These days I have been in retrospective disposition, the first thing I do when sems are around and when I’m only supposed to struggle for GPAs. My retrospection reinforced my yearning if I could go back to the start……IF. But life certainly has no ifs and buts… My contemplation concluded that my past nine months could be best summarized by the opening lines of ‘The tale of two cities’ where Dickens starts paradoxically with “These were the best of times these were the worst of times”. Recently times have changed and I hope may be the worst is over and expect that the best is yet to shower. But such hopes just remind the cynic in me about Morgan Freeman’s “Hope is a dangerous thing my friend”.
About friends wise men say our best friends are the books we really had great time with. Holden Caulfield, The Catcher In The Rye Guy, rephrases them in his trademark rebellious way as “What really knocks me out is a book, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it”. I must be a fortunate being, as unlike Holden I have some really great people to hang around even outside the world of books. But there is one such friend from the world of literature whom I spared some space in my self contemplation, one living legend, Sir Salman Rushdie. Now why so? … you will know.
Despite W. H. Auden's assertion that "Literature makes nothing happen," Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, is one of the relatively few works of fiction to have made a significant and permanent impact outside the enclosed world of literature. It has led to the loss of over twenty lives apart from making its author go into hiding from the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa. Above all, coinciding with the ending of the Cold War, it has played a significant role in redefining the West's image of itself, which now is no longer the threat of Communism, but that of Islamic fundamentalism. Islamic clerics used this work of fiction to reinforce their image of the United States as the Great Satan. Anyway enough of throwing light on well known facts, when right now I don’t give a damn to world affairs. This piece of plausible contemplation is solely about me and a hole inside me, where Rushdie has a role.
The formation of this hole started almost a decade ago during my early teen days. Teenage, as it is, a rebellious stage of life when you question all norms. So even I at its very inception, impressed by my thirteen year old imagination, questioned the religious hypocrisy prevalent around and begun to flirt with the idea of atheism. It’s like when we discover rationality religion doesn’t seem to impress us much, and we look forward to sundry atheist idea to support our stance. I long searched for such ideas in Osho before I recognized his other side, and my tryst with Osho ended and I switched to others. I had perplexing time understanding Nietzsche’s Nihilism, Camus’ existentialism, Ayn Rands’ Objectivism, Vivekananda’s Vedantic Hinduism. Claims like Nietzsche’s ‘the death of God’ generated waves of goose bumps to the seeker in me. It was all like a constant struggle with my psychological and intellectual inheritance, searching some short of self realization for creating a new self. Amongst all such search once I came across these lines of Rushdie repudiating the idea of God “I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.” Rushdie maintains that the ‘The satanic Verses” was an exploration of the "God-shaped hole" left in him after he had abandoned the "unarguable absolutes of religion"
Unlike Rushdie without understanding it much I mugged these lines to quote to my mother who when worried of an agnostic me (she just couldn’t stand atheism in me) at times futilely tried to pour some pious sagacity in my alternative moral universe. In order to pacify her subtle worries I used to edit and carve up Gabriel Garcia’s line “Mom, I don’t believe in your God but don’t worry I am surely afraid of him”. Anyway after many fruitless attempts she understood that sometimes you just can’t save some fanatical people from themselves and in some way or other she primed herself emotionally for my surreal reality. Her disappointment was in a way a triumph for me as I used to take pride on all the GDs in which I exhausted her reasons with my fervent iconoclastic apathy towards the idea of God.
I wished someday, like Rushdie, this hole would become prominent in me too, but when have my wishes ever been answered…… never. Spirituality for the true seeker is the means to release his spirit from the confines of his materialistic existence. Now the hole in Rushdie never bothered him as he has his magical realism as a transcendental force within to fill in the vacancy. Through his aesthetic ideological imaginations he got his self conviction. He believes his ideology is superior to that of the fundamentalist and unlike them he never tries to compel it on others, but only persuades. You have to firmly believe in something at least so that you can believe yourself. Now that’s where I went astray.
I was never bothered about the hole in my soul and thus never could successfully fill it with anything… neither with passionate ambitions, neither with fragmented dreams and neither with friendship and love. Somewhere deep within this hole has rendered me hollow, devoid of any faith. It was only during these few hard days in recent past, when my pseudo self belief was badly wounded and left my ego heavily humiliated, that I fully comprehended this growing emptiness within. The emptiness which, crooked my sense of pleasant solitude into agonizing lonesomeness. The emptiness due to which, I nearly had let down my self to abysmal depths before reverting back well in time. They say it is in adversity that character is tested and true faith blossoms. May be these difficult times were a providential event to help me make out the hazard of the hole, and thus what all the provoking theories of the great philosophers failed to recognize, was flashed before by the reality, which till now only sucks. Quoting Rushdie once again “One great fact about life is sometime even the unthinkable becomes the thinkable” In what once I took pride, now for the first time in my life am worried about; that there is a hole in my soul. What I’m not sure of is “IS IT GOD SHAPED”??
