What is Evil?

Just finished reading 'The Immortals of Meluha' by Amish Tripathi. It's an interesting read, blending mythology and fiction like I've never seen before, except may be in 'The Great Indian Novel' by Shashi Tharoor. It's a new genre of sorts.

But that's besides the point. I was intrigued by the concept introduced in the book by Tripathi, that evil is a relative term. What one person or community thinks is evil or bad is probably just a different way of doing things, which they aren't comfortable with. A good example would be, capitalism and communism. The capitalist world considers the communist as backward and bad as a way of living with highly restricted freedoms. The communist world have their own views of how capitalism is bad, leads to tremendous social inequality and stuff. There have been wars, many of them, over these differences and their incorrect interpretations. Why? Just because they don't believe in each other's opinions and feel that the other's influence may increase if they don't stop them. I'm probably over simplifying this, but it can't be completely denied.

Evil, if you look at it this way is then a difference of perspectives. Of course there are exceptions like pure badwill. But then it's just circumstances and perspectives causing distortion of 'what is right' at such an immense level that entire civilizations are blinded.

Evil is relative, just like everything else in this universe, conditions apply.



I await the next two parts of the 'immortals' trilogy, to see where the author takes the definition of evil to.

PS: This post was written on a phone with a brilliant predictive keyboard, SwiftKey.