Evil and revenge are the cardinal sins of the spiritual world, yet it is these very vices which are most dominant in human behavior and thought     

    Dr. Jernail S. Anand

     If you want to flush evil, use the detergent of goodness.

Am I wrong if I say this world, particularly man’s life, is the result of some evil committed somewhere in the cyber space, and we are here to pay for those offences? Wasn’t man, thrown out of the Garden of Eden, and consigned to this earth, to pay for the act of ancestral disobedience? Our life on earth is an extended version of Adam and Eve’s life, paying for the original sin.

We are under a curse. We have been given the freedom and a free will to dispel this curse, and return to godly realms, freed of all charges. [‘Ba-Izzat bari’- acquitted of all charges]. But the way things are shaping up, one wonders if men remember this predicament of man? He is already under penalty – does man realize this? A child, before he is born, carries on his head, the burden of crimes his forefathers had committed, and gods expect him to expatiate for it? Year after year, century after century, millennium after millennium, man, in his epical ignorance and pride, has engaged in battles which caused rivers of blood, yet failed to flush the evil that has prospered in the ribs of mankind.

IS MAN REALLY KIND?

Mankind. Is man really kind? I wonder. ‘Kind’ is a word which has lost all reality. Men are mad, crazy, wild, ruthless, angry, revengeful, killers, slaughterers, – but ‘kind’? No, not even to themselves. Man has ravaged nature, he has ravaged his environs, he has famished his neighbors, and the only dominant trait in the character of man is ‘madness’. Humanity, therefore, is best described as ‘Madkind’.

I wonder if man, at all carries the lingering feeling of being under a curse? Or even a prison term? Do we behave like a man who is suffering because of the sins of his grandparents? Man carries no such guilt complex. He is of his own, on his own, and for his own. Another issue is: how long men will have to suffer for that one blunder? Did it have such a lengthening shadow, that even today, when epoch after epoch, we have seen rivers of blood, have not men paid for the crimes that their forefathers had committed? Are we still to suffer? When will this sentence be over? Or is this pain eternal? Is there no end to the pain of Faustus?

EVIL BREEDS ON EVIL

I have a strong feeling that evil breeds on evil. If you want to flush evil, you need the detergent of goodness. No logic, no law, no punishment can bring a man back from the romantic domain of crime and sin. Don’t you remember the most talked about word, in the human dictionary is ‘Fall’ which we discuss and practice with immunity.

OF EVIL AND REVENGE

Evil and revenge are the cardinal sins of the spiritual world, yet it is these very vices which are most dominant in human behavior and thought. It is evil which makes a film worth watching, and revenge makes it worth enjoying. We have no qualms when the good are punished and the evil celebrate in loud voices the defeat of forces of goodness. If we look within, we shall see, I can claim it with certainty, we are not for good. We are not on the side of good. In other words, we can make a claim that evil makes things romantic, and worth watching. We should not forget that all novels, all drama, all films – talk about people who have gone astray. There won’t be any takers for a film, which has no evil, no revenge, no killings, and no conspiracies, to show and thus provide lethal entertainment to the viewers.

Devil’s commands cannot be easily resisted. He wrests man’s mind and drains his wisdom.

It is only the poet, the writer, the philosopher, whose thoughts run counter to the evil mongering that characterizes our world. Only they challenge these tendencies and create in their imaginations a world which is free from strife. Only they uphold good, while the whole world denounces it. Beyond them, are the saints who preach the gospel! Good and God have their sympathizers only among the poets and the saints. With religions going the devil’s way, Gods can depend only on poets, who are the saving grace of this humanity.

QUENCHING EVIL

One only wishes we could save a great man like Macbeth from committing the crime and then, suffering a terrible fate. We wish we could have saved Lear from going mad. Alas, evil had not been so pervasive, so evasive and so persistent, that we could have saved great Oedipus from the foul writ of fate. Millions of men are now writing with their lives, the stories of evil in as many ways. Alas we could cry halt, and stop.  Alas we could make them stop for a few minutes and count ten.

