smile please

Gods and Demons

Who / what is God? And what, exactly, is a demon?  Heavy questions!  I’m not qualified enough to discuss these issues at any length at any level.  Most certainly, I’m not going to.  However, Daivik gave me a lesson today touching upon these areas, a lesson that I will be well served to remember, a lesson that left me pondering. How does a child’s mind perceive these apparently heavy topics? Is there an element of simplification? And in that simplification, can we, the supposedly “grown-ups”, find answers that often elude us?

This is what happened. Daivik got angry when I told him something that he did not particularly like (something like, okay, shall we stop the cartoon now). Now, five year olds are well known for their tantrums, and they can be, well, taxing at times. His anger raised a trigger and I responded to that. Things were getting a bit heated up between us. It was pretty unnecessary. Even as I was realizing that, Daivik stopped his anger show quite abruptly, gave me a lovely smile and said, ”Okay Appa, I will not watch any more cartoon today”. That defused all the tension and we exchanged smiles and pleasantries.

Both the flare up and its defusing were abrupt and left their marks. After the smile, Daivik explained it in the following words. “See Appa, I got angry and the demon in me came out. This invited the demon in you. Then the God in me came out and killed that demon and made me smile. This killed the demon from you and brought out the God in you”. His logic was both simple and astounding. It made for a neat model.  A model where the god and the demon are both within us and neatly partitioned according to a binary scheme of things, each responding to one particular call: good and bad, right and wrong, god and demon. According to Daivik’s logic, the demon comes out more easily and spreads by inviting other demons, but the god has more power. And the god in him can not only kill the demon in him but also influence the demon in me and by virtue invoke the god in me.  How elegant!

This left me wondering. How exactly do children get ideas from? How do the ideas crystallize and evolve? In this case, neither of his parents told Daivik such a concept in so many words. How did he arrive at this? And what gave him the conviction - and confidence - to actually put it to test? It will be the most fascinating thing ever to understand this process! Of course, as he grows older, he is going to realize that at times these divisions are not entirely black or white and could get somewhat fuzzy. How will this model evolve then?

Can’t wait to find out!