A mighty big fall: The news spread like wildfire. A political figure had been dethroned as if he had been dropped from a high-flying aeroplane to terra firma. Was he wounded? Nay, apparently his thick cuirasse had acted as a shock-absorber. Everyone (but a few of his stooges) felt an overwhelming sense of jubilation. My inbox was flooded with congratulatory messages, “Doctor your tears paid off.” “Your untiring efforts have been crowned with success.” I was stunned, muted by unbelief, yet wrote: “Yes, he was bloating with pride, money and arrogance.” Facebook friend Kennedy was more caustic, “Karma is a b****! The natural law is that vindictive people who go out of their way to hurt others end up broke and alone.” But advocate Cleofato Coutinho does not rule out Dalal’s comeback, “The cunning fox will find a stratagem to remain politically relevant.” God forbid!
MURKY POLITICS: We Goans also witnessed something which led us to bow our heads in shame. Ten Congress MLAs had switched over to the ruling BJP government and within 48 hours three of them had been made ministers. In Karnataka, we were witnessing retail defections, individual MLAs being poached in small groups and being transported from one five-star hotel to another. Sagarika Ghose writes, “What is the reason for this supreme power of the politicians and powerlessness of citizens?” The answer, “Today, State power has expanded into so many areas of daily life (businesses, liquour licences, mining leases, real estate deals, jobs and even school admissions) that Indians are ruled by the imperious raj of the “Big State”. This means permissions for everything require the nod of the Big State whose agents are politicians. Local strongmen have captured politics so completely that citizens are marginalised spectators of political shenanigans. Citizens’ anger means nothing to professional politicians jumping ship, pushing their tentacles into citizens’ lives, mute spectators of a sickening drama.
HEARTBEAT ECHO: As the dance of the devils unfolded into the theatre of the absurd, I was provided the golden opportunity to participate in an international conference and to be one of the dignitaries to launch the most advanced Echo machine in the world, a rare opportunity to rub shoulders with Dr Roberto Lang of the USA, who is at the forefront of Echocardiography. We discussed photorealistic 3D/4D imaging in OLED monitors, dynamic heart model, auto-strain, artificial intelligence, augmented virtual reality, Echo visualisation of the coronaries and more. The interactive session was mind-boggling. This provided me a wonderful opportunity to remain aloof from social media where everyone was pouring his frustration against whosoever dared to say something different.
And as I returned home, eager to apply the valuable insight gained at the conference, I encountered a veteran Pilar priest, who came to me for medical help. He had lately developed an affinity for Hindu spiritualism and visited an ashram in the Himalayas, being totally exposed to Hindu practices, rituals and the study of the Bhagvad Gita. How would you describe your experience, I asked the priest? His answers were straight and to the point, 1) “We Christians are dancing with the Bible and know nothing else”, 2) If every Hindu practiced the Bhagvad Gita from the heart, Hindu Rashtravadism would vanish into thin air!
It must be said that the popularity of Indian spirituality in the West exploded after the Beatles visited Rishikesh in 1968 to study under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, in turn giving birth to the New Age movement. Renowned authors like Aldous Huxley, Henry Thoreau, influenced by Hindu philosophy, incorporated the teachings of Vedanta in their works, further catalysing the trend. The arrival of major Indian gurus like Yogananda on American shores in the 1920s, and his predecessor Vivekananda’s historic address at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, contributed greatly to push Indian spiritualism into the Western mainstream. Luckily, I was absorbed with Ravi Zacharias’ bestseller, “Why Jesus”, which helped me as a buffer to stay deep-rooted to my beliefs.
FROM OPRAH TO CHOPRA: “Two personalities that typify what we have in the spiritual smorgasbord before us today are Oprah Winfrey and Deepak Chopra. And if they are two ends of the spectrum, there are hosts of others in between. Their success has demonstrated how easily in a “depauperated” West an idea can be marketed, reshaped, repackaged, and taken at face value by a generation that not only fails to ask the right questions but doesn’t care enough about the truth to even think the right questions.”
WHY JESUS? “It is pertinent to ask why has Jesus met with such poor response, especially in a culture that has benefitted so much from his teaching and ought to know better?” Zacharias writes, “the Jesus of history has suffered wantonly at the hands of critics who wished more than anything else to strip him of his uniqueness and make his name forgotten. Yet, the more we look at the Jesus of history, and the more we see the inspirational incentive he has been to millions there is no message more beautiful, more powerful than his.”
Refusing to wax philosophical, in all humility, I confess that in the silence of the night I often hear Jesus and the sound of his voice prompting me, ‘My precious child I love you. You are mine and I am yours. Amen!”
(Dr Francisco Colaço is a pioneer of Echocardiography in Goa)
