The study of Impossible Questions.

Once, when my friend Arundhati was 6 years old, she came home to visit. We were all sitting around the lunch table when my father asked her why she had a holiday that day. The conversation that followed:
Arundhati: Because it is teacher’s day.
Acha: What is teacher’s day?
Arundhati: Dr Radhakrishnan’s birthday.
Acha: And do you know who Dr radhakrishnan was?
Arundhati: He was a philosopher.
Acha: A philosopher! Hmm, and who is a philosopher?
Arundhati: A person who studies philosophy.
Acha: Okay, then what is philosophy?
Arundhati: Philosophy is the study of impossible questions.
Acha (laughing): And what is an impossible question?
Arundhati (straight-faced): Is there God?

For me religion has always been an addition to the list of oddities that punch holes in my introduction speeches. As if the ‘home-schooled’ part wasn’t enough, my parents decided to bless me with the name Shalom as well. Sweet sounding with a pleasant meaning and an irrefutable link with churches. Those few people who are able to pronounce my name never fail to ask the fated “which church?” question. Another question with an impossible answer since my parents don’t pray in churches, or mosques, or temples. In fact my parents don’t pray at all, and when I tell people that, they look at me funny and usually get up and leave soon after.

Questions about God, about religion as a part of my life, were never really of much interest to me until just this May when Arundhati’s father passed away. If God did exist would He(?) allow for such things to happen? And if indeed He did exist, was He to be held responsible or was it the doing of the Devil or something? I recently read ‘Kite Runner’ in which Khaled Hosseini says that God’s presence is felt most in hospitals because that’s where people most need Him. In another book, ‘Rainbow Troops’, the author Andrea Hirata says that the Indonesian people’s positive attitudes sprouted from the seeds of religion. Does that mean that God is like…like willpower?

Sometime last week, my friend Sanjana was freaking everybody out at badminton class by asking questions about the difference between coincidence and destiny. She went on to say that if our entire lives were already written by the hand of fate, then actually free-will didn’t exist at all. I assume she must’ve fought with her mother about going out somewhere and then having discovered that she had no say in the final decision, she probably began thinking about free will and so on. Anyway, I didn’t really want to talk about it at that time, so I’m not sure what logic she had behind her example, but never-the-less her questions proved to be contagious.

What if we’ve invented fate. Invented it to help us accept life for what it is? Then, since God is like willpower, and fate like an excuse to cover up for life’s bad sides, does that mean…could that mean that God is not the creator, but the created? As in, each of us individually creates a God within ourselves, and some of us find similarities in our creations. Some of us find differences. Is that how such diverse and conflicting religions came to be?

Then there are science fiction movies like ‘Matrix’ and ‘Inception’, that have an annoying habit of inducing more impossible questions into my head. Forget about religion, forget about the big bang. Do we even exist at all to be asking such questions? Are our lives really predestined by computer programmes? Are we in a dream? Are we all maya, illusion? Unlike Keanu Reeves, I think I would pick the blue pill.

Originally published at www.shalomgauri.in on August 19, 2013.