A Tale of Two Worlds
We are creating imaginary rights and even endorsing legislation to give them effect, says AVERTHANUS L D’SOUZA
We live simultaneously in two distinct worlds – more different than chalk is from cheese. It is not an easy feat. We live in the here-and-now and in the hereafter; in the corporeal world and in the spiritual world; in the tangible world of the senses and in the non-tangible world of ideas and ideals; in the confines of our own individual selves and in society together with others. It is a strange world that we inhabit, if only we stop to give it some consideration.
Philosophers have tried to explain this mystery for as long as recorded history. Plato, the great Greek philosopher, held that we live in a shadow-world, a world of images and reflections of the ‘real’ world outside. This point of view is shared by ancient Hindu philosophy, which holds that what we consider to be reality is, in fact, only ‘maya’ or unreality. This philosophy holds that ‘reality’ is beyond our comprehension. We can only grasp at its images and reflections.
The present age, which Hindu philosophy designates as the ‘age of darkness’ (kalyug), is the most materialistic age ever known to humankind. All our energies are dedicated to living according to the epicurean principle: eat, drink and be merry because tomorrow we die. The Epicureans were steeped in a world of pleasure and sense gratification – not very different from the hedonism of present times. But we seem to have failed to draw the lesson that one can never contain air within one’s closed fists; one can never capture one’s own shadow; one cannot contain infinity in the finite mind.
We live as if there is no tomorrow. We have organised our political and economic systems as if there is no need for individual space and personal liberty. We are hell bent on endowing our governments with powers over our private lives while, at the same time, proclaiming that we believe in individual freedoms. We have abdicated our responsibility to build a peaceful society, and entrusted this task to governments that neither understand what freedom is, nor have the necessary tools to bring about freedom.
To speak about governments ensuring individual freedoms is a contradiction in terms. We live in a world of strange contradictions. We launch wars to preserve peace. We set up military dictatorships to ensure civic liberties. The listing of such contradictions would fill an entire library. But let us look at just a few striking examples.
The education of a child, which is the most individual and intimate enterprise, has been handed over to the government, which now not only decides what a child must learn at what age, but also determines how the child should learn. The government decides the curriculum and the qualification of the teachers. It decides what kind of food the child should be fed and what kind of books it should read. The absurdity of this situation is highlighted in the fact that the government has now approved the teaching of the reproductive process to kindergarten children; all in the guise of giving them ‘sex education’ even before they are prepared for it.
The Government of India is now considering a Bill to control all so-called ‘fertility’ (or is it ‘infertility’?) clinics in the country. Instead of assisting infertile married couples to have babies, the Bill approaches the question of ‘fertility’ as a lucrative commercial enterprise that, according to the Law Commission, has been described as an ‘industry’. Even the Supreme Court of India was aghast at the callousness of this approach, which considers babies as commodities.
According to the draft Bill, assisted reproductive technologies will be made freely available to anyone and everyone who desires them, irrespective of whether they are legally married couples, simply living together or even if they are single, lesbian or homosexual. The basic flaw in the Bill is that it is based on the principle that the latest technology should be made freely available as a commercial enterprise, rather than be used to assist infertile married couples to have babies.
The most tragic aspect of the Bill is that it seeks to empower the government to become the sole monopolistic operator of the technology of assisted reproduction. The government will be the sole repository of all information concerning the donors of sperm and oocytes, the medical status of surrogate mothers, and the details of the ‘parents’ who will purchase the children for a handsome amount.
Another aberration that is quite obvious to those who want to see is the twisted way in which women want to be treated as equals. Women not only want to do jobs that were hitherto exclusive to men (which is perfectly legitimate), but they also want to discard their femininity and become male (which is not).
The latest example of this is a group of women that call themselves Raelians (named after a French racing car driver who saw a vision in which all life on Earth was engineered by extra-terrestrial beings). The Raelians observe an annual ‘Go Topless Day’, to demand their ‘constitutional right’ to go topless in public. Their argument is that if men can go bare-chested in public, women should have the same ‘right’. Is this equality? How will the ‘right’ to go about bare-chested in public enhance the dignity of women and give them equal status with men?
In a similar twist of reason, homosexuals are demanding the right to use toilets and rest rooms reserved for women, on the ground that they have equal rights to all public facilities. According to them, restricting toilet facilities along sexual lines amounts to discrimination and violates their rights to equality.
A certain insanity has begun to pervade our society, which blurs distinctions between the real and the imagined. We are creating imaginary rights and even endorsing legislation to give effect to these imaginary rights. Our perception is skewed to such an alarming extent that we cannot distinguish right from wrong, or real from imaginary. This is quite pervasive in the multitude of so-called ‘Reality Shows’ on popular television channels. What passes for ‘reality’ is unreal; the product of sick minds.
We need to wake up to the fact that we are living in a world in which there is a conflict between good and evil, between the noble and the brutal, between the spiritual and the material. St Paul described this in the best possible way: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (Rom.7:14). In theology, this is called the Consequence of Sin, a reality that all humankind would do well to acknowledge.
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Story of a Princess
By Adelmo Fernandes
She was elegant, beautiful and graceful in her movements as she sailed across the globe. She traversed the seven seas and weathered all the storms that came her way. At times she was battered and bruised, and down, but she was never out. She was strong and sturdy, a combination of brawn and beauty.
All went well till the day she reached the sea off a place called Goa. The princess had heard of the tiny state in the India and was eager to reach the shores of this ‘Pearl of the East’.
One stormy day, the princess entered the waters off the Goa coast. All of a sudden, she was drifted off from her normal course by a strong wind. She lost control and was slowly dragged near the shores of a famous beach, and got stuck in the sand.
She was grounded. That is when all the trouble started for the princess. In the normal course, the authorities in charge would have done everything they could to get her out of the sand. But then she had run aground in Goa, where playing ‘sossegado’ is the name of the game.
No one in the form of a prince came to the aid of the princess. It seemed that there was not a single prince in the entire state of Goa who would come forward and rescue the princess in distress.
The princess had to spend the day in the sweltering sun and the night in biting cold. Nobody seemed to bother about the princess. Her whole body seemed to ache and her skin began to peel off. She was struck by several maladies.
Days turned to weeks, weeks to months, months to years and to one whole decade. The poor princess lay there, subject to the vagaries of nature. The local government got into a tangle as to who should save the princess.
The locals began to blame the princess for all the trouble that came to the state. She was like a bad omen. As time passed by, the princess died. She met a watery grave. What was left of a once beautiful princess was just skin and bones.
The dead body could hold together no longer. It began to disintegrate. The body was breaking into two. But even then the local government would not give it a decent burial.
Some were talking of taking the dead body away and cutting it up. Others were talking of cutting the dead body right there where it lay, and then carting it away. And those in power could not make up their minds…
So the corpse of the princess began to rot and disintegrate. With every passing monsoon, the condition of the corpse became worse. The local courts took pity on the plight of the princess and intervened. They wanted the concerned authorities to act fast and give the princess a decent burial, so that her soul could rest in peace.
But then, her body began to rust into pieces. The local authorities, it appeared, did not have the conscience not to allow the poor princess to suffer even in death. The plight of the MV River Princess continues to this very day, as the government cannot make up its mind about who should remove what is left of the corroded ship. This tragic story is ‘To be continued…’
