Abomination of desolation and grace |
With wartime rhetoric adopting a deeply eschatological colour, the "abomination of desolation" has resurfaced to evoke the prophesied ruin of the Temple. Applying the gravity of this phrase to the secular world, the true desolation of our time is visible to all: the ultimate temple is human life on Earth, and the abomination is the systematic devastation of war. Something needs to be said about the human condition. Every few centuries, this race messes up its affairs so incontrovertibly that it starts daydreaming about the sweet release of civilisational death rather than putting its house in order. To our collective loss.
Before I build on this thesis today, I need to squish a bug. Ostensibly, India's External Affairs Minister has used contumelious language against Pakistan. If you want to grasp the hate behind his choice of words, do not look them up in a dictionary; ask someone what they mean on the Indian streets. Imagine: the land that gave the world Gautam Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi is now churning out such gifts that keep on giving. But I do not intend to pay him back in the same coin. When such language comes from such a high office and is deployed in an official setting, it can only be interpreted as a call for help. Jealousy and hate are the worst subplots to get lost in. Since grace has always served us well, I offer it to him now, with the sincere prayer that he gets well soon.
Back to our thesis. Just look at the nature of the beast. Three conflicting parties are invoking religious iconography with righteous claims. Pay attention, and their versions of endism are slight variations of the same concept: the same idea of God, an........