THE ELEMENTS

A self sufficient man living on an island had, as generations before him, tilled the land around his house, fished in the waters and lived a life that was by and large, quite content. His existence was based on his relationship with his environment and so he gave names to the Elements who helped him, calling a tree, A Tree, the wind as Wind and such.

                He wished a better education for his children and so sent them to a school of learning. When they returned, a few of them felt that the Elements needed better names. Ones that evoked a supernatural fear or respect. And so they added God after the names and soon the island had a Tree God and a Wind God and such.

                By and by, dispute and discord set in amongst the children as a few preferred to pray to the Rain God before the Tree God and so forth. The children who disagreed left the island and decided to start their own farms and employed workers who conformed to their ideas. Soon many different farms sprouted in many parts of the world, making the same produce but differing in the names of the elements and the order of prayers.

                In time, some farms cropped up at the borders of others and this led to a completely new set of  problems. Farmers started poisoning the minds of workers disrupting prayer times through loud speakers and fomenting revolt. It led to breakaway groups and formation of new farms with newer names being given to the Elements.

              The next step was to give the Elements, human like qualities, human like emotions and what in the poetic world one would call Personification. This lead to intense debates, symposiums and seminars on these superhuman Gods and the proper methods and prayers to appease their wrath or insatiable desire. They were attributed with vengeance, benevolence, anger and peace to name a few. By and by a few farmers, realised that if a particular God was projected as powerful, the farm could make a lot of money in the form of donations by the scared devotees.

             In no time blind belief was twisted by the intelligent farmers who used rhetoric to sway the masses into believing that the path to the Gods was through them. They commanded armies of workers who spread their teachings far and wide in order to gain more and more followers. Some even went so far as to kill other farmers and farm workers in the name of a God with a different name.

               And the man who started it all by giving the first names, scratched his wizened face at the incredulity at how his words had now spawned entire generations of  believers of a supernatural God that was once just a passing breeze or a fruit bearing tree.