Enough has been written on this subject to wallpaper every square inch of the planet if the printouts were to a laid out edge to edge. The Internet space it occupies could, if put to more fruitful purposes, host enough information to the true nature of politics to put that revered business model out of the running forever.

And yet, there are no answers – only vague suppositions, amateur conjecture, the dubious assurances given in the Bible, Koran and Torah, and the impotently dry intellectualism of philosophers. Nobody has really been able to tell us, with immutable logic and indubitable power of conviction, why we crawl across the planet.

No, I don’t have the answer either – but I have two eyes, a like number of ears and a backside that learns reasonably well from experience. Even with limited knowledge, the power of observation and deduction can carry one pretty far. In fact, because everyone has at least a modicum of these faculties, we all know at least SOME baseline facts about the nature and purpose of human life. The problem is that they’re so unpalatable that we look for better explanations.

The best (and worst) I can do here is to stand on my soapbox and spill these facts out in broad daylight. Nobody will thank me for doing this, and I consider it fortunate that I’m NOT here for gratitude. Now, to the subject.

The last office I worked in had a creaky old lift, traveling in which was always new incentive to reflect on whether one’s life insurance policy was still paid up and current. The walls of this death contraption were generously plastered with stickers, posters and scribbles that promoted some product, service or school of thought or the other. One of these, half torn away but still faintly legible, simply stated:

MAN IS BORN TO BE HAPPY.

“WHAT?!?” you scream. “HAPPY?!?! How mercenary! How shallow! How utterly bereft of social spirit! We are here to HELP EACH OTHER!! To make this world a BETTER PLACE TO LIVE IN!!!”

Yeah, right. Okay, your time is up. Gimme my soapbox back.

Let us examine some facts here, shall we? Yes, yes, I know it will hurt, but hey… you can’t expect a perpetual ride through La-La Land, now can you? There have to be way stations, right? Places where we can alight and have a quick cup of hot Realitea before we embark on our cocooned journey again.

Now stop whining. The facts:

* Nobody achieves anything of true universal importance in his or her lifetime

* Suffering achieves no purpose other than to displace happiness

* Nobody’s watching, applauding or preparing a Welcome Cart on the other side

* There IS no other side

I have no real reasons to give you, but I strongly suspect that whoever put that sticker up was right. We are, indeed, here to be happy, simply because being sad is such an inferior option. However, the pursuit of happiness is traditionally equated with hedonism. ‘Hedonist’ is NOT a qualification that most of us would want on our visiting cards. So, even though each of us definitely DOES want more than our share of the good times, we make sure that there’s enough misery in our lives to soothe our uneasy conscience.

Let’s define misery. No, forget the Oxford dictionary, I mean let’s really DEFINE misery here, okay? No farting around with semantics, just the bare bones. Misery is the state in which our wants are not met, and those that were being met before are also compromised. That’s misery. Misery is also other people, but only to the extent that OTHERS get what THEY want and we don’t.

Pretty self-centered, huh?

Did you just mention the bleeding-heart social activist who is miserable because his PEOPLE (or maybe not even HIS people) are being deprived of their rights? Gimme a break. The man may be crazy now, but he wasn’t born that way. He had this harebrained stance implanted into him by his parents, in school or perhaps in the Army. His natural state is as selfish as yours and mine. Anyone whose heart bleeds for others is merely on a sanctified ego trip. And even THIS person is looking for a state of personal happiness, even though he or she erroneously believes that this state is somehow linked with the happiness of others. We are here for ourselves, period.

Closer home, we are often tempted to believe that our purpose on this earth is to serve our family and fulfill their needs. Another ego trip – we just want to get a healthy chomp of the feeling of personal achievement that doing this provides us with. Examined closely, it would logically seem that we would be happier WITHOUT those appendages that we added or were added to us somewhere along the way – if we had never met that doe-eyed beauty, scraped that orphan off the road or taken that doggie home. After all, it’s not as if anyone is desperately UNHAPPY until he/she is married or accepted into the local Lions chapter. It just so happened that we did, thereby inheriting a whole new slew of complications on the final journey towards personal happiness.

Now let’s go to the original model of the human being. No, I don’t mean the protozoa crawling out of the primordial ooze. Not THAT far back, okay? Let’s examine the blighter who recently descended from the trees and found that this cave actually beats that nasty old tree hollow when it rains, shines or freezes over. Did I hear a Christian anti-evolutionist squawk back there? Put a sock in it and read your Bible, okay? We’re talking REAL LIFE here, not your grade of nebulous candy floss. Hey, barkeep, give that poor numbskull a double shot of Holy Water and make him shut up.

