God? Is He there? Is He good?

As I was typing the article title, MS Word rejected the mere idea of questioning god’s ‘godness’ in its own way. The word ‘god’ followed by a question mark is shown as a grammatical error by this software.

In a middle class Indian family, unquestioned belief in god is generally inbuilt. But as in my case, I come with a programming error. I go to a temple not because of the reasons normal people have, but because I like to see people following an age old magnificent culture.

There’s a temple in Jharkhand, India, that draws huge crowds. This gathering of faith and that unstoppable wish in everyone to touch god’s holy feet makes me shiver when I’m there. Once when I somehow came out of that ultra-dense human concentration camp, my mom asked me, what did you wished for? As I had expected, my answer was followed by an agitated face and a long speech: is this what we travelled such a long distance for? With the answer that I asked god to bring me out of the closed suffocating temple alive, I was having the same question in my mind: is this why I travelled such a long distance, just to enter a room that made me ask for such a wish?

When I share this ‘ungodly’ theory with my friends, there reaction is hazardous to me. It’s okay to me as different people have different opinions. But what I feel is that there nothing such as god. God is a belief one has that there’s someone who will be there when things go south. It’s like having an inverter makes you feel secure that there won’t be a power cut. God’s is a backup for all cases where one loses hope. He is someone who you blame if something wrong happens, so that you won’t feel guilty. He is someone who you thank for achieving something, while keeping the credit to yourself.

Even if it feels like quoting some great personality, I would say the real god is within. Whatever you do, achieve or lose totally depends on what you do. You will always get what you deserve, give or take a few percent for the so called ‘luck’.

Now luck is something that checks how prepared and alert you are for a hostile situation. Take any situation where luck hasn’t or has more than normally favored you. Exempting situations like an asteroid hitting your house, most such ‘unlucky’ experiences make you wiser. Even if a bad event is caused by another person, such as someone causing you trouble for reason’s unknown, you at least get to know how to deal with such a sadist person! Remember, no experience is bad. It depends on what you get from it.

Getting back, if you ask me who is most powerful in the universe including god, I would answer nature. I have seen it, felt it and sensed it with the remaining three sense organs. I haven’t seen god. But I have seen people around the globe, working hard to make this world a better place, from teaching a child how to wash their hands to preventing a third world war.

I once read of a boy who tried to donate bread to an organization seeking funds. The person there told him that the bread would become stale by the time it would reach the needy. This boy sold the bread with the name ‘patriotic bread’ and collected good money. With this money, he bought more bread which he again sold with the same name. This way, at the end of few days, he had collected a large amount of money and donated the whole to this charity organization. Later, with his money and money from people inspired by his act, the crisis was solved.

I can think of him as god. I think of bankers working for the poor as god. I think of scientists finding ways to cure a disease as god. Since god is defined as someone who watches over and selflessly cares for you, I think of my parents as someone above god. Someone said, god couldn’t be everywhere, so he made mothers.

God is in little things. God is in whatever good you do. It isn’t just that god is good; it is that good is god.