Today marks the celebrated birth of Jesus Christ but it also is the day Isaac Newton was born. While science is not the opposite of faith it does sow the seeds of doubt in the believer. Newton by most accounts was a devout Christian and his genius like Ramanujan allowed him to reconcile both science and faith effortlessly.

For mere mortals though, sailing across this spectrum of beliefs can be a bumpy ride.

My life of faith so far has been like a bitcoin trading day, alternating between the extremes, as an ardent devotee of a convenient god and an assured atheist, arrogant in the power of the human mind to denounce anything super-human. The mind absorbs experiences and swings between God and Godless.

Over the years I have settled somewhere on the bell of the bell curve, confused and conflicted and certainly in doubt, poised to be pushed down either slope.

In my early years, faith was a ritual with daily ablutions and unquestioned prayers. School life began with a daily invocation of the God of the day. After-school had its own Gods. Lord Ganesha was my go to God, especially while waiting for that fast new ball hoping for an assist from above to get a 50. Hanuman was my Hulk and he could do anything and more importantly, make me do anything. Geography was a terror in school, the maps take on shapes of their own and without Hanuman, I would never have made it.

Life was filled with many Gods, for Cricket and Viv Richards were Gods too. And then 1983 happened and the entire Indian cricket team was God.

Over the years the Gods changed as priorities changed.

Teenage and college years were dedicated to countless namaskarams to Goddess Saraswati. Every significant moment required repeated incantations to the lord of Lords, Pillayar, a small slip resulting in disastrous consequences.

It seemed like cause and effect when I cruised along.

I pray, I believe, I wish and wish was granted.

Faith is strange in that it fulfills our wishes leaving us full in the stomach but empty in the mind. And the mind keeps grinding, unhappy left to its hungry state.

Time turns the numbers called years and the mind churns and turns with it.

And one day it rebels.

I fell out with my Gods just like that.

If faith is mindless belief, the mind is a faithful rationalist.

You are what you read and what I read took me to a godless world of rational science. A science dominated by progressive techies who don’t believe in scienceless Gods and a solace in the power of the individual, independent of the Man above.

What was once a cocooned world of benevolent devas soon became an atheistic world of atoms and molecules. The notion of prayer seemed archaic and the cause and effect of invoking the Almighty, broken. Science, however unscientific, seemed to provide a certainty that the mind craved. Darwin replaced the Devas and Einstein the elephant God.

Time moves the needles of our biology ever so slowly, but surely, and the relentless Gods slowly make their way pushing faith into the aging body. The rationalist mind reduces its spin, tired of its own logic or the lack of it.

For many humans, existence is like a slowly shrinking string suspended on a massive object, a pendulum oscillating between beliefs and disbelief’s. The shape of our experiences determines the frequency and strength of the swing.

The immortal Father Time slowly adds friction and the pendulum swings less and less. For some, it is stuck at the extremes. For me, the pendulum swings slowly, at lesser extremes.

The Gods have reappeared, this time not as those distant idols deemed to be worshipped with wishes and desires but as divine unknowns, an acknowledgment of powers beyond the human mind and science.

As time gets ready to turn the page on another western year, the evergreen eastern poet Tagore was probably right :

“Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark”.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.