The Wise Man

‘It was poetic justice that England had to be the eventual winner in yesterday’s match” said the Wise Man.

I wondered what was so poetic about this victory except for the swing of fortunes but I suspected he was possibly not happy with the third umpire’s judgment of that on-the-line catch. Don’t you think even the third umpire is a human being and prone to errors, I asked. The wise man had his own theory. And he beat me down with his impregnably strong logic. Toggling between technology and philosophy, he made me realize that anyone asked to function as a God should never go wrong. In this exposition, I was also taught how ‘could’ was different from ‘should’ in the world of supreme beings.

The wise man was a different character in many ways. He had a view about everything on earth. He refused to believe he could be wrong or ignorant. “If only in real life we had a review system like the one in this World Cup, how nice it would be” he started. “There won’t be any wrong doers. The wrong doers will be rightly punished and the wrongly punished will be rightly rewarded. A seemingly guilty culprit will be elevated to the role of a judge and… ”. He had a dozen other examples – all aimed at conveying the same point: The world will be a safe place if there was a referee system for all decisions on earth. 

I was happy to hear this and wished that life really had such a mechanism. I wished I could appeal to such a mechanism and implore for justice in all places where I have been wrongfully punished. I also wished even if it was not available now, I should get a retrospective justice whenever this ‘Referee of Life’ was put in place. I quickly resolved to go home and list out in black ink all the instances where I was deceived, cheated, tricked, swindled (little did I realize they all meant the same thing). I also wondered if I should write down what I have done to others but quickly erased such an idea as the mechanism did not provide for introspection / self-appraisal.

I countered the wise man by saying that even in the world cup, the review system was based on an appeal. And there was a limitation on the number of such appeals. Given my needs and greeds in life, I would have long back exhausted my quota and would have started trading in a secondary market for such a quota. He said, “No, in real life, the RoL will be a permanent feature and he will intervene even without a petition for justice.”. That was egregious to me. I wanted to ask if there would be a referee for every locality and what would happen if my referee had some disagreement with the perpetrator’s referee. Will we have a fifth umpire then? With very few things right and very many things wrong between the sky and the earth, the superman called RoL would be an overworked imposter and would soon turn a monster – preferring to kill the errant than punish. Which meant, if someone chose to pick me for treachery, he would be condemned to death after I declare myself ‘the affected’.   By that reckoning I may have vanished long back, I dreaded.  In any case, that was a good idea I thought.   I richly deserved justice, I self-pitied.

The wise man, I thought, was impractical in his expectations of life. He was out to demolish the karma theory and the principle of rebirth and re-generation. The centuries old myth of ‘this birth’s good deeds passing on to next’ was rendered unnecessary by the advent of such an imposing referee I thought. But his idea triggered in me a process of thought : In what is supposed to be a sporting event where everyone is expected to behave sportingly, we have serious checks (third umpire)  in place.  Whereas in real life, where we ought to have had uncompromising dispensation of correctitude, we have serious aberrations. Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will use it, I concluded.