and nothing happened in all those 2000 years.  In my own little lifetime I came across many other prophets who smugly predicted the end of the world.  Some of them became fabulously wealthy as many people set store by the prophecy and donated their wealth hoping to secure seats in heaven.

I’m now reading a novel, The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber, which is set on an alien planet that is being domesticated by the Americans who hope to sell seats to the privileged rich on the earth as the planet is nearing its end.  [My review of the novel will appear in this space tomorrow.]  It is typical of Americans to think of a heaven whose seats will be sold commercially.  They have not left anything more on the earth to be commercialised.

The novel made me ask a question to myself: would I like to buy a seat in that American heaven?  I scorned myself for asking that question.  My childish longing for Jesus’ heaven was less ridiculous. 

What if the world ends?  Nothing, I guess.  I escape from what the Buddha called a misery, life’s misery.  The Buddha wasn’t romantic enough like Jesus to imagine some fantastic heaven up there.  He was profoundly practical to understand that existence was the biggest pain.  He hated existence.  Would he have welcomed the end of the world gleefully?  I can’t imagine the Buddha smiling anyway, even at the prospective end of the world. 

But I prefer the Buddha to Jesus, notwithstanding the fecundity of the latter’s imagination.


Comments

  1. G. VarkeyFebruary 2, 2018 at 9:22 PM

    What Jesus said is true because His calendar is different than ours. Our 1000 years is just like a day to Him ( ref: 2 Peter 3: 8,9 ). The end will come, but that's not the end, there is life after death. Read the following:
    https://www.keepbelieving.com/sermon/death-is-not-the-end-of-our-story/
    Good wishes!

    ReplyDelete
  2. ARFebruary 6, 2018 at 2:33 PM

    I would recommend you to watch a movie called man from Earth. Its available on YouTube.
    You will surely enjoy it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. ARFebruary 6, 2018 at 2:34 PM

    If possible write an article about it..

    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
47 comments
Read more

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...
18 comments
Read more

The Vegetarian

Book Review Title: The Vegetarian Author: Han Kang Translator: Deborah Smith [from Korean] Publisher: Granta, London, 2018 Pages: 183 Insanity can provide infinite opportunities to a novelist. The protagonist of Nobel laureate Han Kang’s Booker-winner novel, The Vegetarian , thinks of herself as a tree. One can argue with ample logic and conviction that trees are far better than humans. “Trees are like brothers and sisters,” Yeong-hye, the protagonist, says. She identifies herself with the trees and turns vegetarian one day. Worse, she gives up all food eventually. Of course, she ends up in a mental hospital. The Vegetarian tells Yeong-hye’s tragic story on the surface. Below that surface, it raises too many questions that leave us pondering deeply. What does it mean to be human? Must humanity always entail violence? Is madness a form of truth, a more profound truth than sanity’s wisdom? In the disturbing world of this novel, trees represent peace, stillness, and nonviol...
6 comments
Read more

The RSS does not exist

An organisation that has 80,000 branches in India does not exist legally in any document. This is the cover story of The Caravan this month. By the way, The Caravan is one of the very few publications that still continues to exist in spite of being overtly critical of Narendra Modi and his Sangh Parivar. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is not registered as an organisation under any of the usual Indian registration laws such as the Societies Registration Act or as a trust or company. It functions as an unregistered voluntary organisation, though it is arguably the largest public organisation in the country. This situation makes the organisation absolutely unaccountable to anyone, argues The Caravan . The RSS is not legally required to file annual returns to the Tax department or disclose its financial details publicly though it deals with thousands of crores of rupees every year especially after Modi became the Prime Minister of the country. The membership of the organisat...
12 comments
Read more

No Problems Only Opportunities

You’ve probably heard this joke. A young man walked into his office one morning and found a beautiful young lady sitting in his chair. He called the MD and said, “Sir, I have a problem.” The MD replied, “Don’t you know our company’s motto, young man? No Problems, Only Opportunities .” When Suchita of The Blogchatter sent me a mail with the topic of this week’s blog hop –  - the first thing that came to my mind was the above joke. I know many people – too many, in fact – who went through terrible problems. My own life was a series of problems in none of which was there the consolation of any beautiful woman. One essential lesson I learnt from life is that life is a series of problems. You solve one and then arises the next one. Now I have reached an age when problems are no more problems: they are life itself. If you ask me what was the biggest problem I ever dealt with, it was my last years in Shillong. I was a lecturer in a college drawing a fat salary stipulated by the U...
13 comments
Read more