The Sacrifice of Ravana
While sitting in his golden chair, Ravana was still wondering whether his sacrifice proved useful to mankind. It has been more than 3000 years and people on earth are still doing bad things by giving various stupid excuses, one of them being religion.
Being extremely powerful, Ravana could not be defeated or killed. He was the greatest warrior and knowledgeable person of his time. When he first heard about Rama from his sister, he could not resist himself from meeting him.
At that time, world was not good anymore. With increasing number of bad people, the ratio of good ones was reducing significantly. His one meeting with Rama changed everything. Though it is not documented in the formal history, it changed the course of mankind and created an epic story in the form of Ramayana.
Ravana started creating chaos and established himself as a powerful con man. Rama was already considered a great man. People considered Ravana as undefeatable. But his end by Rama affirmed the long taught concept of conquest of goodness over evil. And it did help for some time.
Ravana was interrupted by a beautiful unicorn wandering in the forests of heaven. It was so calm and divine here. He remembered his last moments on earth when entire human population was celebrating the victory of Rama and cursing Ravana for being bad. Ravana took it all because he was assured that world is going to be a better place because of his sacrifice.
But the world has not changed for good. There is no more Rama. There is no more Ravana as well. Being black and white was the thing of past. Now it is about shades of grey. A combination of Rama and Ravana in every person. And it seems that the ratio of Rama is getting lesser with each passing day.
It was Dussehra. Ravana saw that the people on earth were celebrating by burning his effigies. Children were dancing with joy, adults were enjoying their day off with their children, some of them utilizing the crowd to molest some girls, pickpockets enjoying their peak season where they find maximum crowd and pick more pockets, fireworks makers utilizing child labor to make fireworks to sell them at higher margins, murderers and criminals worshiping their weapons as if they have done a good thing by killing people using them etc.
He could not see it anymore. As soon as the festival was over, people were again back to their work forgetting everything Dussehra was meant for. No one got inspired to do good things, to stop people from doing bad things. The sacrifice of Ravana was useless. He was just a story now.
Disgruntled Ravana was feeling utterly sad first time in thousands years of his stay in heaven. Suddenly he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned back to find that it was Rama with ever assuring smile on his face.
He said that world may have lost the meaning of Rama and Ravana, but there are powerful people in the world who act as Rama and Ravana at the same time. The world has changed, but we do not know whether it is for good or bad.
All we can do is wait to see how it turns out to be. And if it doesn’t go well, we can always go back there to start our never ending war of good vs bad, creating another Ramayana. If you want, this time you can play the role of good one and I will play the bad one. We can call it Ravanayana. After all motivating people to be good is all we want.
Ravana, little bit assured, took a deep breath and went back to his golden chair. He smiled, his sacrifice was not a waste after all.
