Homo Contradictus

God must have been in a particularly capricious mood when he created us humans. Or, perhaps, like all of us, he left everything to the last moment and, when he felt the deadline pressure of those 7 days, bunged in the brain without properly debugging it. As usual in such cases, it is we who have to live with the consequences.

Take as simple a matter as food, for example. I mean, do you ever salivate at the thought of that low calorie meal, no matter how yummy they claim the recipe to be? Does the thought of a bitter-gourd smoothie or a cabbage soup make you lick your lips and pounce on it the moment it is in your vicinity? (I still retch at the smell of boiling cabbage after going on a diet that seemed to mainline on it) Just get a distant whiff of a baking cake or the heavenly aroma of frying pakoras and try keeping the saliva from pouring out of the mouth like a Niagara! This thing of everything you like being unhealthy and everything healthy seeming unsavory - I mean, come on, how difficult could it have been to wire the brain and body to like what is good for it?

Then there is this weird code that seems to have been exclusively reserved for human brains. I mean, come on, ever seen an animal cause suffering to itself because of what other members of the herd would think? Can you convince a monkey to keep off the local bananas so that it can afford a half-meal of an imported banana a day, nicely wrapped though it may be, so that it can impress the other monkeys? "Nuts to you. They will not be impressed, they will only think me silly and, even if they are, why should I starve myself to impress them?", it would say. Or get a female bear to wax its legs? "WHAT?? If that bloody Bruin does not like the damn hair, there are a lots more where he came from" would be the probable response. And try telling it to wax the legs not for the male bears, oh no, but for the other female bears...And yet, that's the funny thing with the way the human brain is wired. Each one of them, left to themselves, may find it better to 'eat the local bananas' or 'keep the wax for the candles' but the fact that ALL are in agreement with that option somehow does not suffice to keep them from opting for the other, more torturous option. One rather wonders if God was really smoking something that day.

The only consolation for me is that He must be getting paid back in His own coin these days. Once we run the marathon of life and land up at His desk and ask Him for our rewards...well, good luck to you, God, trying to figure out whether we are asking for what we really want or what we think we ought to want. Sooner or later, a badly-written code does become a headache for the one who wrote it...now try debugging THIS!