Skip to main content

Good Friday and Some Arithmetic


Two and two is not always equal to four, my young friend Tony says. 2 + 2 4, he reasserts. Tony doesn’t think linearly though his thinking has the precision of mathematical logic.

See these two, Tony offers an illustration, Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. Then add another 2 to them, Ambani and Adani. What do you get?

I smile in answer. It’s dangerous to answer Tony verbally.

Now, Tony continues, let’s take two beggars from the street. And then add you and me, another two, to them. What do you get?

Tony goes on with more arithmetic because he thinks I didn’t get it.

(Modi + Shah) + (Ambani + Adani) = 4 persons

(Beggar 1 + Beggar 2) + (You + I) = 4 persons

Is the first 4 equal to the second 4?

Today is Good Friday. Good Fridays are sad because they are about the victory of vicious political power over simple goodness. Just a few days back, on what’s known as Palm Sunday among Christians, Jesus was led like a hero to Jerusalem, a political fulcrum in those days, by a huge crowd of people who imagined that he was their redeemer. Those same people gathered a few days later outside governor Pilate’s palace demanding the crucifixion of Jesus.

People sing hosana to you today and demand your death tomorrow. Lesson umber one of Good Friday.

What changed the people’s attitude to Jesus? Religion + politics. The religious priests like Annas and Caiaphas hated Jesus because he was undermining their religion by making it humane instead of subhumanly ritualistic. The power that the priests enjoyed over the faithful as well as the money that came through that power would go with the wind if people really started taking Jesus seriously.

Every genuine teacher is a threat to those in power. Lesson number two of Good Friday.

The priests changed the mindset of the people as soon as they saw Jesus’ increasing influence on them. So the shouts of Hosanas transmogrified into cries for crucifixion.

It is easy to hoodwink the masses with new stories and histories. Lesson number three of Good Friday.

Give the masses new slogans and they will hunt your enemies with the zeal of frenetic militants. One of the easiest ways of eliminating certain people is to project them as enemies of some glorified entity like nation or religion. Jesus was projected as both: an enemy of political rulers and of God.

Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus of the Sanhedrin will become powerless in front of the frenzy of the masses. They can only bury Jesus now.

Goodness dies again and again because of the leaders of the masses. Lesson number four of Good Friday.

(Joseph + Nicodemus) + (Tony + I) = 4

(Annas + Caiaphas) + (Pilate + Herod) = 4

One 4 Another 4. Lesson number five of Good Friday.

 

 

Comments

  1. Hari Om
    One of the best arithmetic examples I have ever seen 😉 Blessed Easter to you and your good wife, dear blogpal. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you, Yam. Wish you too the joys and blessings of Easter.

      Delete
  2. Great Arithmetic, of Alternative Possibilities, beyond the TINA Syndrome. Building Little Pockets of Resistance. Why don't you try s Trigonometry of Holy Saturday. People speak of Good Fridays and Easters. But not of Holy Saturdays. Take my challenge and be at it tonight, in the quiet of Arikuzha night.


    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for the challenge. Let me contemplate. Tangents aren't easy to manage.

      Delete
  3. What's sad is we never actually learned that lesson, did we? We're still doing the same thing over and over and over again.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's how the species is, a big blunder of evolution!

      Delete
  4. Sharing this one. Very aptly put.

    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...

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...