The writer is C. Marks Professor at Cornell University and former Chief Economist and Senior Vice President, World Bank.
Does god exist? There are several possible hypotheses
What I would recommend to you, dear reader, is my own philosophy of scepticism, which has stood me in good stead and which can be summed up in a simple dictum: Anything that is not logically impossible is possible.
Meeting my old friend, Michael Menezes, at the beautiful Pali Village Café in Mumbai recently, my mind drifted back to our college days in Delhi and another café.
This was in early 1972, maybe March or April. Our three years in St Stephen’s College were drawing to a close, three magical years of fun and friendship. I did poorly in my final exam but that seemed like a small price to pay for all the joy of not studying. Mike and I decided it was time to do some good deed and our plan was to match one of our classmates, whose name will remain anonymous, to a very charming student of Miranda House, whose name, alas, I do not remember. So we devised a remarkable entrepreneurial scheme. We wrote a letter to her pretending to be him, professing to be in love with her and pleading her to come to the university Coffee House to meet him. And we wrote a letter to him pretending to be her, professing love and that he come to the Coffee House at the same time.
When that momentous day came, Mike and I headed off to the Coffee House to witness the fruits of our match-making. On the way, we had to make a phone call and stepped into one of those phone booths, so ubiquitous those days, where you insert coins to make a call. And there we struck gold, or, more precisely, a 10 rupee note, left behind by someone on the phone counter. There was no one to be seen nearby, and it was too small an amount to go searching for the owner. The thought struck us both that this was an occasion for free coffee. Mike, being a Catholic, wondered if we were about to commit a sin. I assured him of the flexibility of the Hindu gods. Further, somewhere in high school, I had ceased to believe in god. I saw no evidence of god and, in case he was there and had hid the evidence of his existence, he would surely be irritated by the dishonesty of the believers who claimed to see evidence.
In any case, we decided this was a good test of god’s existence. We would see whether or not he punished us for this sin. We walked over to the Coffee House and, soon, as expected, our classmate came in, looking tense. He sat alone in a far corner, an eye on the main entrance. Within minutes she came in, and walked unsurely to his corner. They began chatting. We could not hear the conversation but it was clear that it was running into heavy weather, each claiming the other had asked them to come. Then we saw them both pull out letters from their pockets and thrust them at each other, at which point, Mike and I decided it was time to leave the scene of crime.
As we walked out of the Coffee House, Mike got proof (in his case, a reminder) of god’s existence. He reached into his pocket and his wallet was mysteriously missing.
The salad days of college came to an end in June. I packed my bags from my residence in Stephen’s Rudra South, bid farewell to my dearest friends and left for a short vacation in Calcutta and then for the London School of Economics. (Luckily, LSE had given me admission before seeing my final-year performance in St Stephen’s.)
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