HAVE YOU MET GOD LATELY?

DID GOD COME TO IIT CHENNAI?

1. It happened at the gift shop at IIT Chennai a couple of days ago. I was chatting with a friend when he met a lady with whom he started talking in the Oriya language. Neither of them knew that I too could speak fairly competently in that language having spent a decade in Orissa.When I butted in in Oriya they were flabbergasted. There were many co incidences that evening The man was an Oriya and the lady and I Tamilians who could speak Oriya. This was only the beginning. We moved to the canteen and over cups of coffee the discussion veered round to Obama .I surprised them by telling them that I was a ‘neighbour’ of the US president having stayed at Potomac City not far from the White House. At this point an IIT student joined us, his curiosity aroused .He planned to study in the US and sought my tips on that matter. Then something ‘ strange’ took place. This student told me casually that he too was an Oriya and his father worked for the State Bank of India at Talcher in Orissa .Guess what-- I was the branch manager there over 20 years ago! We expressed amazement at this string of coincidences. The lady remarked that there are no coincidences—it is all the work of God she declared high soundingly. It is my intention to question this and in the process I hope to put forth another way of looking at life.
2. In response to my article about Dr Abdul Kalam I am still receiving hate mail .I am aware that DR.Kalam is a middle class icon and rightly so considering his integrity in public life. But does that mean that he is above any criticism or even a mild difference of opinion? One reader went so far as to give a spiritual twist by asserting that Dr Kalam was upholding the highest traditions of the Vedas and Bhagvad Geeta and I am only to be blamed for my inability to understand him. I am still not clear why spirituality came into all this.
3. . An elderly friend of mine made his first voyage abroad to London.When he returned I asked him what he had learnt from his visit .He replied as follows ‘I learnt that the only limit to our achievements and progress is our imagination’. I almost heard bugles blowing in the distance. I then asked him what three things would he do differently in the next few months as a result of his learnings from his London trip. Four months later I await his answer.

I will now clarify what is common in all these seemingly disparate instances.
First the IIT incident. Coincidences are not the work of God .We need not move into the realm of faith and belief especially since we have a simple verifiable proof of such phenomena. Too often we are impressed by high sounding explanations when in fact there are mundane ‘ secular’ ones that are verifiable and decisive. Such events can be explained in terms of probability theory. Look at this story that is commonly discussed in mathematics books. How many people have to be assembled in a room in order to have a 50% chance that two people have the same birthday? The answer is astonishingly just 23! Random events of small probability take place all the time and yet we ascribe them to God! The meeting at IIT, the chance encounter with a tamilian who spoke Oriya, the student whose father worked in the same branch as I did—but at different periods—all these are matters of probability and there is really no need to bring God into the equation.
The response to my Kalam article delved into the realm of religion and God when as far as I am concerned I was operating at the level of day to day life looked at from the viewpoint of the poorest of the poor who feel that their tragic plight has not been highlighted in the media as much as have been John Abraham . There was, in my opinion, no occasion to bring spirituality into the discussion. However I concede that the middle classes—whom Kalam referred to in the statement that I wrote about have moved higher in the Maslow Hierarchy and can afford to quote scriptures. This class will have to make a serious effort to think from the perspective of those whom I wrote about and who languish at the bottom of the pyramid. Spirituality to this class boils down to this—when will my family be saved from death by starvation? When will my crisis be taken seriously by the better off people.?
The problem with bringing esoteric spirituality into any talk is that one tends to think in abstract ways and finds oneself unable to concretise one’s thoughts. This brings me to the third episode listed above.
The statement about one’s imagination limiting one’s achievement may be right but if you stop at that ,such noble thinking will serve no purpose. Thus the silence to my question about how he would concretise his thoughts is indicative of the error I refer to. In order to guide our thinking along concrete actionable lines we may have to go down to basics, Thus a trainer friend told me that she intended to conduct a workshops for pharma executives on self development using spirituality. I commended her but gave a suggestion. ‘Try telling the trainees at the end of discussions of each concept that they ought to ponder over how they would apply the learning to day to day life.. What three things they would do differently beginning the next day in their effort to apply the spiritual learning imparted to them’.
K.R.RAVI
WWW.KRRAVI.COM