I have understandably not met such a recent descendee myself (though I DO get a brief glimpse of him when a traveling relative lands up at my doorstep, asking if he can crash out here for the night.) However, I do believe that the kind of brains going round then were pretty rudimentary, and therefore not too hard to pick. Simple motives.

What did it take to make a caveman happy? No philosophy about the meaning and purpose of life there. Get fed, get laid, keep warm/cold/dry, biff that fuckhead from the next cave on the head if he comes sniffing around your mate, and a swim in the river would go down pretty well, too. Bingo, happiness. Purpose of life achieved in full – let’s file that report! No concerns about the state of the nation, the absence of a red Ferrari or the fact he can’t pay for bambino’s summer camp this year. Just because we’re complicated matters of personal happiness beyond all salvage today doesn’t mean that it is no longer what we want, and what we live for.

Yes, we’re here to be happy, but there is a problem there. Happiness is a highly subjective term, considering that some folks are happiest when someone is whipping their hide to shreds while they’re chained to a post. In fact, some folks are only happy when they’re in the midst of a state that most other humans would pay considerable amounts of moolah to avoid.

Yup, happiness is subjective. By the same coin, so is sadness. Some folks are only sad when they’re in a space that others would equate with happiness. These worthies find the state of being without problems intolerable. If none exist, they bend over backwards and sideways to create problems. You get the picture – happiness and sadness are subjective, and YOUR take on them is by no means the global standard.

Okay, now for your original objection. We are here to help each other, is it? Why are we here to do that? Does our help somehow change the equation? You’re going to die, and so will the dude you’re helping. His life’s purpose is the same as yours – to be happy, period. No more and no less. So now you’re going to fulfill HIS purpose is life, are you?

Even if your help somehow results in him becoming the president of your country some day, everybody in this country is going to die too. You may not have noticed it, but human life comes with a limited shelf life. Whether you help someone else or not, that fact will not change. So, what precisely ARE you achieving? Totting up credits in Heaven for yourself? Well, even if that’s the case, you’re still being selfish, aren’t you?

The purpose of human life is to make this world a better place to live in, you say? Playing God again, are we? This planet is going to hell in a handcart. Nobody on it is going to make a dime or a difference in that fact, or in the Universal context. My guess is that in a thousand years or less, it will be no more than a smoldering cinder cluttering up space. Nobody will have got off it long enough to impact any larger scheme of things. The Earth is an essentially doomed, localized infection, of absolutely no significance to God’s plans for the Big Picture.

No, you are not going to make any difference. Don’t worry and be happy, already. You’re running out of time.

Between jobs a few years ago, I happened to chat with a friend in another town. I mean, I didn’t KNOW I was between jobs then – I merely knew that I’d chucked my old one and was looking for alternatives.

The state of being jobless is a spiritual experience – it is like looking down from the edge of Hell’s chasm, smelling the sulphur fumes and hearing the screams of the tortured while the heat from below singes the hair in your nostrils. Extremely unpleasant, but we tend to remember such times in a moronically sanitized manner in later years. Sometimes we fondly call them ‘the turning point of my life’ or ‘the time when I experienced the spirituality of helplessness.’ We are a dumb race, to be sure, or we’d have been smart enough to extinct ourselves long ago.

The days where one job hunted by wearing out shoe leather are over, of course. What you do today is put out ten bucks, hit the nearest cyber café and wear out your fingers instead, keeping your mobile within grabbing distance the moment you see the words ‘walk-in interview’ on the monitor.

My friend is like me – he can’t stop working. I compared notes with him many years ago, and we’re fairly sure that workaholism is not in our genes. In other words, something has happened to us along the way. The result – we are the first to profess that work is not everything in life, but our lives to do not epitomize that homily. We work as though our lives depend on it, defining Hell as any day on which we don’t have enough work to occupy every spare moment.

“So how’s life?” he asked

“Life sucks,” I replied, only paying marginal attention as I scanned yet another job site. “Am jobless. Am doomed.”

“Why are you doomed?” he asked, his gentle curiosity infuriating me. It seemed to imply that I had missed the point here; that a job is NOT as important as I was making it out to be… that I was some poor ignoramus in the Kingdom of the Enlightened, and that he was here to show me the Way. That, coming from him, was nothing but a joke.

“Am doomed ‘coz am jobless,” I replied, wondering how anyone could question such logic. The jobs portal had great listings for people with 7+ years experience – I had 2.5, and that was pushing it. I was doomed for sure.

“So what’s the big deal about being jobless?” he asked.

