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     I am starting this blog to share my reflections on various aspects of life including history, religion, science, health, politics and literature. Please know that I am not expert on any subject. I am not going to reveal any startling new discoveries. Let me say that

 I am indebted and grateful to many great thinkers and writers from whose life and writings I have learned a lot and developed my views.

     I invite you to dialogue with me thru this blog. I hope you will join with me on this exciting journey! Here is my first post:

                                     SILENT SKY

                      

      At the time of a famine in Somalia, a few years ago, one father started walking with his eight children toward a city where there was a relief camp providing food and medical care. It was a forty-mile long journey. On the way, one by one, seven of his children died of hunger. When this man reached the camp and handed his surviving child to a doctor he knelt down and kissed the earth to thank God. One cannot say whether he thanked God for receiving seven of his children in his care or for the eighth one receiving doctor's care.

     During Kumbh Mela (a regularly held religious fair for Hindus in India) thousands of people gather and a few hundred die in stampede on each occasion. A worshipper asked a Hindu priest, "Why does this happen? We have been preached that anyone who makes a journey for an auspicious cause attains his desired objective." He got the reply, "God sometimes helps people who do good deeds by rescuing them from the pains and aches of their life. It is beyond our human intelligence to fathom God's plans. Jay ho Shri Ram!” On a radio in a nearby shop, a 'bhajan' (a song of worship) was playing, "O God! Your mercy is without any bounds..."

      In the Yugoslavian civil war during the last decade of twentieth century hundreds of Muslims were killed by some from the Christian community in Bosnia. At that time no religious or political leaders from the countries of middle-east made much of an outcry. Preachers of Islam kept on making usual pronouncements: "Allah is great! Only those who believe in Him will go to heaven on the day of judgment. The disbelievers will receive severe punishment."

     Under the rule of Hitler in Germany thousands if not millions of Jews were sent to concentration camps just for being Jews. There they lived in inhuman conditions and underwent starvation. Many of them looked up to the sky and asked, "Our Savior! Where are you? When will you come to rescue us?" They received only silence from the sky. Even when mothers with their young ones in their arms walked into the gas chamber, the sky remained silent.

     After the scale of death and destruction of the second world war that ended in 1945, a skeptic respectfully said to a Guru (a knowledgeable religious teacher), " In our religious scripture 'Gita', Lord Krishna is supposed to have told Arjuna, his disciple, that whenever the burden of sins becomes too great on this earth he incarnates himself and arrives on the earth to destroy all evil. Then why does he not arrive now?" Swamiji replied, "God will definitely reincarnate himself when the burden of sins becomes truly unbearable." The skeptic tried to console himself, whispering "May be the misery of human kind has not reached the unbearable point yet."!