Deliver us from Evil. Amen.

Certain people should come with a warning label like food products or chemicals- Warning: Totally and utterly dangerous, do not let within a 100 miles of you. The Pope is one of them. I was following the story of his current run through Africa when he landed at Cameroon and made the most ridiculous statement imaginable- Condoms could make the African AIDS crisis worse.

Yes, you heard right. He said that. I saw it. I heard it. I read it. I'm not going to bore you with the statistics on HIV and AIDS in the world. There are over a billion sites on the Internet if you are interested. What I'm concerned about is this: There are approximately 1.2 billion Catholics around the world, give or take a few hundred thousand. And they think it is okay to accept this man, no wait- this IDIOT, as their spiritual leader and guide? This blundering fool who thinks it is perfectly acceptable to deepen a very serious, downright critical crisis by talking through his arse?

Sexual abstinence and fidelity- this is his counsel. What planet is the man from? The Vatican has long been criticised across the world for its positively archaic and utterly unrealistic, thoroughly stupid views on this matter and here he comes along, traipsing into a continent that is crumbling under the weight of this crisis and tells them without a single moment's hesitation that "The traditional teaching of the church has proven to be the only failsafe way to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS."

Failsafe? Traditional teachings? Is he barking mad or does he have an agenda? Either way, it makes him a sinner and a criminal. What about that, pontiff? You think disseminating information that could directly lead to an action that causes death by AIDS is permissible? Why isn't this man being tried in a court of law? Does idiocy fall under crimes punishable by law?

In places like Africa and India where the AIDS crisis festers on a minute-by-minute basis, where the number of deaths are increasing instead of decreasing and where the majority of the population is illiterate and are driven by religious leaders and religious practice, there can be no greater damage than the damage caused by these so-called moral guardians of faith. Whether it is the Pope or the Hindu religious leaders or the Islamic fundamentalists, when a common man relies on them to steer his life towards salvation, the only thing that's going to happen is that he's going to find himself up shitcreek without a paddle.

If there is a god, may he strike all of these holier-than-thou wankers dead and save the rest of us from them.

Thinking man's theatre

I've been meaning to see this play 'When God said Cheers,' for the longest time. Finally, last night, I got around to indulging myself. The cast included the director/actor, Cyrus Dastur, a childhood friend and the greatly and rightly venerated Tom Alter. The play debates the philosophical existence of god and if he does exist indeed, is he omnipotent and omniscient as we've all been trained to believe, or is he, in the words of the equally venerated Woody Allen, 'an underachiever?'

The easy-to-relate-to setting of a chance meeting of an average Joe with god in a pub, is something that we could either scoff at or choose to believe, in order to get to the larger argument of his much-debated existence and much-maligned powers. The play was primarily in Hindi with English supporting the Bertrand Russell-like philosophies, which are best left untempered and in English. Both actors, Cyrus who played the mortal man and Tom who played god, had great energy which leaped off the stage, to cast an electric net over an audience that hopefully pocketed their prejudices for a short while and tried to see life from the other side of the river. For me personally, it was a secret personal triumph. I've often been accused of being irreverent about religion and even about god. I've resisted pandering to religious rituals and ceremonies and scriptures and while I think the bible or the quran or the torah or any other religious text has great literary value, to me they are sources of reading entertainment. I do not for one moment, believe that they can take away man's ability to be cruel or his desire to be kind. Surely we cannot be living in the world we live in and think these books have any power or sway in themselves. Religion is the most magical unlicensed weapon we have in the world today and god is the easiest guy/girl to blame. It's an old game, played out since the existence of man- whether you believe in evolution or not- the rules don't really change and neither do the results.

In an India which is deeply fractured by religions and gods and demons and finger-pointing so-called sages, this play is a breath of fresh yet prickly air. It's not easy digestion for the average Indian who consults his thirty thousand odd gods before he makes a phone call, nor is it easy to digest for a country whose Indian name's origin can be traced back to mythology.

If you are fond of thinking, go see it when you get a chance.