Was he sick? Had he got Jesus or Coelho? How can one even THINK of dragging such an important aspect of life down to the level of mere philosophy? I mean, you can probably do that if you have a working wife, which passes off for being gainfully employed in India. Me, I was single and still an adherent of the obsolete school of thought that believes that a man must pull his own freight in life. I know how old fashioned that sounds, but there you are…

My fingers slithered restlessly across the keyboard. My ten bucks in the cyber café were almost used up and I STILL hadn’t found a job. www.jobsforall.com stated that there was an opening for assistant bank clerk for someone of my experience, if I wanted it. I was partly willing to consider it by then.

I was about to hit the ‘end chat’ icon when he threw a simple question my way.

“Why do we make such a big deal out of work, the likes of you and me?”

I mean, what kind of question is that? Work? Big deal? Work is GOD!! Work is all there IS!! All hail the Holy Workload!!!

“We have to keep body and soul together!” I replied. “I don’t know about you, but nobody’s hanging around with a perpetually stocked fridge in MY part of town!”

“I don’t think so,” he replied. “We’re not homeless urchins. We all know enough people who would throw two square meals our way till we die if that was the only criterion.”

“Speak for yourself,” I replied curtly. “I don’t.”

“No? What about your dad back in Hicksville? You telling me he wouldn’t feed you, expecting nothing but a willing ear for his geriatric drivel in return?”

He had a point there. There’s always someone we can suck up to if it comes to safeguarding mere physical existence. The REAL point here, however, was that I would’ve rather DIED than subject myself to such ignominy. Been there, done that, can’t never do it again.

I cannot speak for everyone, of course. Some otherwise virile men seem to be content with mooching off their wives’ earnings, but I think the global standard is that they’d rather NOT be known as doing that. In other words, mere survival is not a real reason for why we work.

“We overwork because we feel that as long as we’re working harder than anyone else, we won’t die,” I hazarded, getting sucked into the discussion despite clearly having better things to do. The job search page for www.getemployedNOW.com jittered suspiciously when I pasted in my threadbare CV. I think it was laughing at me.

“Hmm, there may be some truth there,” he replied. “But we’re all smart enough to know that we’ll die anyway, work overload or no work overload.”

I had no proof to the contrary to offer, but I still had a good answer left.

“We overwork to get away from our overbearing spouses, dictatorial parents, demanding brats or whoever else we have been fuckbrained enough not to jettison from our lives long ago,” I said.

“Does it work?” he asked. “Those chickens always come home to roost anyway, no matter how we try to avoid them.”

Damn him.

“We overwork because our egos demand it,” I shot back. “Because we need to prove to the world that we’re capable of living life on life’s terms.”

“I don’t think so. We may believe during the day that the whole world is watching and evaluating what we do with out lives, but at 2.00 in the morning, everyone of us knows that nobody’s watching at all. Everyone is too tied up in their own shit to give doodly squat about anyone else.”

I was getting pretty hassled about it all by then.

“For the money!” I replied vehemently. “FOR THE GODDAMN MONEY!!! We overwork because we LOVE MONEY!!”

There was a long pause. Then….

“Oh, yeah? Well, how is that you always end up in loser jobs working harder and making much less on it than anyone else?” he asked.

I didn’t reply. He was being unreasonable, and I don’t argue with unreasonable men. Also, he was right.

Finally, he sent me this –

“I think we kill ourselves with work to fight off that dreadful feeling of futility and shame.”

Then the monitor switched to a hideous shade of aquamarine and a ‘gimme more money’ screen came up. My hour of cyber café time was up. I walked out. I didn’t HAVE more money.

He was right. We overwork because we feel our lives are futile if we don’t. We can’t stay away from wrestling with the company’s annual report on a weekend because the company is the only entity on earth that makes us feel validated. We can’t stop working while others are relaxing because if we do we feel like the eunuch in the harem. That explains the ‘Busman’s Holiday’ that Eric Berne outlines in his book ‘The Games People Play’ – (sic) ‘using skills learned in one’s profession to help others without pay while on vacation - for example, Joining the Peace Corps (nominally paid).’

But we also overwork because we fear the Hereafter, where the complete depth of the meaninglessness of our lives will surely be exposed. Sure, the simple fear of death comes in there somewhere, but it goes deeper than that. Even the most die-hard atheist in the lot instinctively works to store up brownie points in the very Heaven that he says he doesn’t believe in. I know of the futility of worldly treasures, titles and adulation – but I’m not sure what waits on the other side of the grave and I don’t want to think about it, either.

What we workaholics do all our lives is work hard enough to feel that we deserve some indulgence in guilty pleasures, snarf up those pleasures, work hard yet again, feel worthy enough for more guilty pleasures, then work even harder. On and on it goes.

