Musings on a Sunday Morning

This morning, I woke up late, being a Sunday, and I sat of the terrace of my house in Artist Village looking at the blue Parsik Hills, that surround our little valley on the edge of a rain forest and thought how insignificant are our worries, anxieties and frustrations when compared to the inexorable march of nature and history. I was reading my favourite book – the Bible. It is a best-seller all right, and contains everything from murder, deceit, rape, harlotry, seduction, etc. I am reading Genesis, and this is part of a project to read the bible as another book, say a novel, as a progression of event that marked the coming of Christ. I read how Judah’s daughter-in-law seduced her father-in-law pretending to be a harlot. I also read how the wife of the Egyptian captain-of-the-guard of the Pharoh tried to seduce Joseph into lying with her and when he didn’t, alleged that he had tried to rape her. All too common events we encounter in life. Must say reading of the word, whether the Bible, Ramayana, Mahabharata, etc. puts things in perspective.

When I read the Bible as a chronicle of my faith I understand the greatness of humanity, of the written word, the propagation of faith implicit in it. But if we read only a part of it, for example, that how the daughter-in-law seduced the father-in-law pretending to be a harlot and interpret it as the gospel truth and therefore admissible in society, as a precedent exists in it, and fight for it to be legalised, then, that’s where most interpretations of the holy books go wrong. They do it. That’s where fundamentalism creepily sidles in and the zealots begin waving flags and clanging their religious cymbals. They say that since it has precedence in the holy book it is condonable by law and they demand laws passed in this advanced stage of human consciousness based on the less-intellectually-evolved social conscience of those days.

Take today’s literary world. Umbrage is taken on the contents of a book even before people have bought and read the contents of its pages. They buy a book to read a certain chapter, or a passage and start hitting out at the author. I am sure they would think otherwise if they read the entire book, starting from page one to where it says “the end.” Simple enough to say, but hard to do. We humans have a tendency to jump to conclusions, even I.