Rendezvous With Rama

India can comfortably straddle the crossroads of science and religion

- [e-mail]

In Arthur C Clarke’s acclaimed sci-fi story The Nine Billion Names of God, monks at a Tibetan lamasery aspire to list all possible names of God. They believe once this list is completed, God will bring the Universe to an end. Writing out the estimated nine billion names by hand, as they have been doing, would take 15,000 years, so they hire a computer (it is 1953) and two programmers for the purpose. The Western programmers are sceptical, but as they play along (for good money), they worry the lamas will get upset at the end of three months when the computer is expected to finish churning out all the names – and nothing happens. So they plan to bolt the monastery just as the computer is printing out the final pages.

Let’s save the climax of the magnificent story for the end, as Clarke did. But the tale brings us to the crossroads of science and religion, often seen as being at odds to each other. This debate is particularly vigorous in the US and India, two countries that are avowedly – purportedly, to some – secular in different ways. India asserts its secularism constitutionally, albeit through an (42nd) amendment; it is more implicit in the US in its founding documents. Both have been imperfect in the practice of secularism, the fundamental principle of which is separation of the state from religious institutions.