Thursday 1 October 2015

SAINT VERSES SINNER




The first time I read Oscar Wilde’s epigram, ‘Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future’, I was a young student and didn’t give much thought to those words then.

However today I have come to understand that the world in which I live feeds on ‘isms’ like Hinduism, Islamism, Zoroastrianism and the likes which include in their religious diet a serving of the not required fanaticism. Our world is today sadly experiencing the effects of extremism. How horribly judgement we have become like the characters in the story of the blind men describing an elephant! To one, the animal is like a pillar, to another, like a fan and yet to another like a wall; and each sadly believes that his elephant is the right one. 

An intellectual believer could probably with the mental edifice of his collected knowledge condemn one and glorify another but then Ravana too was an intelligent demonic king, Lucifer too was an angel who fell.

If birth has a purpose, then today or perhaps tomorrow, a search is inevitable. The saint is a saint because s/he understood that purpose yesterday and a sinner is a sinner because s/he will do the same tomorrow.

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