Destiny's Children

By Ranjan Yumnam *

"Our destiny is frequently met in the very paths we take to avoid it."
~Jean de la Fontaine

At some point of time in life, we wonder why bad things happen to good people while slimy characters enjoy a disproportionate amount of happiness without any rhyme and reason. We gasp in disbelief at the slacker winning a lottery while hard-working and law-abiding people rot in penury waiting for their golden chance which never comes.

Why didn't Fate treat all of us equally? If it did, we all would have been geniuses and golf partners of Bill Gates—all of us, including Kaboklei who sweeps my office floor daily. Unfortunately, in the real world, inequality is the norm: some people are filthy rich, successful and endowed with enviable health—by inheritance of birth or sheer good fortune to be in the company of right people at the right place at the right time.

Which is to say, this world is not run on objective mathematical principles of give-and-take but on whims of some seriously deranged Being somewhere up there. In an ideal world, if you work hard and are sincere, it is expected of you to earn more, date more beautiful women, travel more, dress more dandily, and eat much more amazing food than would the slobs ever do.

The only problem to this hypothesis is: It simply doesn't happen that way. Good Samaritans meet with accidents and die in landslides. The average backbencher in the college goes on to become a Money Bag. The illiterate bully of the locality becomes a Minister. In the physics of life, Newton's Third Law doesn't work. Equal action doesn't necessarily elicit equal rewards for all people!

All these life's injustices led me thinking whether we are living out a plotline scripted by a divine providence even before we were born and nothing can be done to alter it. I am not alone in thinking this aloud. Almost all religions agree on some narratives of Predestination. Some religions contend that every breath we take to the minutest details of conversations we have with others throughout our life have already been programmed in Destiny's own code language. Some other faiths also believe that all major events like birth, marriage, accidents and death are pre-ordained and we just fill in the blanks that lie between these milestones.

Hinduism tries to explain the intrinsic inscrutability of the ways of Fate with the concept of karma: bad deeds attract bad events in life while good ones beget good fortune. According to this tenet, whatever happens to us is the consequences of our actions in this life or past lives, and in that sense Kaboklei may be a very hard working woman with a generous heart, but her current situation can only be attributed to her deeds in her former life. You never know, she could have been a serial killer.

Having said that, the belief in Predestination or Fatalism puts one in a philosophical soup. If Destiny is non-negotiable, and free will is a myth, then one can very well quit the day job and idle away at home watching Serendipity and worry nothing about the future. "No," say the followers of Destiny: You just can't stay idle. Destiny decrees that you should keep doing whatever you are now doing for you to become the person it has determined you to be; by any means you have to act out the script of your life.

What about the destiny of a nation or a society? If the individuals' actions are shaped by Destiny's designs than it follows that those actions have a bearing on the destiny of a society for society is just a culmination of the individuals and their actions. However, one would never know whether the destiny of the nation is written first and the individual destinies of men and women are crafted later to fit into the larger narrative of a nation's destiny.

Simply put: Without India and her history of colonial rule by foreigners, could there be a Mahatma Gandhi as we know him today? Did Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's destiny precede the fate of the nation of India? When Jawaharlal Nehru gave that Tryst with Destiny speech towards the midnight of 14th August 1947, was he referring to the destiny of the nation or his own in being the Chosen One to be in a position to deliver that speech.

I don't know which precede which and which is the function of which. Nor can there be a precise answer to this question popping up in my mind right now: Is the demand of the Sadar Hills District or the imposition of Armed Forces Special Powers' Act a manifestation of Manipur's destiny? Are the people's reactions to these issues a predestined phenomenon? I don't know.

In a lighter vein, we can apply the Laws of Destiny to the animal kingdom, plants, the worms, virus, bacteria..? Chances are that God has already written the fate of the hen that is going to land up on your dining table on the New Year's Eve. Even inanimate things have destiny written all over it, the most obvious of which is its expiry date. In the army, there is an eerie feeling of the "bullet that has your name" that will kill a soldier. Somewhere, a virus must have been reproduced lying in wait for its chance to infect you, God forbid, with a nasty flu on a pre-determined date and time.

I don't know why I have written this article, but during the last few days I have watched movies and read novels that centre on the irreversibility of Destiny on people's lives. Adjustment Bureau is the finest movie I have watched on this theme, and I have to admit this movie comes closest to being the inspiration and the spirit of this column. Adjustment Bureau is based on a simple premise that there is a supernatural Bureau led by a Chairman whose sole purpose of existence is to write a Plan for every person and make sure that we stick to the blueprint of our lives.

The Bureau takes up this role because it has lost faith in human beings to conduct their own affairs from past experiences: too many times when the fate of the humankind is left to themselves, they messed up ending in World Wars and other disasters. The movie is a visual treat with Matt Damon in the lead paired opposite the very edible Emily Blunt in this romantic thriller which reveals gradually that all our actions are manipulated by the constant interventions of the Bureau's angels.

We meet these angels everywhere—at the telephone booth, bus-stop, traffic island, on the street—disguised as a salesman or a cop, and they nudge or brainwash us to pursue a predetermined course of action. There is this one poignant scene, in which Matt was supposed to spill his coffee on his overcoat at a specific time to cause a delay of few minutes so that he would miss a bus in which Emily was commuting. The coffee didn't spill and they met in the bus because the Bureau's agent was dozing off in a park. Talk about God's angels goofing up, and boy, what a kismet!

Here's more. The call that came just before you left your house for work, the friend request from an unknown person in Facebook that blossomed into a real life romance, the freak rain that delayed you, the loss of mobile network signal, the traffic jam, etc. are all not just chances but actually the result of intricate planning by the Chairman above, the movie suggests. (It is safe to assume that social networking sites are now a convenient tool in the hands of the Adjustment Bureau agents to bring people together or to separate them).

The funny part is whether you believe it or not, you, my dear reader, you must have been already predestined to read this column. You may not even be a regular reader of this newspaper, but irrespective of where you read this—in a bus, office, home, airport or cyber café—my connection with you is meant to be established this way. If you don't agree, then, it was in your destiny not to agree with me. (May I add ROFL and smilies here, though it is a newspaper column with solemn offline standards).

The good thing about believing in Destiny is that it makes life a lot easier to live, justify the injustices happening in this world, the horrific crimes, the acts of terror, the indignity of some people living obscenely ostentatiously and some not even having a square meal a day. Blame Lady Destiny for these startling sorry state of affairs of this world. She is either a cruel master or a bitch.

Or am I just being escapist, frustrated at our inability to change things for the better? Is my belief in Destiny a surrender to the circumstances—my brand of opium for alleviating the effects of the monstrosity of this world? Am I destined to be ambivalent on the concept of Destiny itself? Why do I doubt myself?

My coffee just spilled.



(Views expressed are personal and do not represent official position)

Ranjan Yumnam

* Ranjan Yumnam, presently an MCS probationer, is a frequent contributor to e-pao.net. He can be contacted at ranjanyumnam(at)gmail(dot)com. This article was posted on August 22, 2011.