Random Places, Random People and Random Chats

Often found these three roulette wheels yielding bizarre combinations with me. This time with an Iranian guy, at a London pizza joint, and a banter(a discourse rather) on religion.

Had a tough day in office, and came home to see a documentary on partition playing on tv. Just dropped my bag in the room and joined my housemates to catch it from between. As is the case is with all documentaries & films on the genre, they leave you with a different insight on the period to mull over. It got over at 11, which meant pizza for dinner(again). Also feel a good film or a good book is best followed with a stroll. So having given this intellectual backing to the only option in front of me, I took to the road.

Not very far from my place is this pizza joint where you can find freshly baked pizzas that are penny cheap. It’s here that I got into talking with the guy owning the shop. I could guess that he wasn’t British, but couldn’t guess that he was from Iran (he looked European). I told him that I had seen some of Majid Majidi’s films and had found him to be brilliant in his craft. He turned out to be a bigger fan of Shahrukh Khan – I was hoping he’d have taken some other name….but so be it. Chatting further he asked me if I was a Hindu. I said yes. He felt that religion was nothing but a business to make money, and asked me if I felt the same. Honestly, I didn’t. Because if it were, it’d make us the richest economy I the world! On another note, I do not go to temples often, neither does my family have many ceremonies and customs performed. So I felt it’s a personal discretion, that the religion can’t and doesn’t dictate. What do you believe in? he asked. And this is what he went on asking me later. Hmm…let me see…I was trying to look for an answer, but was totally lost. A person who has ever had to answer this question would know my state. My struggle to give a quick, yet a discernable answer was made worse by his continuously asking me the same question. “Tell me my friend. What do you believe in!”. I had to reply, and just to shoot something at him, I said – myself. Myself? What did I just say? It sounded funny to me and wondered if it was the best I could come up with. Anyways, I had spoken, and unless he was momentarily deafened by some miraculous cancellation wave, he’d have heard it. As I would’ve expected, he dismissed the answer, and asked me the question again. I told him that I wasn’t able to grasp what he was looking for, and hence wouldn’t be able to answer his question. I mean c’mon…You believe in so many things right from your philosophies. So though it’d be ideallic to have one belief that drives the way you live each day, each moment, it’s often not the case. Finding no answer from me, he started with his discourse. Why are you a hindu. Just because your parents are, and their parents were? How much have you tried to find your own beliefs. People don’t eat cows because it gives them milk. What the f*. A goat gives you milk, a sheep gives you wool. Why all these foolish practices when we are all going to die in the end. Why do we need to go through this cycle of living? He sounded much like a rigid anti-hindu, which got me into a defensive mode trying to defend. But soon I realized he was denouncing all religions. Islam, Jews, Christians, He touched them all, rejecting them all one by one. I was shuffling between being convinced at one moment, and finding him just another pseudo-intellectual at another. However, his narration was quite animated and gripping. Which made me spend close to 45 minutes there. I had no answer for his questions on idol worship and its likes, and found myself at the wrong end, as I’m one of those lesser hindus if compared with the average of the lot.

Going by his narrative, I was waiting for an enlightening conclusion, which turned out to be a little bland in the end though. He told me that his ideology is to take 5 minutes out every night to retrospect on his day, his past, and how it fits into his entire life. And to think about a supreme power in those 5 minutes. This way he said, if there’s a god-you were right all along. And if there isn’t, you didn’t lose much in those 5 minutes every day, and besides you’d never know that you were wrong once you die. Interesting concept I thought, but nothing that you’d have heard or thought for the first time.

Nevertheless, he had asked me to live with a motive, and try and find my beliefs in life. So, the quest goes on...