UDEME RALPH

    Unto us a child is born. Welcome, dear baby. Welcome to earth.     So what next?     Several years await you; several lessons to learn. Your legs must learn to walk; your tongue must learn to talk; your frail little hands must learn to write. After few months, you're able to walk and run around. You've mastered the alphabets and have learned the strange ways of arithmetics. Well done.     What next?     More learning. More schools. More failures and exploits. And now, after years of pensive yearning, days of sitting at home doing nothing, you're in the university. Welcome to the system. Your travail is unspeakable. Already, after just a year, you're talking about stress and frustration and countless sleepless nights. You're eager to graduate, and you desire to do well at all cost, to be among the best. In a blink, your dreams have turned real. Well done. But you're not satisfied.     Your mind no longer dwells on lectu...

The human race is in a serious mess. Here we are, helpless and miserable, battered and bruised, hopeless beyond words. Ages have come and gone but our shackles have lingered. Day by day, our pains surge. Our maladies remain. Hither and thither, evil acts abound. Our best efforts end in misery; our best minds stink. Our technologies, our inventions, all our fine theories and logics, our greatness and grandeur, only pave way for greater despair. Every new policy draws us to the brink of nuclear war. Every path leads to doom. Our heads bloat with ideals; our tongues flourish with promises of paradise and Utopia.  We long to live in the stars, to sail accross galaxies, to rule over the universe. We dream and dream and never stop dreaming. "Better world! Better world!" We cry out. "Change! Change! Change!" we keep crying. But has the world gotten even an inch better? Has anything really changed since the days of Napoleon or Hitler?  We say we're wise and able, but ...

      There is a great channel, an almighty means by which men get almost everything they want in life. That means is called God. And as long as “God” meets these needs, as long as He satisfies these longings in the hearts of people, He remains relevant, needed, sought, and worshiped. And in that case, He becomes something more than an end; He becomes a means, a middleman, some kind of noble pathway for the attainment of nobler heights.       People generally call God lofty names—Almighty, Alpha and Omega, the King of Kings, and so forth. On a philosophical plane, God is often conceived of and portrayed as the noblest, the most perfect, the unmoved mover, the Great one at the Peak of being. All these point to one thing—the supremacy of God. People, believers especially, have the trite tendency to refer to God as their “all in all,” and to make allusions to self-abnegation, self denial and other things of that sort. But deep within, ...

On a cold and rainy night, Walter, a world-weary thinker stayed up to write a short story about a writer. At first, the idea seemed absurd. Even so, his obsession with absurdities made it desirable.   Before him was a blank sheet of paper, time-yellowed, resting somberly on his reading desk. The light from his lamp was growing dimmer and dimmer; but he had to write. He had learned to exploit his growing sleeplessness by writing—writing anything. He named his protagonist “Okoro” and plunged immediately into the burden of whys, how, where, when, and who did what. At first, his mind was blank, blanker than the paper before him. He knew nothing about this creation of his, other than this: that he was a writer, with a name like that of a typical village chief. He was not very good at details, especially at faces, and heights, and other things of that sort. He was not actually a writer, so to speak. He was a thinker, a master of the abstract, the metaphysical, and of countless exi...

        There is a way, lofty and noble, with a gate so wide and tempting. And many are there, strolling, trotting, running joyfully, heading steadily towards doom. The world has finally found this way; lo, humanity has reached the gate, and there we linger, glad and thankful, that at last we've found home. But this is no home. This is misery, and in it we keep wallowing, day after day.        Thinking beings: so we are called. Homo sapiens. Wise beings in exalted attires, builders of sky scrapers, writers of books, builders of softwares, explorers of space and deep space. Our schools keep swelling, with more and more minds coming to learn, libraries filled to an overflow. Computer has come and knowledge has surged; the internet has arrived, and humanity has advanced. And so, our pride grows, our respect for sacred things wane, our regard for the spiritual and ancient goes faint.        In the days of old, divorce, to us, w...