Reflections

Last evening, over a cup of chai and a samosa at Raju's chai shop, I saw something that disturbed me from within, and I was at a loss to explain why. Maybe because I felt I've seen something of the sort so many times before that I'd have gotten immune to emotion, hardened to the extent of insensitivity. I was thrown into a wistful thought spiral.

What I saw was something very banal, very workaday. It was the sight of an old beggar, scavenging around for food, with no clothes to drape his ravaged body, and hardly any strength in his lifeless legs to carry him around. He kept going from one pile of garbage to the next, looking for any scrap of food that could help him get past the night. I sat, there, watching him, dumbstruck by the unfairness of it all. Why was I sitting here, in my clean clothes, eating hot samosas, and he, there? What right have I to be in this comfortable state while there are those whose suffering knows no ends? Is it the inherent randomness (draw of lottery, if you please) that all human beings are blessed with? Is it god's doing? Or is it karma? Being an agnostic, I shall leave out the bit about god.

Karma, though, for me, is one of the biggest excuses mankind has ever come up with. To think that one human being suffers while another enjoys purely because of their respective actions is a little too absurd. Why, then, is one born into a nice, well-to-do family, and another into a dysfunctional, hapless family, having to keep his nose to the grindstone just to have a fistful of rice? Is it still karma? Well, they've hardly had any time to do anything good or bad. Shouldn't both of them be given a clean slate to start with? Does it eventually even out over the course of a lifetime? I think not.

No amount of stress, work pressure or professional problems can ever be comparable to a state of starvation, to a state of such abject poverty. In no way can there be a rational explanation for why I am the way I am and he the way he is. Karma might seek to give me a wall to hide behind and placate myself, but the bitter truth is that karma is all too often just a question of faith, like religion. What then, am I to make of it? Randomness? God? Or maybe an explanation as far fetched as karma extending over the cycle of death and rebirth. If only I could find the book, where 'it is all written', I'd gladly burn it to ashes.