Skip to main content

Da


Short Story

“The threefold offspring of Prajapati, gods, men and demons lived with their father Prajapati as students of sacred knowledge.  Having completed their studentship the gods said, ‘Please instruct us, sir.’  To them he uttered the syllable da.”

Baba closed the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad from which he was reading and looked at his listeners.  Thousands of faces were eagerly looking at him.  He was the source of their truths.  Their peace.  The very meaning of their existence.

“I’m going to speak to you today about the meaning that the men, demons and gods found in da,” Baba started his sermon. 

Men interpreted da as datta, give.  Baba preached about the vice of greed that had entered the hearts of people.  It is a cancer, said Baba, eating up our hearts.  Nobody wants to give anything.  All are out to grab.  We have become a grabbing civilisation…

The sermon on datta went on for an hour after which Baba retired to his air-conditioned office for an interval.  His manager was summoned.

“What are you doing to get the school shut down?” Baba asked.

“I have increased the workload of the teachers to 17 hours a day,” said the Manager.  “They are asked to go to the hostels at 5.30 in the morning to wake up the students, and then take normal classes till 2 in the afternoon after which they will look after the studies in the hostel, games in the fields, again studies in the hostels till 10.30 in the night.”

Vidya Devi Residential School had a 20-acre campus.  Baba had already bought up the entire land of about 1000 acres all around the school.   The school remained an eyesore in the middle of his empire. 

Finally he managed to convince the owner of the school, who was his devotee too, to donate the school to him.

The first thing that his Manager did on acquiring the school was to dismiss every employee who was on temporary appointment or probation.  The next thing was to change the colour of the buildings and walls.  Sooner than later the campus underwent a total metamorphosis.  It’s not just the colours that changed.  Tempers did.  Attitudes did.  People changed their colours.  Like miracles.  Miracles are an integral part of every religion whatever the colour.

“Yes, break them with work,” said Baba.  “The students are leaving faster than we imagined.  It’s the staff that remain a pain you know where.”

A fart escaped the Baba’s derriere. 

“It’s time for the next sermon,” the Manager reminded Baba.

“Ha, yes.”  The second meaning of da was dayadhvam, be compassionate.  The demons had given that meaning.  Baba was going to preach...

Note: This is a work of fiction.  No character is intended to resemble any real person, dead or alive.  If any resemblance is found by anyone, it is sheer coincidence   
Labels:

Comments

  1. Dwiti RApril 13, 2013 at 5:30 PM

    Interesting twist in the tale !

    ReplyDelete
  2. MaliniApril 13, 2013 at 7:53 PM

    Enjoyed it! You have a unique style of writing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 13, 2013 at 7:57 PM

      This uniqueness has got me into a whole lot of hell, Malini. But I love the whole affair called life anyway :)

      Delete
  3. UnknownApril 13, 2013 at 8:47 PM

    Thoroughly enjoyed the post , good one Matheikal :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. mandakolathurApril 14, 2013 at 8:33 AM

    As far as I see it, you are on a mission ...

    RE

    ReplyDelete
  5. umashankarApril 14, 2013 at 11:08 AM

    You have singularly unveiled the 'da' of the demons. But I guess he'd merrily fart his way to his desires.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 14, 2013 at 2:32 PM

      Indeed, Uma. Some people are incredibly wicked! They look incredible even in fiction.

      Delete
  6. AnonymousApril 14, 2013 at 12:56 PM

    Fact is stranger than fiction ... the demons and the devils are real, not the gods. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 14, 2013 at 2:33 PM

      True, fiction may look mere fabrication of the writer's imagination...

      Delete
  7. UnknownApril 14, 2013 at 4:29 PM

    what a twist

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 15, 2013 at 7:17 AM

      What appears solemn may turn out to be ridiculous!

      Delete
  8. Saru SinghalApril 14, 2013 at 8:37 PM

    I read in the news an actor was quoting babas to be the biggest con man. Interesting tale and has a lot to reality to it. Many will find resemblance.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 15, 2013 at 7:17 AM

      Religion is merely a business, Saru. A very profitable one too.

      Delete
  9. wingsApril 15, 2013 at 8:00 PM

    I don't know why I remain a climber still. You are really a banyan tree sir. Not baba of course.
    dawn

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 15, 2013 at 9:28 PM

      I will never be a baba. Life offers me much entertainment without donning that garb.

      Delete

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
47 comments
Read more

Indian Knowledge Systems

Shashi Tharoor wrote a massive book back in 2018 to explore the paradoxes that constitute the man called Narendra Modi. Paradoxes dominate present Indian politics. One of them is what’s called the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). What constitute the paradox here are two parallel realities: one genuinely valuable, and the other deeply regressive. The contributions of Aryabhata and Brahmagupta to mathematics, Panini to linguistics, Vedanta to philosophy, and Ayurveda to medicine are genuine traditions that may deserve due attention. But there’s a hijacked version of IKS which is a hilariously, if not villainously, political project. Much of what is now packaged as IKS in government documents, school curricula, and propaganda includes mythological claims treated as historical facts, pseudoscience (e.g., Ravana’s Pushpaka Vimana as a real aircraft or Ganesha’s trunk as a product of plastic surgery), astrology replacing astronomy, ritualism replacing reasoning, attempts to invent the r...
17 comments
Read more

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...
9 comments
Read more

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...
31 comments
Read more

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...
14 comments
Read more