Finding God is like reading a film script

You have to keep an eye and ear out for what is said between the lines

I would like to ask a question: ‘God, please show me your Aadhaar card.’

To find him, do I need to walk through dense jungles, climb high mountains or swim to the centre of the ocean? The thought is forbidding.

What if he comes to me instead? My grandmother used to say one has to perform penance or be virtuous to be able to see the supreme power.

Doing penance in today’s context could mean pursuing one’s duties, doing ‘karma,’ to achieve what one is seeking.

Being virtuous and following one’s ‘dharma’ (universal righteous duties) is not easy.

If one can pull it off, one is rewarded with contentment, happiness and ‘moksha’ (freedom from the cycle of rebirth), and remembered or worshipped for generations. But I don’t want to be remembered forever or be worshipped.

Believers say the ultimate universal truth is omnipresent. But I don’t see him! Him? Oops, am I sounding like a male chauvinist? God might be ‘she’ or even ‘it.’

‘It’ could be ‘dharma’, or our conscience trying to guide us all the time, or our ‘karma’. Or it could be a combination of the two, plus more.

However the curiosity around ‘the invisible’ grows.

We believe God sits on the threshold of the main door. Maybe this is because of a mythological story, which goes thus: Hiranyakashipu, king of demons, is granted a boon by Brahma: he can’t be killed by animals, humans and even gods. He can’t be killed within or outside a structure; during the day or at night, neither on the ground nor in the sky. And no weapon can harm him.

So to kill the arrogant demon, who demanded everyone worship him instead of gods; Vishnu took the form of Narasimha, part human and part animal.

He sat on the threshold of a courtyard, neither indoors nor outdoors, he came at twilight, neither day nor night, and he placed the demon king on his thighs, neither earth nor space. Finally, he used his nails, and not any weapon, to kill the terror Hiranyakashapu.

According to this story, God is neither this nor that, neither here nor there, neither now nor then, and so possesses no specific identity.

During my recent visit to Sanchi, near Bhopal, I had the opportunity to see the Tropic of Cancer. Interestingly, the line drawn by the authorities is not one but two, with a gap in between. A gap...

As an actor, I am taught to read a script between the lines, a space where there are no words. There is absolutely nothing visible there but that’s where the details lie. Yes. ‘God is in the details.’

No one observes what lies between two breaths, which decides whether we inhale again.

I guess ‘God’s Aadhaar card will show his address as ‘sitting between our two lines, somewhere on the threshold, and in the twilight.’

(The actor is a singer, writer and director)