Skip to main content

Karma



It is rather hard to believe that you get rewarded according to your deeds when you live in a world in which the wicked flourish and the righteous perish. You see mass murderers mount high pedestals and preach dharma to the people. Swindlers are winners and the honest lose out pathetically in the rat race that life has been converted into.

There is no morality or dharma in the universe. The planets may follow their orbits; that is gravity, not dharma. The stars shine; that’s thermodynamics, not moral benevolence. That world of stars and planets can also buffet you with storms and other cataclysms. We can take such cataclysms as punishments for our misdeeds: punishment from gods or the universe itself. That is a matter of belief.

In the world of belief, just anything is possible. Angels can become demons and vice-versa. That is the power of belief. Do you know about people like Joan of Arc who were burnt at the stake as the foulest heretics and then later were declared saints? Both the burning and the apotheosis were done by the same believers.

That is karma. You get burnt and then you get deified. Or you get burnt and you get demonised. It depends on who is in power. Look at Mahatma Gandhi. He has become a villain now. His karma has not left him even decades after death. Think of Nehru: he is still carrying the burden of all the evils that plague his nation years after his death.  His karma. Karma is as vindictive as its bigoted advocates.

So, am I saying that you needn’t do good things? No, not at all. That’s just mediocre thinking. The mediocre people assume that they must get just rewards for whatever they do. Such people kill other people in order to prove that they are more powerful. Most of our ancient kings were such mediocre people.

Intelligent people understand that doing good is their obligation. Obligation to whom? To themselves. Not to any gods or ideologies. Their hearts are restless until they follow their real, deeper instincts and those instincts tell them to do good. Their intelligence tells them that when each one of us starts doing good, the world becomes a beautiful place, a heaven on earth. It is not for any god’s sake that we must do good; it is for our own sakes. That is our real obligation. Karma will be good to everyone if we all understand that.


Comments

  1. wingsApril 14, 2019 at 9:47 PM

    (Oops! Where's the comment I posted this morning?.....)

    The fate of some of the people mentioned here has deeper implications. It is realised through wisdom and inner growth rather than understood through arguements at the factual level on an explicit plane.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 14, 2019 at 10:11 PM

      The tragedy is those people will never learn. They will end up with z plus security cordon paid by us.

      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
47 comments
Read more

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...
2 comments
Read more

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...
18 comments
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more

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. ...
16 comments
Read more