We don’t know why we do this, but what we hope without knowing that we hope is that the Someone Upstairs whose existence we don’t think about at all while we’re still alive and in control of things will sigh, throw away the damning tally sheet when we come face to face with Him and say, “Well, you were a totally louse all your life. Look at this – you are a prime candidate for damnation. Hmm, but you sure worked hard. Okay, come in…”

There are days when my family and I are don’t see eye to eye on certain things – like the validity of my life. On such days, I generally do something spiritually uplifting. The guilt-trip scene has limited entertainment value and fails to fascinate me after the first three rounds.

Anyway, I had such a day a couple of weeks ago, so I went to a local church and lent my ear to the priest’s message. Yes, I do that sometimes. It’s not a religious thing – I go to any place of worship where I can possibly learn something of value to me – or at least get a couple of hours of quality time with someone other than me and mine. I’ve attended Muslim discourses, Hindu satsangs and Christian sermons in equal measure.

Well, this evening I was startled to see a rather prominent local Hindu octogenarian sitting in the meager congregation. I usually meet him only when I visit the local park, where he’s something of a permanent evening fixture. He’s a fascinating old man, full of the kind justly acquired wisdom we spend our lives trying to find shortcuts to. I nodded at him with a weary smile and sat down to listen to the sermon.

Not surprisingly, it was on sin. Sin is a very marketable commodity – the more painfully aware you are of yours, the more money some people seem to make. Sin never goes out of style. It keeps us in line, the awareness of sin does.

Anyway, the good priest quoted extensively from the Bible’s Old Testament and generally served up a generous helping of fire and brimstone. In particular, he belabored the various transgressions for which God flash-fried his people before society invented the judiciary, the Income Tax department and organized religion to do the job. I peered over to the old party to see how he was taking it. It was my guess that he did not go much for such stuff. He’s old enough to have outgrown religion and found God instead.

He was looking thoughtful and even nodded geriatrically at some points of the sermon. At other points he grinned toothlessly, the way a grandfather does when his grandson makes a foolish but cute juvenile statement.

After the sermon, I gathered my flayed senses and left the church, one virtual eye peeled for lightning bolts from heaven. My people back at home make it very clear that I will pay for my maddening non-conformism eventually, but they never mention a specific timeframe….

“So what did you think of the sermon?” I asked him as we stopped for tea outside the church gates. He also untied his fleabag Alsatian, who is at least as old as he is in doggie years.

“Oh, very nice,” he replied. I kept a good two feet between us as we talked - he tends to spray people with whatever he’s ingesting if they’re too close while he does sibilants. He doesn’t believe in dentures.

“I mean, did the priest have a point?” I pressed on. “I don’t think about it much, but my family and I have been discussing my failings over the last two days. If they’re right about them, I’ll be out of the reckoning soon. The Man Upstairs has me in His sights.”

He looked out at the thronging crowd on the main road long enough to convince me that he hadn’t heard me. I was about to repeat the question when he turned to me again.

“I agree with him that sin is what distances us from God,” he said. “What we perceive as our sin fills us with guilt. What we perceive as others’ sin fills us with self-righteous pride. In either case, God is kept at bay.”

I listened carefully, knowing that this was a very important moment in my life.

“The priest also says that God can save us from sin. All we need to do is turn to Him and call on him as a friend. Is it that simple?”

He laughed so hard he almost choked on his last sip of tea. His dog looked up at him worriedly.

“I’m sure it is. But then, how many of us consider God our friend? Sin leads to trouble for sure. When we’re in trouble, we turn to our friends, right?”

“Uh… yes, of course,” I replied.

“Well, who do we turn to first when we are in trouble? First to ourselves - we all consider ourselves our best friends. In our hearts of hearts, each of us believes that he or she is the ultimate standard of human virtue and excellence, and that our own resources are the best. When no solution is available within us, we turn to others – starting with our next-closest friend. When finally not even the last person we consider a friend can help, we do what our pride has prevented us from doing until then. We go to last person we’d ever consider approaching. Who is such a person?

“Hmmm, our enemy?”

He nodded sadly. “Yes, the one we obviously consider our enemy – as a last-ditch solution.”

“Who is that?”

He smiled affectionately at me.

“You tell me, my friend – but didn’t you come looking for Him in church today….?”

Religion has almost always been more about going through robotic motions than about lifting one’s soul to the One Above. The world over, we see people engage in pagan substitutions for true worship to Him.

