Satiricus
Satiricus has been thinking. Having been bombarded by a spate of newspaper articles eruditely explaining to him that the right to convert was enshrined in India's secular constitution he had veered to the view-point that as a constitutional-law-abiding citizen it was his duty to wait for some merciful missionary to come and exercise his constitutional right to convert Hindu Satiricus to Christianity. He waited, and waited, and waited—and suddenly he came across a new article with new wisdom in it. It said there is no right to convert, but there is a right to get converted. Not being agile enough to be an intellectual acrobat like the article's author, Satiricus could not make sense out of it, but soon it dawned on this dimwit that it was a call on him not to waste time waiting for a missionary to save him from Hinduism, but to himself do his duty in the sacred service to secularism by converting himself to Christianity. But unfortunately this is easier said than done for Satiricus. For as a journalist he is illiterate and as a communal journalist he is an illiterate ignoramus, knowing next to nothing about Christianity. Then what should he do? He should start educating himself on Christianity, starting with the Bible and keeping aside his Gita. He has seen even Western thinkers acknowledge the Gita as the noblest ever philosophy of human life and yet amazingly congruent with modern science. Then why should he give up such a Gita for the Bible? Why, because it must be so much more profound. Unfortunately Satiricus is too shallow to appreciate this profundity. Still more unfortunatley he finds modern profound Christian thinkers dubbing the Bible itself shallow. For instance, with profanity shocking for an almost-convert like Satiricus George Bernard Shaw writes in his Everybody's Political What's What, that the Bible is "a fumble of superstition, obsolete cosmology, and a theology presented in such an unbalanced one-sided way that the first Christian Catholic Church forbade the laity to read the Bible without special permission". Good God! Does this mean this lay lout will need the Pope's permission, for which he will have to go all the way to the Vatican? The Vatican quotes the Bible as saying that Jesus Christ "sent the apostles into the whole world, commanding them : 'Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Preach the gospel to every creature. He who believes and is baptized shall be saved, but he who does not believe shall be condemned'." 'That does it. Satiricus must throw into the dust-bin this Hindu nonsense of sarvadharmasamabhava and Ekam sat viprah bahudha vadanti. He must realise that he is a 'heathen' who can be 'saved' from 'damnation' only if he believes in the 'One Word of that One Son of that One God'. In other words he must accept the greatness of the religion to which mass-scale conversions are being made for the sake of secularism in India that is blessed Bharat. But here again great Western thinkers are—very unhelpfully for Satiricus—not only questioning this greatness but calling it surpassing smallness. The world-famous German philosopher Nietzsche called Christianity "the one great curse" and "the one immortal blemish of Mankind", while Count Leo Tolstoy wrote in his What is Religion: "Really no religion has ever preached things so evidently incompatible with contemporary knowledge or so immoral as the doctrines preached by the Church—Christianity.

The very foundations or this religion—Christianity—are so absurd and immoral, and run so counter to right feeling and to commonsense that man cannot believe in them." What does all this mean? The most charitable answer Satiricus can give is that profane people like Nietzsche and Tolstoy obviously did not come into convertible contact with merciful missionaries like, say, Sisters of Charity of motherly Teresa. This latter-day saint of Christianity had such utter contempt of this "contemporary knowledge" business that when she was asked what side she would take if confronted with the old dilemma of Church versus Galileo, she unhesitatingly replied, "Church". So in deciding to leave Hinduism and turn to Christianity Satiricus has also decided to leave science and turn to superstition. He has decided to forget that his Vedas are compatible with the latest knowledge in atomic science, and to accept the 'gospel' truth of Christian theology, according to which the world was created about four thousand years ago at a precise hour and a precise minute. Fortunately he can do so without jeopardising his job as a pen-pusher for this journal. For in his Adventures of a Black Girl in her Search for God Bernard Shaw says:

"The Bible's versions of starry universe are childish. It is the Bible-educated human who is now the ignoramus. If you doubt it, try to pass any practical employment test by giving Bible answers to the examiner's questions. You will be fortunate if you are merely plucked and not certified as a lunatic." Satiricus is sure Shaw would not have said this had he been a certified secularist. And in any case Satiricus' soul is thrilled at the prospect of rising to the magnificent madness of Christian childishness. Talking about souls, Satiricus recalls reading in a book by Swami Prabhupada, founder of ISKCON, that a Christian theologian had told him that according to Christian theology humans and animals had different souls. So Satiricus has decided from the bottom of his soul to forget the teaching ingrained in him as a Hindu since childhood that the same soul resides in all creatures. In fact, forgetting everything Hindu Satiricus has decided to seek the beatitude of baptism. Then will not some missionary please, please help him in this? For the Vatican explicitly states : "The reason for missionary activity lies in the will of God, Who wishes all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of truth. For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, Jesus Christ. Neither is there salvation in any other. Everyone, therefore, ought to be converted to Christ, and they ought, by baptism, become incorporated into him, and into the Church, which is, his body. "So what is Satiricus waiting for? he must rush to set a two-in-one example—of the right to convert, and of the right to be converted.