Sunday, September 23, 2007

Which way does God lean?

I have had this small thought bubbling in my head for a while, it probably entered my head a year and a half from now as I was strolling through bandstand. Offlate it has been trying to push its way out, through my upper middle class, sometimes greed driven mindset. I could discern its voice as I watched the first few scenes of ‘Cider House Rules’ where Michael Cain so succinctly puts it “Orphan babies learn not to cry; they realize its of no use". It got louder as I was going back home in a cab listening to this rather mediocre Hindi song from the 90s. It had a decent guitar solo from a guy no one will hear about. He played really well given the almost un-creative limitations set by the music director and I couldn’t help but think, “If only he were born in the Summer of Love in America!” And this thought almost ripped my mind apart as I was reading ‘ A thousand splendid sons’ (By the way I SWEAR I will NEVER read Hosseini again- Great great author but I cannot take the pain in his books, its too damn real) It got so loud that I had to keep the book aside and start furiously hitting the keys on my laptop.

So the crux of the thought is this, Why are people made unequal? Why does one kid drive by in his car on his way to college staring out of his tinted windows at the world outside, A world that holds his dreams of excellence, a dream to be someone big, in his jock language “Be a superstud once in his life before he calls it a day” while on the other side of the window there are dirty street kids deftly balancing their tyres with sticks picked off the road thinking about how much money they will have to collect today to fuel their fathers drunken frenzies. Why are some women educated, well employed, empowered enough to feel nothing about bitching to their boyfriends about their ex’s who couldn’t give them a good orgasm while for some women sex is nothing but an act of enduring pain and submitting to a man’s borderline violent desires. Why do we have couples who forgive, learn, grow and stick together and couples that never learn, never forgive and fall apart? Why is someone pretty and someone else ugly, why is one man taller than the other? Why is someone given the brains to pick up stuff in an hour while someone with much more sincerity takes days grappling with the same?

I know I have written a lot about inequality and how it is good for the country, the civilization. I know I have made it clear that I am a card carrying capitalist who believes that some men have the right to be better off than others, but today I think I realize why communism and all other forms of leveling the playing field for everyone were doomed from the outset. The one who started it all, God is a capitalist, and not just economically. I am not so sure I like it very much.