Skip to main content

Godman


Once upon a time there was this godman who called himself Paramanandaswamikal.  He appeared from nowhere on a day that stood drenched in a cloudburst.  A few trees had collapsed in the storm that accompanied the cloudburst.  This man with shabby clothes and criminal looks was sitting on one of the fallen trees when the rainstorm abated.  The villagers were as suspicious initially as they were of any stranger. 

“I am the poem of the almighty,” he said very solemnly when the village elder asked him who he was.

The villagers thought that he was a lunatic.  Then the stranger said, “Your children are not your children.”  The villagers were amused.  They nudged each other.  Marital fidelity was not considered a particularly great virtue in that village since many men were working in faraway places and came home to embrace their wives only once in a blue moon.  “Your children are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself,” the stranger went on after a solemn pause.  “Life is the greatest miracle worked by the almighty.  You are the greatest miracle of god.  Each one of you is a miracle…”

More villagers gathered.  They loved to see themselves as some great miracles. 

Food and money began to move from the village huts to the stranger who called himself Paramanandaswamikal.  In return for the food and money Paramanandaswamikal gave profound spiritual lessons to the villagers every evening.  Since the name Paramanandaswamikal was too long, the villagers decided to call him simply godman. Godman is a good name.  Easy to pronounce.  Highly fashionable too.  The people were very happy that their village was blessed with the physical presence of a godman. 

Those were the days when the villagers didn’t have much work to do.  Those were the days when petrol prices zoomed sky-high taking the prices of all essential commodities along with it.  GST and SGST and many other mysterious ghosts were haunting the village.  People were falling prey to depression, melancholy and opium.  Opium made them think that they were living in achhe din.

The godman brought them a new kind of intoxication.  He made them believe that each one of them was a miracle.  The people inhaled the fumes of paramanandam delivered every evening by their own godman.  They surrendered themselves to the greatest bliss that flowed like honey through the eloquent utterances of the godman. 

Words have the greatest power.  Paramanandaswamikal had learnt that while he served his prison term for a rape.  He was a fervent devotee of the television in jail.  He watched the channels that brought spirituality live to the prison. 

“Surrender, surrender yourself to the divine,” he preached to the villagers who found a new meaning in life when they had lost everything else in the process of what their government called ‘nation building’.  They surrendered themselves and their wives and their children and their little lands to the godman. 

“The kingdom of heaven is within you,” godman taught the villagers as he built up his kingdom in the village with the lands surrendered by the villagers.  The people were happy.  They were building the kingdom of god.  They had an occupation, a divine occupation. 

Everyone was happy. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

You Don’t Know the Sky

I asked the bird to lend me wings. I longed to fly like her. Gracefully. She tilted her head and said, “Wings won’t be of any use to you because you don’t know the sky.” And she flew away. Into the sky. For a moment, I was offended. What arrogance! Does she think she owns the sky? As I watched the bird soar effortlessly into the blue vastness, I began to see what she meant. I wanted wings, not the flight. Like wanting freedom without the responsibility that comes with it. The bird had earned her wings. Through storms, through hunger, through braving the odds. She manoeuvred her way among the missiles that flew between invisible borders erected by us humans. She witnessed the macabre dance of death that brought down cities, laid waste a whole country. Wings are about more than flights. How often have you perched on the stump of a massive tree brought down by a falling warhead and wept looking at the debris of civilisations? The language of the sky is different from tha...

The Veiled Women

One of the controversies that has been raging in Kerala for quite some time now is about a girl student’s decision to wear the hijab to school. The school run by Christian nuns did not appreciate the girl’s choice of religious identity over the school uniform and punished her by making her stand outside the classroom. The matter was taken up immediately by a fundamentalist Muslim organisation (SDPI) which created the usual sound and fury on the campus as well as outside. Kerala is a liberal state in which Hindus (55%), Muslims (27%), and Christians (18%) have been living in fair though superficial harmony even after Modi’s BJP with its cantankerous exclusivism assumed power in Delhi. Maybe, Modi created much insecurity feeling among the Muslims in Kerala too resulting in some reactionary moves like the hijab mentioned above. The school could have handled it diplomatically given the general nature of Muslims which is not quite amenable to sense and sensibility. From the time I shi...

Nazneen’s Fate

N azneen is the protagonist of Monica Ali’s debut novel Brick Lane (2003). Born in Bangla Desh, Nazneen is married at the age of 18 to 40-year-old Chanu Ahmed who lives in London. Fate plays a big role in Nazneen’s life. Rather, she allows fate to play a big role. What is the role of fate in our life? Let us examine the question with Nazneen as our example. Nazneen was born two months before time. Later on she will tell her daughters that she was “stillborn.” Her mother refused to seek medical help though the infant’s condition was critical. “We must not stand in the way of Fate,” the mother said. “Whatever happens, I accept it. And my child must not waste any energy fighting against Fate.” The child does survive as if Fate had a plan for her. And she becomes as much a fatalist as her mother. She too leaves everything to Fate which is not quite different from God if you’re a believer like Nazneen and her mother. When a man from another continent, who is more than double her age,...