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A Response To Decoding PK By Amish Tripathi

By Amritanshu Pandey

09 January, 2015
Countercurrents.org

In the days since watching PK and observing the reaction to it, I felt like voicing my opinion as well, but a catalyst was lacking. Author Amish Tripathi’s article in the Hindustan Times, titled Decoding PK, proved to be that source. As I read it, I could sense that something in it seemed jarring, but only after another reading could I place it well. By using seemingly innocuous terms such as idol-worship, spiritual masters, and theology, the article gives the impression of objective critique. But dare I say, it misses the point at several places, and misleads at others.

The prime problem with PK, the article makes us believe, is its critique of idol-worship. Certainly, one can imagine sincere believers who do follow idol-worship rituals feeling offended at the random-stone-with-paan-turned-sudden-idol scene. That however is hardly PK’s chief problem with the faiths he finds on Earth. When discussions turn to god and religion, it is important to distinguish between two gods- Spinoza’s god, and the god of religions. While Baruch Spinoza did categorically state that by god he did not mean nature, Spinoza’s god is now a term commonly used to define the unknown forces at play behind our existence. Other words for it range from simply nature to the cause of all causes.

This is not, for the most part, what atheists are denying. Of course there is an underlying cause for you and I to be alive at this moment, for the earth to be rotating around the sun, and for the sun to be only one of an unimaginably large amount of similar bodies. But the precise point of contention is that we do not know anything about it, even though a surprising majority of us accept definitive claims about it- bringing us to the god of religions. PK is not really criticising idol-worship, what it criticises is the hypocrisy of blind idol-worship existing in parallel with abject moral and spiritual vacuity. The article asks for a cogent, theological answer to why idol-worship is wrong. The answer it offers is precisely the reason why the question is tautological. If you’re looking for a theological refutation of a theologically-held belief, the only answer on the table is ‘my god said so.’ Under this analysis, PK is agnostic, exemplified in the protagonist’s climactic dialogue- I know of two gods. One is the god that created us, the other is the god you have created. I know nothing about the god that created us.

Next, the usage of spiritual masters in the context of PK is severely misleading. There simply should not exist a term under which a Buddhist lama in a Himalayan monastery and a Mirnal Baba can be clubbed together. PK has nothing against the Buddhist lama, who can only impart certain techniques for you to adopt in your search for the god that made us. It has everything against the fraudster who lures you towards the god that we created. The distinction that becomes important here is between religion and spirituality. The antagonists PK rails against are specifically not spiritual masters, they are religious opportunists.

The above distinction specified, the third point must be made against the easy statement regarding living spiritual masters enabling idol-worshipping cultures to ‘change in the times of fast change.’ I wonder when a living, dead or fictional spiritual master will enable the desert-dwellers of Rajasthan to break the caste-based conditions that define even the colour of their clothes and folds of their moustaches as they have for hundreds of years. But that aside, let us focus on the article’s penultimate paragraph, and imagine a world populated exclusively by people that hold the outlook it espouses therein. Does a true understanding of PK’s message criticise such a planet? One populated exclusively by humans that see the divine in everything, worship all faiths, and respect nature and the environment? No, on that planet our alien friend would not have had a problem. A human such as that described above is unlikely to rob and flee from a perplexed, naked man in the middle of nowhere to begin with. The problem thus, is that humans such as this are possibly a minority, with an even lesser share in public opinion. What most humans believe seems to affect neither their morality nor the consideration of their actions. And PK only points us to the hypocrisies that create this dilemma. Few would disagree with the article when it proclaims its love for Spinoza’s god, but in either case the discussion would have nothing to do with PK and the god of religions.

A last point must be made about the gentle frustration in the article regarding PK’s specific focus on one religion. I for one loved the subtle jibes the movie took on the other faiths, but the issue is a matter of statistics. If more than 80% of India’s population is of a particular faith, one must at least allow for a proportionate majority of agnostic/atheistic movies to focus on that faith in particular!

Amritanshu Pandey is a writer and author of the novel The Seal of Surya. I live in Gurgaon and work for one of the many corporations that dot the city's landscape. My interests lie in the fields of rationalism, skepticism, religion and the politics of religions institutions. I am on Twitter @amritanshu_soa





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