The absurdity called moral and evil: An idea

I find this whole idea of good and evil pretty amusing. This is the vaguest classification ever known to mankind. There is nothing called good or evil in this world. Everything is purely contextual. What may be good for some might be evil for others. What might be evil for some might be good for others. So what is the benchmark? Evil is defined as anything which is morally objectionable. Whose morals? Whose objection? Whose rules are to be followed? Who made the rules that set apart good and evil? Who made these arbitrary tenet that certain things are right and certain things are wrong. But nobody has a clue on what basis good and evil has been defined. Some say good has been defined as something favourable to the sustenance of the society. In other words a man’s self interest has to be traded off for the interests of the society. A man instead of living for himself is forced to live for the so-called benefits of the society. Everything that we see around the world today is because of man’s inherent nature of self-interest. Till somebody is not being destructive, everything should be acceptable. But still we are taught from childhood that selflessness is a virtue. Why? Selflessness amounts to the cruellest form of depravity. My strong view is that the laws that define good and moral are made by weak people who are insecure that they will be overpowered by the virtues of self-interest of mightier people. There is nothing called inherent goodness of man. Everything is programmed into the mind by the incessant teachings right from the day he/she is born. Everybody is just playing a role of a so called ‘good human’ even when his insides are churning. There is nothing called evil. It’s anything that does not conform to the random idea of moral. It’s a myth that society needs a code. As the joker says in movie ‘The Dark Knight’-When the chips are down, these civilized people will eat each other. If you really need a definition for morality,then there can be only one rule. There is no morality above man’s self interest.

Cross-legged beside the highway

I could taste blood in my mouth. My knees were severely bruised. My shirt sleeve was torn off. The heat of the slap on my face could still be felt. I was sitting cross legged just next to National Highway 1. I had been travelling on Haryana Roadways bus on my way to Delhi from Chandigarh. The bus had been stopped somewhere before Panipat to let the ticket checkers in. I had been casually standing at the back of the bus alley listening to music on my earphones when a bald foul looking man poked me from the back. He asked me to show him my ticket. Very indifferently I took out my bus pass and handed it over to him. He looked at it for a second and then suddenly grabbed my earphones and threw it somewhere towards the front. I was aghast. I was about to grab his collar when he screamed at his loudest voice with his heavy Haryanvi accent,”Do you think we are fools!!” And then as if announcing to everybody he yelled again, “This gentleman thought he could fool Roadways by carrying an expired Bus pass all the way to Delhi!!” And then he thrust my pass much too close to my face. I hadn’t realized that my Bus pass had expired 15 days back.

I said, ‘I didn’t know that my bus pass had expired.’

“Now you know. Take out 1000 Rupee fine”

“I don’t have 1000 rupees right now, but I....”

That had been just the response he needed. And I felt a heavy slap on my face. I felt my face numb with the impact of the slap. But I had lost my temper myself. I raised my hand and punched his nose. But suddenly somebody hit me from the back and grabbed my hair from behind and made me lie on the narrow alley of the bus. And the bald guy then kicked me on my crotch. And somebody else stomped me on my face. I was almost unconscious. The bald guy and the guy who hit me from my back picked me up and threw me out of the bus. I was lying in pain when I heard the bus go away. It had taken me 10 minutes to regain myself fully.

Now I was sitting beside the road watching vehicles go past. I felt like crying but I did not. I knew I should have taken care if the bus pass was valid. But what they did was completely unreasonable. They didn’t give me any chance to explain and resorted to violence without even the slightest provocation. I was brimming with anger. I wanted to teach them a lesson. I took out my phone and dialled Tauji’s number. Tauji was a senior officer at the Haryana roadways. I told him everything that happened to me. I came to know he was at Panipat. He consoled me and said that he will immediately go with his boys to Panipat Bus Stand and wait for the bus. He asked where I was. I lied to him that I was at a dhabha sipping chai. I hung up the phone. But I didn’t move from that place. I was feeling a strange comfort sitting there in that obscure place somewhere in Haryana between some sugarcane fields and a highway. Half an hour later I got a call from Tauji, ”There is a problem. I will get back to you.” and he hung up the phone immediately. I was concerned what had happened. But I didn’t call back. Nervously I was rotating my phone in my hands. After 20 minutes I got a call again, this time from an unknown phone number. Somebody from Tauji’s office had called me. Tauji and two others had been arrested. They had badly beaten up the bald man with the foul face. The man was dead. I had held it back, but now I couldn’t stop crying.

Time machine to the present

Time travel has intrigued man from a very long time. What will happen if we go to the past? Will we land in a parallel universe? Will we be able to alter events to change the reality? Or what will happen if we go to the future? These questions have given many thinkers food for thought.  Will we ever be able to make a time machine!!? I can’t answer that. How about a time machine that will take as back to the present? Because it’s pretty evident that we are in a desperate urgency of a device that will make us come back to our reality, our present. I will call it the NowMachine.

We don’t live in the present anymore, do we? We are either moaning about what happened in the past or anxious about what will happen in the future. We are either regretting things that we did or are restless about things we should do in the future. We have become slaves of the past and future. We have made the present, a hook to hang the baggage of past and a platform to put the weight of the future. We are either still at loggerheads because of what happened a few years back or are concerned if the world will end on 2012. We think ‘present’ is just a ‘0’ in the number line of time with past and future extending till infinity. We don’t realize that even present offers us infinite possibilities. Enter the NowMachine.

NowMachine will take us back to the moment we are currently living in. It will take us to a present which has no past and no future. NowMachine will make us realize there is so much that present offers. One push to the lever and all the future and past just zaps away. Worried about exam results? Enter the NowMachine. Lost a job? Enter the NowMachine. Break up? NowMachine. Terminally ill? NowMachine. NowMachine would become a revolutionizing device!! But wait a minute; don’t we all have a NowMachine at our possession already?

SREERAG