WHY PAY AND CRY? WHY CRY AND DIE?

“Even the Gods love jokes.”

-     Plato

My Guajarati friend, Bipin bhai, is very particular about how he spends his money. For instance, he never wastes his money on films with melodrama, that is, with lots of rona-dhona. His logic is simple and straight: “Pagal hoon kya?” he counters, “paisa de ke kyun roneka?”

Kyun bhai?  Yes, why to pay and cry?

This Gujju friend of mine has been fitted with a funny bone by default. Everything he utters from his mouth, he does it, putting his funny bone to full use!   

Some men and women are born to tickle our funny bone, through their own!

Yesterday, two of my brothers sent to me this holy crap!

A man caught a thief at night in his kitchen. Just when he was about to raise an alarm, the thief said calmly, “Do you remember what I said in the Scriptures? That, behold! I will come like a thief in the night. I have come again, blessed are you among men, that you have stayed awake as I told you.”

Then, the man looked at the thief, smiled and replied, “My Lord, you have fallen into the hands of Pontius Pilate again… I will nail you tonight.”

When funny bone is put to use, even the serious spiritual discourses get spiced up. There are many such gurus (Gaur Gopal Das is my favourite) and priests who make you laugh as they make you worship. Heaven, after all, is supposed to be a happy and cheerful place, right? So, why die crying… Laugh and die!

Like this ‘pure-and-pious’ man, who lived for full hundred years, died one day and went straight to heaven. However, at the heaven’s gate, he had to answer a couple of questions from grand-old Saint Peter…

“While you lived, did you marry any woman?” asked Saint Peter.

“No, no… I did not,” replied quickly our man.

“Did you ever love any woman?” Saint Peter probed further.

“No… Never, ever,” reacted our man, with a sense of pride.

“What about your mother and sister,” grilled Saint Peter, “You must’ve at least ‘loved’ them?”

“I told you, I have been a virgin all my life,” our pure-and-pious man reacted angrily.

“Useless soul, what took you so long to reach here,” yelled Peter the Rock, running his hand over his long milky-beard, “You have been long dead!”

Similarly, here, in one of our towns, lived a beggar. Every day, he sat outside a temple and kept pleading before the temple-visitors, “Ishwar ke naam pe kuch de de baba!”

The people, as they came out of the temple, dropped coins of one-rupee or two-rupees in his begging bowl. At the end of the day, he hardly earned any money. Frustrated, one day, he took his mat and the begging bow and went to sit outside the nearby desi bar. He sat there outside and kept pleading, “Ishwar ke naam pe kuch de de baba!”

To his surprise, as people, fully drunk, came out of the bar, dropped notes of rupees ten, twenty, fifty and more! Soon, the begging bowl was brimming with cash! As he got up to go home, he shook his head left to right and right to left and concluded, “Ye Ishwar bhi bahut ajeeb hai… Address de tha hai mandir ka, lekhin rehta hai daru ke adde pe!”

As my Gujju friend, Bipin bhai, says, why pay and cry… Yes, why cry and die?

GERALD D’CUNHA

Pic's.: Ben White/Unsplash/Clipart Library/MEME