Wednesday, October 11, 2006

The Imperfection of Perfection : Of the god who failed

Isn’t it ironical? Every article I write actually starts with this clichéd starting line. Ah! The sense of satisfaction that I derive from the act of actually deciding the fate of the entire blog. A sense of perfection driving the control. The maser of the game rolling out the dice with the enigmatic move. Perhaps, like the master of the puppets, controlling each string and each act. Perfection!

So what is perfection? The act of achieving the so called state of being perfect. But then what is being perfect in itself. Perfection is the art or a state of mind for attaining what we consider as the final destination of all human endeavors and the ability to repeat the feat again and again. The ultimate feat that the human essence and spirit actually thinks it can achieve. The exuberance of the human spirit, however, is such that it never bows down. That is probably the irony, while we think and strive for the absolute, perfection always remains relative. Perfection and being perfect are absolute but then what use is it if it stops the dynamism of life in itself with the realization of the contentment of having achieved what should be a threshold of all human endeavors. And it never really is. We try to reach the peak to gain the supremacy and yet we really don’t want the stagnation that the supremacy presents us as an aftermath. And so we run again, run like a zombie in the mindfeild of hunger for the next level. It’s more like a psychedelic void in an infinite loop, and we just run in it. So I guess then perfection is relative right?


I was triggered to write on god and perfection today as I was just driving down the NH8, in the sweltering heat of Delhi. You look at the world around you. You are always a part of it and yet, there are times when you just step aside, out of the entire paradigm and look at the labyrinth or the prism in which we exist. So complex and vast and yet so full of life. What are we and why are we? You just look at everything in a very critical view and just question everything. At times you derive pleasure by just looking at people and analyzing them and being aware of the predictability that people have in their lives. The unpredictability about the predictability of people is in itself too exotic and intoxicating to miss the speculation. Though you and me are part of the same prism as well and once we step back in to the crystal ball, we are back into the same grind and entangled with the life that we are not in a position to step out of it again and again to look at life and human nature in a holistic nature. So today being one of those rare days when I was just looking at everything being a part of the oblivion, just kept on smiling to myself as I thought about people. Think of people and you realize that your life is nothing but an aggregation of interactions with other people, the environment, and also an aggregation of human nature and emotions.


Have you ever wondered what might be the notion of perfection vis-à-vis human life. Everyone does say that perfection is relative and yet when you talk of people, you do realize that no body is actually perfect. Its just a state of consciousness that we all try to attain in all our actions and behaviors. God makes all of us equal almost in every aspect and when a baby I born, a soul is brought onto the earth, it is so pure. Totally devoid of any treachery, any manipulation, any deceit, any self or ulterior motives. The word is pure. The word is sanctity. You look into his eyes and you see something that you know you never see everyday. And that is Angélique, Céleste. So naïve. That is perhaps the moment of truth that any father and mother go through when they give birth a new born. Joy that can perhaps not be redefined by words. And the as days progress and the infant evolves and adapts to the world around. Days, months and years pass as an individual develops and somehow he is aware of the surrounding in which he exists and he becomes one of us. The innocence and the purity fades away into the oblivion and what remains is what we call a self that can exist independently. One that can manipulate and get things done. One that can survive and one that can fight it out. It’s a cruel world and I admit you have to deceive, you have to lie and you have to wage a war to get ahead at every step. Perhaps on the route to so called perfection.

So somewhere on the route to attaining the materialistic perfection , we actually lose the celestial perfection imparted by the lord himself. Where is the sanctity? Where is the purity that god gives every time he creates a soul? The innocence, the absolute purity. Have you wondered whether god himself is absolute or is he relative.

Gosh! This is indeed a war of absolute and relative. Or should I say the relativity of absoluteness. No, the reason why I ask this is because if god was absolute, then there would actually be nothing more supreme than him. While I would rather not delve into personal believes which usually range in an entire spectrum from the atheist to the narcissist to the believer. Irrespective the level of personal belief, for an extreme, I’d rather think of god as a figment of human imagination and under the hypothetical case of the existence of supreme power dictating the various aspects of human life, I’d move on to my previous question of relativity of god. The reason why we have the notion of a superior power is because of the need for a belief to depend on someone who is more evolved and one who is perfect. One who can not err, whatsoever. The one, whom we can confide everything and who holds infinite power. When some thing doesn’t happen the way we want, we probably pray or reckon that it might be a test for something good that may happen in the near future. Irrespective of the case, but this gentleman sitting upstairs is actually one who never commits an error and is the statement of perfection. Perhaps that is the reason why we strive for perfection. A thirst for absolute power.

