Monday, December 30, 2013

Chapter 3: The Devil’s Statistics


Even numbers have meanings. They have meanings that are. They have meanings that were never meant to be. The Real confused with the illusion. The illusion becoming the Real. In some languages, 4 is a bad number. It means death.

Death is an inescapable  reality.
An end to all madness and tyranny.
A way home,
 so how can it be bad?

In other cultures, 4 is in demand.. It denotes “get” or “achieve”. ‘Achieving’ and ‘getting’ takes up a major part of human life. It is about collecting as many toys as you can. The toys that will inevitably bore you and decay. The toys that will outlive your very existence on earth.  It is also about getting and achieving candies. They are very sweet to the ear and very sweet to the heart. Titles. Glamour. Prestige. Your Excellency! Honour!

Pray tell me sir, why honour me when I destroy God’s earth in the name of civilization?
And did you not bestow me with titles when I ensured poor people have no access to food and homes by raising the price of land?

A cynical thought penetrates Santim’s mind.  The number most liked are those that denote money. Thousands. Millions. Billions. Humans are born with accurate judgement skills. We grow up undoing those skills. Our judgemental ability becomes blurred. Nay, made to be blurred by the system. We measure humans by numbers. The richer you are, the greater respect they give you. They also inwardly envy you.  You are a man of society. You are uno numero.

And ah yes, the injustice I demonstrated in the name of my profession.
You called me a genius!

It does not matter how much you have plundered the life of others to enrich your own. People have short memories. They cannot see what you do. Only what you have.

Truth to many people is what they see,
Sometimes they are blind
Often times they blindfold their eyes

They wish to see only what is outside of them.
That is why they cannot see the transience of their breath
for it is within them.

Statistics - numbers of the learned and of the powers that be. Delilah Al-Karim was a 12 year old girl. She grew up in her home on a land which no State recognized. She was a sweet, pony-tailed girl who only wanted to grow up to be the best daughter of her parents and the best sister of her two elder brothers.  That was her only innocent, childhood dream. Like your sister and mine, like your daughter and mine, she was full of life inspired by the presence of her family’s love.  One day her bubble burst when they were having dinner in her home.

There was a loud explosion. Airplanes and tanks of adults playing war games against each other. This time for real. In the interest of some lofty adult ideals which Delilah could never understand. She was unfortunate to wake up alive in the rubble of what was once her home with her mother’s severed hand on her stomach. She could not cry any tears when she thought she saw the butchered meat of who were once her father, mother and two brothers.

Santim recalls that she told him she heard the radio the following day: “It was a victorious day for our troops. Our casualty was 12 and the enemies were 240”.  Twenty years later, struggling to understand, she could never find the answer to what happened.

Uncle Sam[1] calls it collateral damage.
Others call it unavoidable war casualties.
To Delilah, they will always be her father, mother and brothers whose love has been cruelly snatched away from her.

Santim Raj knows too well that when humans are reduced to statistics, the Devil is in charge. Statistics have no life or form. They are numbers. They are files or profiles. They do not matter. They are dispensable. The death of 20 people in a population of 20 million can be explained away as ‘statistically minimal’.  These are sleeping pills to make us sleep better.

When your only loved one dies,
he or she is 100 per cent of what you had.

As you had ONLY cared for yourself,
When it’s your turn, your loved ones too will only be a statistic to them.

Santim recalls that the Master once told him, “Many worship the Devil though numbers”. I was then too young to understand. How could numbers be an object of worship?

When something consumes your life,
It is that, that you worship
Not the rituals that you
Innovate to deceive yourself of your religiousness.

People do not seek the Truth anymore but they seek numbers of devotees. The greater the number of devotees, the more truthful the belief is they say. A Truth of one is crushed by the millions of deceit, lies and conjectures. Majority reigns arrogantly and oppresses the minority. The might of numbers and not the Truth becomes a god.

Hence, the pathway to the Truth is but a lonely path.

Truly life is a repetition. We repeat the errors of history. We repeat the foolish ways of our forefathers. We honour and encourage development, education and improvement to better our lives. At the same time, we busy ourselves with weapons of mass destruction to destroy the very things we have built over the years. We want peace, stability and prosperity for ourselves but do not want the same for others. We think it is our birthright that the blessings we now enjoy are ours alone.

Hungry children in Ethiopia are not our children. The homeless Palestinians are merely a news report. The poor Indians, Bangladeshis, and Indonesians are below our status. They are not creative and clever like us to deserve the wealth we have. And the poor among us? Well, they too are just…statistics.

  We have bigger problems – which is the best hand phone model for our 12 year old daughter?


The cruelties we unleash creatively shames even the Devil.
Yet we insist that we are people of God, education and civilization.

Santim wonders: has the world gone mad?  He remembers the village he was born. He grew up in a kampong[2] which was surrounded by coconut trees and plants. Everywhere it was green. His wooden house had only one stand fan.  He could step out of his house onto pure sand - mother Earth. There were no fences with his neighbours, but they were not exactly next door like the expensive link houses of today.

Santim remembers a friend he had who built his paradise on earth. Santim shared in his happiness. This friend had told him his paradise is for all. He has no attachments to anything of this world. One day, Santim had, foolishly, asked him if he could bring some mortals who had wanted to taste his paradise. He forbade.

How could I share in your happiness, when you make it exclusive?
Are you now, God?



[1] Uncle Sam – colloquial term referring to the United States of America.
[2] Kampong, a Malay village like the kind that existed in the 1950s in Malaysia and Indonesia.

Thursday, December 26, 2013

How would you know the scavengers if you never mingle with them?

In the movie "Oblivion", they are called the scavengers.

In the movie, "Total Rekall", they lived in the colony while the powerful and wealthy lived in the United Federation of Britain. The people of the colony are workers for the UFB. They travelled to the UFB via the "Fall".

In every society throughout human history, the scavengers and the people of the colony live and are oppressed.

Today, they are the normal citizens society can do without, do not care - maybe you and I.

How the leaders pretend to serve the scavengers or the people of the colony when they never experienced the experiences of these people?

How can they even pretend to lead these people when they have never lived among them?

How can they understand the pain, the struggles and the real needs of the ordinary people?

Only a leader from the ordinary people can effectively lead the ordinary people - not leaders put on stage by the wealthy and powerful system.