If God is with you

Courtesy Here

If God is with you, you needn’t fear anything. I was taught that in my childhood. That was a paraphrase of what Saint Paul wrote to Romans (8:31): “If God is for us, who can be against us?”

I was reminded of that when I read about Madho Sing II, King of Jaipur, this afternoon. Madho Singh received an invitation to the coronation ceremony of King Edward VII (1902). But good Hindus don’t travel across the ocean. Crossing the ocean meant mingling with all sorts of people and thus losing your racial and caste supremacy or purity or whatever.

But Madho Singh wanted to attend the coronation if only to please King Edward. Also to see London along with his entire family. Find a solution, he ordered the royal priests. After all, when the problem is related to your religion, the priests are the right people to find the solution. And find they did.

Tell the people of the country that their favourite god Sri Gopalji wishes to visit England. Gods have no canonical barriers. The rules and rituals are for the faithful, not for the deity. Gods can travel anywhere. But God Gopalji can’t travel by himself. He has to be carried across the ocean. Who but the King is the right person for that?

And thus Madho Singh II visited London and attended Edward II’s coronation along with his entire family. An idol of Gopalji always stood upright in Madho Singh’s hands wherever he went in England. The God was doing the visiting; the king was merely his transporter.

The royal priests also accompanied the king and his entourage. Their ship was carrying seventy tonnes of Ganga-jal for the ritualistic purification ceremonies which were carried out at regular and not-so-regular intervals. The ship had already been cleansed with Ganga-jal of all possible impurities and contaminations from the ocean and the lands beyond the waters.

God Gopalji saved King Madho Singh from cultural and caste contaminations.

In Salman Rushdie’s novel Satanic Verses, there is a scene in which the prophet’s youngest wife teases him saying that the real genius of the prophet lay in inventing a God who danced to his tunes. When the prophet wanted to marry again (and again), he made his God utter appropriate rules each time. God decided everything, in fact, not the prophet. Only, God’s decisions happened to be in concordance with the prophets likes and dislikes. That’s just coincidence.

In physics, there’s something called the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) Paradox and Quantum Entanglement. It is about two entangled particles. When two such particles are measured, their states appear to be ‘coincidently’ correlated, even when they are separated by vast distances. Einstein himself said there was something spooky about that.

There is a lot that’s spooky about the coincidences between Gods and their devotees, especially the politically powerful devotees. I’m sure numerous examples are arising in your mind right now from contemporary Indian politics.