And this is where I err. God is not absolute. I think it is relative. Because even the perfection we perceive him to be possessing is actually flawed if look into it carefully. Why else would you think of a birth of a soul who would probably never be the clichéd normal human being. One who is deprived of the normal birth. One who we as a society term as challenged, handicapped, retarded or may be spastic.

How can you justify when an individual is not as equal as the majority of the rest. We as a society give him the tag of handicapped. Just one word that probably summarizes everything and you think you have done your part. A wise attempt of the society to classify and segregate and give them a few benefits. That is probably all that they have to give. What about acceptance. What about making them a part of us. What about showering them with love and affection, being able to understand them and their differences and just being subtle about it.

How many times does it happen when some one “special” probably screams in the crowd and all you do is look at him with all the hostility and strangeness that you can. You look as if you look at a beast or an animal. Just by the virtue of the fact of your evolution as a so called worldly normal human makes you blind to look at something that might be different. Have you ever wondered what that scream is? Have you wondered that there may be a possibility that in future you might be the one who screams? Or perhaps someday you’ll be a parent or a relative to someone who might be so called “special child”. How would you react to that? You do not possess the goodness to let someone special just exist alongside with you. Perhaps the metrics for benchmarking are different. You might be conforming to the ISO standards of human adequacy on physical and mental terms. But then when you analyze yourself, you’d probably find that perhaps the realm of insufficiency is not as pronounced as the person who is probably on the road.

Ever wondered what that scream was? It is a scream of anguish. Perhaps at just the unjustification of god’s perfection. The god that failed. The imperfection in the perfectionist. The one who makes majority as same and yet deprives a few. His imperfection gives the world people with physical, mental disability.

The shriek of pain at the unjustification of this world and of fate. As a person who can’t be accepted by society, because of the virtue of having been endowed by god or by fate and there is nothing he can do to tackle it. As a parent you just keep wondering as to what happened and why it happened. The scream of the parent who is always in love with his child irrespective of any disability or so called relative deficiency. The anguish of their souls that exults at the thought of the future and the unpredictability of their own lives. As a parent you know that you devote and dedicate an entire lifetime for your baby. But then immortality is the intoxicating power that no one has. And so, despite giving your own entire life, you are always worried, what would happen to our child after us? Who and how? What would happen? The biggest dilemma that any parent faces when they think about their special child. Physical disability does restrict perhaps mobility and various aspects, but what in the case of the mentally challenged, the ones with delayed milestone, the ones who are autistic.

Perhaps I focus more on the mentally challenged more, due to personal reasons and preferences, but in such a case, the individual affected is not on the road of attaining the so called materialistic perfection. While as a brother to one who is so special, I realize the agony about the unpredictability of future of human life and the way it affects our concern. While every moment we shower our love and affection, and yet you see the concern of what would happen after us? And trust me, that does turn out to be the biggest questions.

You do love but you do also shriek with pain at times at the god that failed and the unjustification of the proclaimed perfection of the almighty up above. You just wonder why and you wonder how things would be after yourself. But then at times when I see the face of the ones we love so much, and you see the gods perfection there. Despite all the so called worldly imperfection, you see the perfection in their smile. The clear innocent smile makes you forget all the pain and the tension and sorrows. You just realize that perhaps this is gods own way of defining another type of perfection. Perfection of absolute purity, devoid of deceit and treachery. You look into the deep blue eyes and the simple hug and you have a sense of contentment of your life. The sense of dependability that a special child presents you with is in itself a gift of lifetime and contentment that very few are fortunate enough to receive. The gift of god who might not be in synergy with the definition of the worldly state of perfection but I look at it as a different perfection. Gods way of preserving the purity that he present all of us with but somewhere we lose it in time. But these kids, never lose it. The Angelique, and celestial purity is always preserved in them. They might not understand the worldly things and might not be independent. But the dependence of the lives of these kids on yours is one that is a precious gift. And you see the immense perfection of god with a different perspective. Perhaps, the tradeoff between the divine, untouched purity vs. the our perception of perfection.