FROM MAULANA’S DESK

by everyday human experiences? These questions can be summed up as: Does science provide meaning to life? The New Year celebrations of 2020 were shadowed by an imminent pandemic, which then became a reality. The blissful world we were accustomed to turned upside down. With the constant threat of contracting the disease, we were forced to stay away from our families and workplace. Suffering the loneliness and the pangs arising out of lockdown and the mental burden of a future that doesn’t bode well, our very ideas of life became shaky. The Guardian columnist John Harris contrasts a religious and a nonreligious person in this regard. March 28, 2021 issue of The Guardian carried a very insightful piece (How do faithless people like me make sense of this past year of Covid?) by John Harris that directly touches this question. He writes: “I felt a pang of envy that has occasionally surfaced in the past – this time to do with a year of lockdown, the sudden fear of serious illness and death, and the sense of all of it being wholly random and senseless. Was this, I wondered, how religious believers were feeling? Or were they able to give their recent experiences at least a semblance of coherence and meaning? Like millions of other faithless people, I have not even the flimsiest of narratives to project on to what has happened, nor any real vocabulary with which to talk about the profundities of life and death.” Thus, it becomes quite clear that an ideology that negates the authenticity of the religious narrative is quite incapable of finding meaning in seemingly negative experiences. When the limit of human intelligence is reached without providing credible answers, where do human beings turn to? The same article provides the following statistics: “In the first phase of the pandemic, there were clear signs that a lot of us needed much more. Across 95 countries, Googling the word “prayer” increased by 50%, surpassing the level associated with Christmas and Ramadan. In April 2020, a service led by the Archbishop of Canterbury from his kitchen table drew 5 million viewers, described by the Church of England as the largest congregation in its history. And since then, as churches, mosques, synagogues and temples have been at the heart An ideology that negates the authenticity of the religious narrative is quite incapable of finding meaning in seemingly negative experiences.