Devil’s commands cannot be easily resisted. He wrests man’s mind and drains his wisdom. He opens before his eyes a vistas in which he can commit a crime, which will remain undetected. Mind has a tendency to loosen itself like animals grazing in a grassy land. Evil thoughts come so naturally to us, it is surprising, yet not surprising at all, because, out of the hundred thoughts that we entertain during the day, and the hundred acts that we perform, ninety are morally indefensible. It is the realm of the foul in which we prefer to stay. God and goodness are left to fend for themselves, we are the ambassadors of Evil. Because Evil recognizes you faster, it decorates you, and brings to you the glamour of life, whereas Goodness is a prosaic trajectory, which makes life turn slow. A swine rejects the offer of gods to go and live in heaven because he finds no thrills, no frills, no excitement, nothing worth a lifetime, when he is told that in heaven there are saints in white clothes remembering and meditating god, and there are streams of clean crystal water flowing nonstop.

FIGHTING EVIL

Films are highly refined pieces of literature, in which we see the stories come to life, and characters start riding reality. In films, we see visual fights between the hero and the villain, and finally, the hero vanquishes the evil. Even in great epics, we see evil-incarnate Ravana, and Kamsa finally fall. Duryodhan left the world centuries back. Shakuni too was killed. But a question which survives all this bloodshed is: Has evil come to an end? Has craft and scheming died with Shakuni? Has blindness gone with Dhritrashtra? Was all that blood which was shed in Kurukshetra worth it because, our world is no different from that world of Kaurvas and Pandvas. Nothing has changed. Does it mean we faltered in dealing with evil?

When Lord Krishna maneuvered the end of Kaurvas, evil should have died for ever. And we should have been living in comparative peace. But it has not happened. I think a war of words would have been more appropriate. Instead of physically killing them, it would have been more appropriate if their evil could have been killed. Even today, we think the hero must eliminate the villain and beat him black and blue, blood dripping from his ribs… only a sight like this satisfies the clammy wits of front-seaters. In fact, our understanding of evil is highly immature and in spite of the epic fights, and loss of blood, we still believe Gabbar can be killed. Gabbar can be killed, but long live Evil. Which is alive even today. Gabbar dead is more powerful than Gabbar alive. He has left in our minds a streak to love and romanticize crime.

Evil can be quenched either with Goodwill or with Forgiveness. The road of revenge is littered with blood as we start liking blood and gore, and taking keen interest in it. If we look at the films being screened these days, evil is present in an exalted form. If in an old film, a villain killed ten people, now, we the viewers are not happy till he has killed hundreds in a series. That accounts for the success of serials based on psychos and serial killers. TV serials like Crime Patrol have millions of subscribers. Violence, crime, drugs, sex and nudity are the cardinal ‘virtues’ which ensure the success of a movie. This is for our passion for evil.

THE SLUM WOLF

It is wrong to think that evil, monsters, devils are living in some slum areas of heaven, called hell. They are invisible angels which are always controlling our minds and stay within and about us. Their presence can be shown with the help of a representation. If evil is represented in dark color, and good in white, then the entire screen of the mind will be black, with only a few bright spots, like stars in a dark sky.

Evil needs no invitation. It is ready to jump into your lives. It is away from you only so long as you are alert. So long as you respect the boundaries of good and bad. Once you lose your scruples, you slip into the mire of evil. Evil angels get into action immediately.  If we compared the elements of good and evil in this world, we will come to the conclusion that evil is predominant all around. It will mean that the element of goodness has gone down, or just evaporated from human society. Where has good gone? And from where has evil come and camped in human heart? These are eternal questions to be pondered over. I wonder if this rhyme can help a bit:

Good and evil are settled states,

Like elements,

A part of our being

They rise up when someone tickles them. 

Read: Evil: Social Mores and the Evil that Lurks Behind Them

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Dr. Jernail Singh Anand, President of the International Academy of Ethics, is author of 161 books in English poetry, fiction, non-fiction, philosophy and spirituality. The Academy of Arts and Philosophical Sciences, Bari [Italy] recently honored him as a Honorable Academic. He was awarded Charter of Morava, the great Award by Serbian Writers Association, Belgrade and his name was engraved on the Poets’ Rock in Serbia. Recently, he was awarded Doctor of Philosophy [Honoris Causa] by the University of Engineering and Management, Jaipur. Recently, he organized an International Conference on Contemporary Ethics at Chandigarh. His most phenomenal book is Lustus: The Prince of Darkness [first epic of the Mahkaal Trilogy].

Email: anandjs55@yahoo.com  

Bibliography link:

https://atunispoetry.com/2023/12/08/indian-author-dr-jernail-s-anand-honoured-at-the-60th-belgrade-international-meeting-of-writers/