“God is intangible, but we can feel it”

SPIRITUALITY IN THE LIFE OF CELEBRITIES

Resul Pookutty journeyed from atheism to a belief in the spiritual

By Shevlin Sebastian

On June 15, 2009, Oscar Award winner Resul Pookutty was about to leave from the six-star Venetian-Macau Resort hotel to the airport, to take the flight to Mumbai, following the conclusion of the International Indian Film Academy awards ceremony.

Suddenly, he had an intuition. “I felt that I would lose my baggage,” he says. So, he pulled out a small bag, which contained his money and valuables and took it with him as a hand luggage.

“I was not shocked to be told at Mumbai that my bag was missing,” he says. “For me this is spirituality. This is guidance. This confirmed to me that God, or Allah or a super soul, to use Osho’s words, had warned me in advance this was going to happen.”

But Resul is not a staunch believer in formal religion. “I pray whenever I feel like,” he says. That means, unlike most Muslims, he does not do the namaaz five times a day.

More than formal prayer, for Resul, work is worship. “When you show truthfulness, commitment and genuineness towards your work, your friends, colleagues and family members, you are being spiritual,” he says.

Interestingly, when Resul prays, it is to his late parents. “I feel their presence,” he says. “I can see them on either side of my shoulders. People say that when you pray to God, you can sense He is close to you. But when I pray I can feel the presence of my parents. I am able to connect to them.”

So what does he ask them? “To show me the right path and to give me the strength to do good work.”

Resul says he has changed a lot. When he was a young man he was an atheist. “I would analyse and reason out every thing,” says this science graduate. “That was what physics taught me.” However, one day he went to see a seer in Kerala.

“I went with the mind-set that I would be able to negate him,” he says. The seer asked Resul to touch an alphabet in the Koran. Resul decided before hand which alphabet he would touch. “I closed my eyes and, unknowingly, touched another alphabet,” he says.

The prophet told Resul that he was a man who plays with energy that comes out of the throat. Resul said, “Sound?” And the holy man nodded. Then the seer said, “Your skill lies in your fingers.” So, indirectly, he told Resul he is a sound engineer.

“It was incidents like this which made me believe that I can’t apply reason to all aspects of life,” he says. “There are many things which cannot be explained.”

Resul now feels there is something enigmatic at the core of life; something which we cannot comprehend. “God is an intangible universal force, but we can feel it,” he says.

So, does Resul have a visual of this intangible universal force? “Imagine you are sitting under a tree and looking up at the sunlight streaming down through the leaves,” he says. “For me, that is the face of God.”

(The New Indian Express, Chennai)