An Atheist’s Prayer
Some people are addicted to drugs, some to caffein and a few to an artist, often obscure. The last variety travel all over the world, spend their last cent to see her work in an art gallery or the performance in a theatre or the opera house. Thanks to my lucky stars, I have no such addiction. Even if I had it, wife and the teenage children would have cured me of it. Dear reader, if I have given the impression that I am a strange bird with no addiction of any kind, I am sorry I misled you. I did not intend to and I will clear the false impression straight away. I have an addiction which is of a very rare kind. So rare in fact that no one has studied its causes, leave alone finding a cure. If you google it you may not find any entry for it.

Believe me; I am not making things up. Being an addict is nothing to be proud of and I am duly ashamed. But now that I have raised the ugly subject, I have to come clean about it. But please, do not tell any one about it. I do not want my family to find out any more than you would if you were so afflicted. My addiction is writing letters to the Editor of newspapers. I love to vent my opinions, rather than keep them to myself. What better way to have them out there than in a newspaper. I admit that not many people read the Letters to the Editor column, not unless they are addicts themselves, so the opinions do not get the exposure they deserve. Still, more people are likely to read it than a blog, at least mine. Moreover, seeing my opinion in print is such a thrill. It makes my day. I spend the day humming Bach and Purcell and not much gets done.

Caffeine addict has a problem: there are only so many Starbucks in town and you can go blocks without finding one. I have a similar dilemma. There are a dozen or so newspapers in Canada and some of them restrict letters from out-of-town contributors. As if that were not enough to send me in a coma, others limit the publication to a maximum of one in any period of thirty days. So if a letter was accepted on August 15, computer will send the following letters to delete bin till September 14. Neither quality nor the subject matters. I am free to spend an hour or two to write the letter, but sending it is an unnecessary work for the fingers. To minimize this effort, I keep a log of dates and place of letters which have made into print. The log tells me when the editor of a particular paper will accept my fulmination and I make sure she is not disappointed.

The reader will perhaps appreciate, though she may not sympathise, that the problems arise often. Most difficult to get over is the one when a letter by some ignoramus or a controversial piece by an ideologue columnist demands an answer and I have just the right one itching to get out of my head, on to my fingers and then to the computer screen. But the pesky editor just published my letter last week and the filter on his inbox is on. What do I do?

Not much, to be honest. Once in a while I put it down on the screen and then delete it. Some other times I keep it on file for future use. But most frequently I find some item in another newspaper to distract me. That was till yesterday. A column on the economic recovery, a subject close to my heart, riled me. The words, all two thousand of them, would have agitated any one who had been impoverished by the recent upheaval. I was furious. I sat down on the computer and the words poured out of my one neuron. Not two thousands, not two hundred even; just fifty. But I am not verbose. I can express complex thoughts in a few succinct words. That is why the editors welcome my letters when they arrive precisely thirty days after the last one. These fifty words did what I intended. They proved the writer wrong and pointed to the true state of affairs. I loved what was on the screen. I moved the cursor to SEND and a mere nanosecond before the click my neuron thudded back to Earth. It was too soon and the letter in its current form was destined for the delete bin no matter how good and timely it may be.

The neuron started circling in the space and generating ideas: expand the letter into a proper response which can be a column on its own; stop being an egotist and forget about it, save it for later use, send it to some other paper and then – Eureka: Change the name of sender. If I imaginatively changed the address and other details and sent it from the daughter’s post, editor will never know. No sooner thought than done. As the sages said - one who hesitates is lost. In a few seconds the letters was on its way with a fictitious writer, address and phone number. Then I got a shock. I discovered that one who hurries can be lost too. Out of curiosity, I looked to see what the sent file looked like. On the top was my daughter’s name and email address, on the bottom a different name with a strange address. Now the neuron was really working. Will the editor notice the difference and start checking? The name and address together with the style of writing could lead a suspicious person to me. Worse, he could publish the letter with daughter’s name. That will make her furious. She is an economist with her own opinions which are quite different than mine. I could visualise her in the form of goddess Kali with the hood of vicious cobras devouring a devil who pretended to be her father. If an atheist could pray, I would have, “Please Almighty, make the letter disappear – if not from editor’s screen then from the newspaper – and if not even that, at least from the copy delivered to my beloved daughter.” But being true to my lifelong belief I could not have the consolation of prayer. Therefore, I had nightmares all night. Goddess Kali appeared in different forms – tiger one time, lion the other, finally as an eagle with a beak one foot long and devoured me with relish. It is a compliment to my innate courage that I did not scream. It helped that the dear wife was really tired after a long hike in the mountains and in no shape to notice any sound coming from me.

I was up at dawn to check whether the newspaper had been delivered. It had not been. I sat just inside the door and waited. I must have dozed off because the thud of a missile landing on the door step felt like a rock had hit my head. I rushed out, tore two pages while pulling out the rubber band and turned to the Opinion Page. I looked from top to bottom, looked again, once more for the third time to be totally certain. Then I breathed. The atheist’s God had felt His devotee’s silent prayers. The letter had vanished at some stage between my computer and printed page. I didn’t really care where.