Ends and means

Official day, calendar are marked by date, times fixed by astrologers who have confidence of paranoid people in power.

Now that the Vatican has confirmed that the world will not end on December 21, as predicted in some old Mayan calendar, science has met religion in harmony. NASA has been publishing articles on its website, for many months now, to show that the doomsday story is a hoax. Scientist David Morrison created a special Doomsday 2012 Fact Sheet in September on the NASA website because “opinion polls suggest that one in 10 Americans worry about whether they will survive past December 21 of this year.”

So the US government, too, has put out a reassuring notice to calm its citizens. In the blog titled “Scary Rumours about the World Ending in 2012 Are Just Rumours”, it says, “The world will not end on December 21, 2012, or any day in 2012. Unfortunately, these rumours have many people frightened, especially children. NASA has received thousands of letters concerned about the end of the world.”NASA veteran David Morrison put out the fact sheet because he was getting messages from children, who said they were sick or thinking of suicide because of the feared end of the world. The space agency has published a video, Just Another Day, on its website.

The trusting faithful are in a frenzy around the world. In my home state of Karnataka, lawmakers in the upper house brought up the issue on December 21 because the local television channels have the worst of the assorted numerologists, astrologers, vaastu (architecture) frauds and such, setting ridiculous tasks of poojas and appeasements to the deities to survive The Flood. The Internet has fed the panic, sending people around the world out to camp on hilltops, safe resorts and in ready-to-escape arks.

So, what is interesting is that the Vatican’s opinion is based on a scientific premise, not faith. The director of the Vatican Observatory, Reverend Jose Funes, has said that because the universe is expanding, it will break at some point but “not for billions of years”. Apart from the disaster movie 2012, which created a popular imagination of the catastrophic end, the world has been visited in recent years with frightening earthquakes, tsunami and natural tragedies to move many of us to faith, but the idea of the end-of-the-world is also attractive to the faithful because it confirms the immanence of the ultimate one.

In an uncertain world, the need to believe in an almighty force is so strong that even evidence in destruction is, perhaps, welcome. The give-me-a-sign desperation will make the doomsday predictions engaging for even the marginal believers. Magazines and TV shows in India have found that the end-of-the-world features and shows sell big and continue to publish them at regular intervals. No matter the world has survived all the ‘end-ist’ predictions, there is always renewed fear or belief and there will be new converts. The intense competition faced by Indian TV channels, which depend more on advertising than subscription, has created a space for semi-literate spooks, who buy TV time to invite call-in consultations for the distressed clients. The solutions offered range from the usual “change the spelling of your name”, “break down the north wall of your bathroom”, to urging them to walk down Chowpatty beach and eat bhel puri.

The tendency of superstition in India is now so strong that it has been made virtually official. In Karnataka, ministers were given official instructions last month to desist from breaking down partition walls in their official rooms in the state legislature building on grounds of bad vaastu. For many years, local councillors in Bangalore refused to work out of a new municipal building because it brought bad luck. Ministers are known to bury animals live, pour down barrels of milk or ghee on made-up gods and participate in other rituals to secure their fortune. The official day and calendar is now marked by dates and times fixed by idiot astrologers and charlatans who have the confidence of these paranoid people in power. What does it matter that the sun rises and sets every single day? There is so little ‘auspicious’ time to work that it hardly ever gets done.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 14^th, 2012.