BENGALURU: There is a joke doing the rounds about an architect dying and going to Hell. He is received by Yama, the god of death, believed to be the final judge on the destination of souls.Shocked at the terrible state of Hell, the architect — being an architect — cannot resist the temptations of making changes to make Hell a better place to live in (or rather RIP in). He asks Yama for a pencil and paper, which is granted to him, and he starts drawing designs. Hell being hell, there were no comforts whatsoever. What the Hell!
But the architect’s efforts in transforming the place soon result in Hell being equipped with central air-conditioning, fresh water, luxurious rooms, good lighting, toilets with flushes, and escalators. The hapless souls in Hell suddenly have access to all these comforts. The hell of an architect becomes pretty popular in Hell, and a favourite of Yama, too!
God, in Heaven, hears about Hell’s progress thanks to the architect’s efforts and approaches Yama. He says, “We have had a mix-up. I was checking the records and discovered that by error an architect got sent to Hell. He should have come to Heaven. All architects go to Heaven. You need to transfer him up here.”
Yama is reluctant as the architect’s works have improved the conditions in Hell. God threatens to sue Yama, who says: “But where are you going to find lawyers in Heaven?!”
There are reams and reams of jokes about what kind of people “go to Heaven or Hell”, and about occurrences “up there” and “down there”. While the jokes may evoke laughter, it is we, the living humans, who in a way assume the power of passing judgments, even if it is meant to be in a lighter vein.We the living, while we are living, are told and convinced about the “beautiful” Heaven and the “terrible” Hell, and that the quality of our deeds in life would determine which of these “places” we would end up in after death – basically, the “carrot or stick” strategy at work.
If you are good, it’s Heaven; or Hell awaits you. Good kids get chocolates; the bad kids get whip-lashed! The concept of Heaven and Hell are made known to the living – only the living, right from childhood onwards, imprinted on our minds like lasting impressions on hardened concrete that was once soft.So deep are these impressions, that we wait for death to “reach” these “places” – preferably Heaven rather than Hell – rather than transforming our Earth itself into Heaven, here and now, instead of letting Hell-like conditions prevail in our world. Something similar to what the architect did in Hell.
But we don’t need a pencil and paper to redesign our world into a Heaven. We need to remember the message of Rabindranath Tagore through his poem, and attempt its implementation:
“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high,
Where knowledge is free,
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth,
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit,
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”
That could do all of us a World of Good!