| September 11, 2008 | Thursday | Ramazan 10, 1429 |
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Dying for a holiday
THE chauffer asked for leave on Wednesday. He had to urgently visit his children, he said, before the world came to an end sometime during the day.
He had read about the arriving doom in a Hindi newspaper and produced a copy of Punjab Kesri as proof.
There was no tension on his face, no nervousness either. It was just a plain matter-of-fact request for leave. He was prepared to die, it was obvious, but preferably in the company of his children. In some ways the end of the world was not too different for him from a nice long picnic or a weekend outing with the family before going for a year-long duty, say, on an oil rig.
The Tamil office boy flashed a similar story from a Tamil newspaper. He wore a broad grin, not because he did not believe in the prophecy of arriving doom but because of the comfort, I suspect, of everybody going down together. TV channels vended a spiced-up version of the story. Gullible audiences already numbed into believing their daily tripe of ghosts and witches ever so routinely dished out these days began to chant prayers.
Not everyone was fatalistic, of course, about the widely anticipated $10bn experiment on Sept 10, 2008, on the France-Switzerland border. The Large Hadron Collider was assembled as a perfectly circular 27-km underground tunnel that thousands of scientists were glued to. Some cynically argued that with the money the world could have cured cancer, but the physicists felt it was more important to discover — with some luck — the secret to The Theory of Everything. A much tinier group of people believed the huge particle accelerator experiment could spell the end of the world.
The LHC was put together as a giant particle accelerator, which, by smashing one particle into another, would tell us amazing things about the birth of the universe. At least that’s what scientists hoped. But the naysayers worried nevertheless that the contraption was not 100 per cent safe. They thought that it was possible the collider could produce micro black holes and dangerous ‘strangelets’, and that catastrophic effects from these could not be ruled out. For them, this was a science-laced variant of eschatology, which otherwise promotes religious theories of the end of the world. Other variants that celebrate doom are millenarianism, end-time belief, apocalypticism, and a few other assorted disaster scenarios.
Islam refers to the last judgment. Khomeini, for all the criticism heaped on him, kept his followers at a safe distance from doing something foolish to hasten it. I have heard throngs in the national cemetery of Bahisht-i-Zehra in Tehran chant the refrain: ‘Biya Biya Mehdi Biya, Ya Waris-i-Khoo-i-Khuda. The men and women were asking Imam Mehdi to appear from his divine hiding to deliver the followers from a sinful world and into the promised Bahisht. An extremist group called Hojattiyeh took a literal view of the chant. A diplomat who served in Tehran told me how Khomeini had to lock up these leaders after a Hojattiyeh plot was unearthed to throw incendiary bombs into the Soviet Union.
According to the plan, the provocation would invite Moscow’s ire and hopefully, it would dispatch troops or bombers to get even with the miscreants. The United States would move in to foil the Soviet plan. In the ensuing Third World War the infidels, including Saddam Hussein and the Israelis would go to hell. And Mehdi’s followers would be delivered. It goes to Khomeini’s credit, according to the version of the diplomat’s account of the incident, that he saved the world from dangerous brinkmanship, if not a disastrous holocaust.
Some Buddhists believe in the disappearance of Buddha’s teachings. The Christian end of world is linked to the Second Coming of Jesus. Hindus believe in the cycle of ages and Zoroastrians may have had the first codified end-of-world theory. None of them had accounted for a scientific experiment that could hasten salvation or doom, depending on your point of view.
According to a BBC catalogue, possibly prompted by the commotion surrounding the LHC experiment, prophecies of doom have a history of failure. Jehovah’s Witnesses have predicted the end several times, but have stopped. Millerites predicted the end of the world for Oct 22, 1844. The day is now known to the followers as the Great Disappointment. Edgar C. Whisenant wrote 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Could Be in 1988 — followed up with predictions for 1989, 1993 and 1994 and Argentinian goalie Carlos Roa gave up football in anticipation of the end of the world in 2000 and so on.
My own tryst with the fanfare surrounding the end of the world came with a Pentecostal proselytiser. Ivy Nathaniel was well in her 80s when she came one early morning to my brother’s home to tell his wife, her daughter, to organise a family lunch very quickly. There was no time to waste, she said, her eyes gleaming with joy. This was probably some time in the late 1980s or early 1990s.
Apparently Rev. Moon, the arch rightist preacher, had signalled that the promised Raptures were nigh. The outcome was a quickly assembled mouth-watering lunch with hot rotis and chutney. Ivy Bua never gave up hope and continued to pray for an early rendezvous with her Maker till one day she finally passed away in her sleep.
Rumours about mankind’s tryst with collective death may have resulted in failure all along but they successfully spreads like prairie fire nevertheless. Sociologists have tried to explain the success rate of rumours in India on the nation’s social fault-lines and on an opaque system of governance that leaves ordinary questions unanswered.
In September 1995, news spread across India and from here to the rest of the world that Lord Ganesha, the elephant-headed deity whose birthday many millions are celebrating this week, was gulping milk by the spoonfuls. Scientists sought to explain the happening as a result of capillary movement in which the milk only appeared to be disappearing into the mouth of the deity.
Whatever the truth, the zeal resulted in milk prices skyrocketing. Also henceforth, as a believer remarked in a lighter vein, future devotees would think twice before preparing elaborate offerings for a deity. Their confidence that the gods do not eat it and that it would be a feast for the devotees was badly shaken. What is a religion after all if at the end of the day there is no feast on offer. That’s perhaps the reason why the chauffer was calm about all the wild stories swirling over the scientific experiment in Euorpe. For him it was one more divine intervention that offered an opportunity for having a celebration, a holiday.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com
