Thursday, April 21, 2011

The Alien Franchise...

"yada yada hi dharmasya
glanir bhavati bharata
abhyutthanam adharmasya
tadatmanam srjamy aham"


Is what Lord Krishna says in the Bhagavat geeta which means “Whenever and wherever there is a decline in religious practice, O descendant of Bharata, and a predominant rise of irreligion--at that time I descend Myself” thus giving the Mankind a hope and assurance against anarchy. Almost all the faiths around the world function around an imaginary power they call ‘God’, ‘Messaih’, ‘Prophet’,’Guru’ etc. to create ,protect and destroy mankind. I am sure I would not alone when I hoped my Math paper or a bad code review or at least my performance appraisal would qualify as this rise of irreligion for the God to hit the restart button to life. I am proud of myself for not giving up hope even if there were minor setbacks in my expectations so far.

Not so long ago I came across an interesting article that there are theories furnishing that the Earth was invaded by the aliens not recently but around thousands of years ago who are now being worshipped as Gods by the mankind. The author of the article noticed an interesting behavior from an African tribe which sparked his interest in the research about the subject. During the first world war, the Allies were supposed to have stationed themselves in a remote African tribal village to enable a more clandestine war and accessed the land by special aircrafts which brought in all the necessary food and groceries. Some of them were even shared with the natives who were in awe of the people needless to mention all the modern equipment they never knew of. The soldiers moved on to their homelands after the war while one of them returned after a couple of years to check on a friend he had made during those years. He noticed things had changed in the village and people were more religious now that they had a God. He saw that the villagers were worshipping a wooden aircraft structure at the spot where the aircraft carrying the food used to land during the war with a hope that one day the God would bring them the food as he did during the war. The more I think about this the more sense it makes and the more scary our world looks.

What if our Gods really were Aliens who had advanced technology which we never knew existed when they came to the earth? They had a spaceship we call pushpaka Vimana, a glowing weapon we call Vajrayudha, a leaders who had four heads or someone who could play melodious flute that mesmerized people around him or who had a swirling weapon we called Vishnu Chakra? That would make the Prophets /Gurus of the present day ordinary folks who could just ape the aliens in some way thus revered as Gods. What if the story of the tribal village applies to all the mankind? What if the aliens who formed a solid subject to numerous Hollywood and some very bad bollywood movies were not just visitors to earth but a center of the faith system to the entire Earth? Scary huh?

If this were to be true, all hell would break lose. I use the word Hell for the lack of any other word as this would also cease to exist if there were no heaven where the Gods (who don’t exist) live. Then let’s just say All Planet X would break lose assuming the Aliens live on Planet Y. Religion which is an integral part of our lives would be just a joke as they would just refer to an alien creature we thought was God. I could not help but imagine how ridiculous we would look to worship Lord Rama or Goddess Durga if they turned out to be aliens. And the hymns we sing in their praise would be an exponential of the ludicrosity.

On the flipside, it appears to be such an efficient way of bringing order to an anarchy if that's what the Earth was when the Aliens first visited her. If all this is true, then kudos to them for having established their franchise so competent and foolproof in product strategy which custom delivered the form of God, in marketing strategy which invented a form for the earthlings to base their faith up on, and in sales strategy which proliferated the entire planet that it survived thousands of years without a shred of competition. I wonder if the earth was just a project they had to finish to graduate and forgot to ctrl+z it. We would never know. But it sure lays down the perfect Business Sutra to the so called top business schools that churn out the so called cream of the business professionals in this world or should I say on this planet. Harvard, Stanford can you beat it?