If you are an atheist, please read following article with open mind as you might need to broaden your view to understand the following article completely. The following article makes an assumption that god exists and god can be personified.

Have you ever been in a situation where you just wanted to go to a temple for darshan and it turns out that the queue is really long? I guess many of us will say yes. Well, this is a very common scenario where not much big/famous temples in the big cities of India are so much crowded that people decide not to go to those temples from next time. Many, seeing gigantic queue, just give up and return. Yesterday, I was stuck in a similar situation (obviously not for the first time). But this made me thinking of an issue that most of today's semi-agnostic young generation faces, i.e. is it necessary for me to wait in this long queue? Isn't it enough to have in my heart love, respect (and whatever it maybe for that matter) towards god? Won't my god understand that it is worthless to waste half an hour (or may be more) of my long waited Sunday when, at the same time, I can actually enjoy doing something I really like?

All those things came to my mind as I was waiting in the queue and one of my friends dropped a bomb, “Why don't we leave this queue right now and go back home?” Actually I was ready with the answer for this question.

Whenever someone tells me that there is no need to wait in a long queue in front of the temple, I always remember a poem that I learned in my schools days. That poem explained the complex idea of god and god’s relation with humans in very simple words. Following is the literal meaning of the poem.

“God is creator of world, universe and everything. God created man. Being god’s most favorite creation, he decided to give the man, all the possible gifts he could. He gifted the man with precious gifts like intelligence, love, pride etc. When he almost done with gifting, he saw only one thing lying at the bottom of the gift box and that was satisfaction. Here, god waited and thought, if I give away satisfaction too, the man will never remember me. The man will never come back to me ever again. So he stopped there.”

The title of that poem is “The Pulley” and after above explanation the title becomes self-explanatory.

To convey my point of view about this, I will just tell you a couple of lines which I believe in, “By waiting in the queue in front of the temple you are actually loading your side of the pulley to weigh more. Hence afterwards, god will gift you some more to maintain the balance of the pulley”.

Actually, I didn’t explain all this to my friend at that time (Why not? come on people, we were in a temple, not in a philosophy graduates’ meeting) and we waited in the queue and completed with the proper darshan.

At this point, even if we don’t have complete answers of above questions (i.e. issues can be explored further), but we have some insight into the “other” side of the story.

Conclusions:

You know what god might be expecting from you.

Don’t try to be satisfied in life, humans are not gifted with satisfaction.

I forgot the name of poet so the reference remains un-credited. :P

Note: The phrase semi-agnostic is used for those people who believe in the concept of the god but don’t believe in customs that people tell to follow in the name of god.

-AmitHK