“The next one is always better”. My friend said with an authority of a highly experienced person. We both were standing in front of my house and he was telling me about his new love interest. His previous girl-friend was conveniently given a quiet burial by him and neither did I try to mention her. Imagining the benefits of putting this statement to practice in our future life, we burst out laughing.
We were in our 10th std and little did we realize that the statement can affect our lives in ways we could not have imagined.
During the course of our friendship, my friend applied this statement diligently with respect to his love life. Later, when the job scene descended, sure enough, he applied the statement to his career and the meaning of the statement changed to ' The next job is always better '. Success, ultimately came to him.
Time passed quickly. I had completed reading the book 'Autobiography of a yogi'. The book had given me the puzzle pieces to form the grand picture of God. However the big picture was still missing. How do I relate the spiritual fact that the world is an illusion to the law of karma? Why is god formless and why is he everywhere?
How I wish my father’s guru was alive. He could have answered all my questions about god. His death itself gave rise to few questions in my mind. My father’s guru before departing for South Africa, had left a note for my father and he gave it to my father’s friend. As fate would have it, my father received the same when it was too late. The note, apart from stating that he is leaving this world assured my father that he is not dead and that he will always be with him.
What? People don’t die?? After the miracle in the Sanskrit exam, understandably, I could not dismiss his words easily. Morever, the scientific law that - All is energy and Energy can neither be created nor destroyed lent support to the assertion of my father’s guru.
It started to seem like a race to understand God and its creation. My competitors, the scientific community, wasn't sure as to what is the nature of the Universe either. They were getting desperate as there was no other reason for them to spend 10 billion dollars ( 50,000 crores ) to build the Large hadron Collidor ( The LHC ) to understand the nature of atoms which are anyways 99.9999% empty! Isn’t this the kind of thing that would make a reasonable person pause.. I wondered.
Time passed slowly this time. I was beginning to get frustrated. I thought maybe I am going mad and that maybe the race between me and the scientists is best left to the scientists. I didn’t know what to do or whom to ask.
Then I opened the morning newspaper and got my answer. God heard me again!
God is the best magician..I realized. He executes the impossible trick of commanding respect of billions of people without ever showing himself!
The newspaper was edited on that day by Chairman of Infosys- Narayana Murthy. In it, he wrote and I quote- “ I do not understand why people read fiction. Life is the biggest fiction”.
Ah.. Narayana Murthy was also in the race to understand God and its creation. Surely then, I thought ..it was worth running. The thought of me wanting to quit the race was erased immediately and I began to take the liberty of comparing myself to Narayana Murthy. well..atleast in some respects. I also wondered who else was also in the race and who had finished the race.
The statement of Narayana Murthy also showed me that the next thing I had to do was pick and read the next book. Perhaps, God was wanting me to put the statement ' The next one is always better' to practice...:)
P.s- Please do not use the statement in your love life while you are in a relationship. It can have unintended and unforeseen consequences.