On the 25th of May, two months before the liberating day of July 25, I made an appeal to God to “stand up for cockroaches”.

As things have turned out, I think was heard.

When sceptics turn their eyes upward in supplication, the firmament shakes. Gods know atheists do not call on them, when they do, for political or commercial reasons but for life itself. Also, atheists are generally better read in scriptures than those who swear by them.

And when small men strut like Gods, they forget what the Gods have said.

Were we not told that whenever the world undergoes a moral melt-down, God puts in an appearance to reset proceedings.

To cite just the ‘Indic’ tradition so beloved of our ruling establishment, the Vishnu Purana enumerates the ten avatars (or incarnations) that the God Vishnu, preserver of the universe, has thus far assumed at various murky situations in order to put the principle of ethics back on the rails, even as it also tells us that it is uncertain how many incarnations there might well have been.

Those afflicted by a Darwinian bent of mind might notice that the incarnations seem to follow an evolutionary line, from the purely aquatic fish, to the amphibian tortoise, to the terrestrial boar, and then upward to homo sapien and full-blown deities such as Rama and Krishna.

Clearly, Darwin it is who must have benefited from the much older dissertation. but a telling coincidence nonetheless.

This backdrop then shines an original light on the fact that Vishnu may have appeared this once in a form far more ubiquitous, quotidian, adaptable and resistant than the creatures previously listed by the Vishnu Purana, namely the Cockroach.

This in view of the far more widespread moral meltdown that has in recent months and years spared not even the temple of the Lord himself at Ayodhya.

Equally instructive must be........

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