Is He impressed? I don’t know, of course – and not just because the Bible states that God’s thoughts are as far from ours as the East is from the West. I don’t know because if I knew the mind of God, I wouldn’t fear Him. If I didn’t fear Him, it is a pretty safe bet that I’d do whatever the hell I please. Also, if I knew the mind of God, I wouldn’t ask Him for help. After all, knowing someone’s mind is on the same level with being an intellectual equal – and who takes help or advice from an intellectual equal?

So, no – I don’t know the mind of God. Nor does anyone else.

However, try telling that to the ritualistic religion freaks of this world. For them, God is some kind of half-witted alien entity into whose good books one can bribe oneself with puerile temporal offerings. They probably hope to lull the Man Upstairs into the same drone-like state of mindlessness that they work themselves into with their waving, chanting and head-nodding. God knows it has mesmerized ME into somnolence at many a church and temple event. ‘Sleeping Gods don’t bite’ seems to be the logic – so let’s all sing him a lullaby and give him some confectionary to chew on. Sugar improves OUR moods, so why not His?

No, I don’t know the mind of God, and I don’t know what turns Him on and what doesn’t. All I know is that I have this recurring vision that makes me squirm in mortification. It pops up on my mind’s screen every time I attend a church do, puja or, for that matter, any format of Upward-directed mass petition.

The vision is of a bearded Geneva psychiatrist, long in tooth in age and experience, responding to the call of a group of schizophrenic, bi-polarly disordered or otherwise fuse-blown inmates at his facility. This bunch has summoned him for any, all or a combination of the following reasons:

1. They want to tell him what a NICE doctor he is, because they feel that currying his favour will somehow get them out of the mess they’re in

(Do we really think that treating God like a snotty kid who will do his chores if we give Him a pat on the head is an option?)

2. They want him to pass on ‘Hi, how’re you, I’m just fine, sorry-for-pooping-in-your-soup-while-you-were-with-us’ messages to previous inmates who got discharged

(I think it’s logical to assume that the dead take no messages, forgive nobody, or do much of anything other than stay dead)

3. They want him to fix it so that the tummy/foot/tooth doesn’t ache so much anymore

(Can we agree on the premise that pain exists for a reason, and that we need to find that reason to ensure it doesn’t recur? If God would take our aches and pains away, we wouldn’t survive as a human race)

4. They want him to either discharge or lobotomize that punk down the hall who keeps stealing their rationed ciggies

(If He is God of all, what makes us assume that He will cook someone else’s goose just because we don’t like his/her looks? What if he/she made the same request about US?)

5. They want him to rearrange things so that they get more dessert in the lunch hall than any of the others

(Again – if He is God of all, what makes us assume that, on a planet with limited resources, He will hand us more than our fair share if it means taking them away from someone else?)

6. They want him to take them home – but not at the cost of all the benefits they’re enjoying in the nuthouse

(It’s the old conundrum that nobody’s found a satisfactory retort to – everyone wants to go to Heaven, but nobody wants to die)

7. They want him to know that they know how he runs his practice and that they approve of his methods, but that they have certain suggestions for improvement

(Yeah, right. The day God needs the approval or self-serving suggestions of a terminally flawed race is the day when He’s not worth worshipping anymore)

To manipulate him into giving in to their demands, they reverently hand him bits of leftover food and knickknacks they have made from stuff they don’t want anyway. They also sing him some droning madhouse ditties that feature him as a caring father who will NEVER let his kiddies down, no matter how out of their gourds they are.

I envision this seasoned observer of human lunacy nodding solemnly, agreeing to everything, clapping warmly to their nuthouse renditions, thanking them for their worthless gifts and encouraging them to share more – because sharing their twisted ideas of reality is so THERAPEUTIC, and what else can they and he do anyway?

They’re never going to be cured of their delusions, and he can’t give them what they want because what they want doesn’t factor in the Big Picture – the more-or-less smooth running of a mammoth mental institution literally crawling with similar cases…

Can we picture ourselves dispassionately in such a light when we light that votive taper, plunk that piece of ‘prasad’ down in front of a man-made idol that represents nothing more than another created being? Can we really LISTEN to ourselves as we mumble the rosary, chant a mantra or go ‘Ooooooooom’?

What makes us think that Someone worthy of being called God can be manipulated, cajoled or challenged into doing what we want? Folks, it’s just us – us trying to change our destiny with a hocuspocus routine that some half-witted clergy has approved as The Real Thing!

What are we left with if we abandon our mad rituals, self-serving and short-sighted beseechings and pathetic bribes to the One who made and owns everything? Again, I find the most profound answer to this question in the Bible – anonymously tucked away in entire chapters dedicated to rituals and more rituals. In the entire book, these are among the few words I can wholeheartedly believe as being God’s own -

“Be still – and know that I Am God….”