One day a man got stranded on the road at night when the bus he was waiting for didn’t turn up. After three hours of waiting, he got a lift from a two-wheeler rider.

On reaching his destination, he said to the man who gave him the lift: "I was stranded there for three hours and you came along and helped me like God."

On hearing this, the other man, who was a hardcore atheist, asked him to sit on the vehicle again, took him to the spot he had been waiting at and told him ‘let your God who made you wait for three hours send someone else to pick you now’ and returned home.

When I shared this on my FB wall, one of my friends commented:

“The believer didn’t lose anything here. He was where he was — stranded on the road at night. Who knows, he would have got a lift in a car this time.”

I learnt two things from this.

One, how obsession towards things may lead one to become loveless at the drop of a hat. Two, how a person tends to think according to one's likings.

Obsession part we all know. Liking part is my friend’s comment. Being a theist, he immediately came to the conclusion that the stranded man would have got a car ride, brushing aside the fact that the man had been stranded for three hours. His anchoring to his belief didn’t allow him to think of the other possibility — the man may have been stranded for the whole night, who knows.

Tail piece: A poem I wrote more than a year ago:

Read all books, deny all gods, it is there

Pray all gods, recite all hymns, it is there

Tour all worlds, go all wilds, it is there

Shun all these, shut all eyes, it is there

However hard one may try, it won’t go

Great query that haunts is, who am I?

End of one is end of it, but not death

End of thought, end of I, shall we try?