Skip to main content

Do I Dare?




Do I dare
Disturb the universe?

Do I dare disturb the power (god/politician/manager/baba/…) over me?  T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock asked that question in the poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Prufrock’s problem was his inability to be either damned or saved.  If you are damned you belong to the group of those who are counted out by the people in power.  If you are saved you are in the power ring.  Eliot’s Prufrock refused to belong in either of the places.  Probably, he was incapable of understanding the politics of the mediocre.

What did Prufrock see in his world?  “One-night cheap hotels.”  “A face to meet the faces you meet.”…  And people who make the rules for that world.  The world of masks.

Ultimately, it is about what kind of a world you are living in.  Who rules it?  Who manages it?  Who makes the rules?

Ultimately, it is about POWER. 

Might makes right.  In the jungle.

Knowledge is power.  Among the knowledgeable people. Among the civilised people.

Who is in power really?  Might or knowledge?  Neither. 

A small group who captures the power through certain manipulations.

It need not be a religious minority.  It need not be a linguistic minority.  It need not be a cultural minority.

It is the politics of convenience. 

Who brings me the maximum benefits here and now?  He/She is my ally.

The world is ridiculous.

Alliances keep changing. 

Where lies the true leader?  The real Baba?  The real Swami?

If you dare, you will be the Baba. 

If you dare, you will the Swami, the Guru, the Messiah.

No one will dictate terms. IF YOU DARE.

Do I Dare?





Labels:

Comments

  1. mandakolathurApril 18, 2013 at 9:39 PM

    "Who is in power really? Might or knowledge? Neither." - This is a Kafka sentiment!

    RE

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousApril 18, 2013 at 10:57 PM

    Nice post!

    Technology News

    ReplyDelete
  3. The MukhtiarsApril 20, 2013 at 4:35 PM

    Nice one Tomichan

    ReplyDelete
  4. ArjunaUbachaApril 20, 2013 at 8:43 PM

    We are not assertive. When someone is aggressive we become timid and we become aggressive infront of others, perhaps to overcome our inadequacy or to get over the feeling that we have been bullied by someone else. If we don't become assertive all the time, people try to dictate terms. One needs to dare to stand up to his own convictions. I think daring is a way of life.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 20, 2013 at 9:25 PM

      The lack of assertiveness has been the problem with Indians for centuries. We are a people who follow the "politics of convenience." Thanks for stating that. Our fate is to be bullied. Gandhi said that dictators and bullies ride over people with no spine.

      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

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 comments
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more