Skip to main content

Faces of 2013


Janus

January is named after the Roman god of beginnings and transitions, Janus.  Janus has two faces, one looking backward and the other forward.   January is the time to look in both directions.

I am terrified and challenged simultaneously by this January, January 2014.  Because 2013 has been the worst year in my life.  In spite of the fact I am not new to the usual ups and downs of life. 

2013 was the year of FACES for me.   MASKS.  I had never seen so many masked faces in my life earlier.  I had never seen smiles that looked angelic but turned out to be diabolic – not even when my students cared to point it out to me.  Not ever to the extent 2013 undressed itself.

I saw more than half of my colleagues lose their jobs in 2013.  I witnessed the march of capitalism and religion, hand in hand.  They marched wearing the best saris or the best of cravats available in the market.  They marched on the bones of people they buried beneath the land they acquired in the process of marching.  And they recited prayers every morning and evening, prayers copied from the internet, prayers from Tagore’s Gitanjali and Hopkins’s adaptations.   They performed rituals from the Vedas and they sermonised with the help of “workshop” experts.  They brought in criminals as VIPs whom we garlanded and bouqueted.  And they raped us.  Raped us worse than what the western colonialists  did world over throughout modern human history.   And they made us take pledge every morning that we are Indians and we should love all Indians.

No, I’m not writing fiction.   

Ashvamedha is not fiction in India.  Not in America either.

This was the reality for a lot of Delhiites in 2013.

I look forward to a better 2014.

I look forward to Arvind Kejriwal. 

This is the first time in my life I’m putting my faith in a politician.

My hope, rather.

Janus had/has 2 faces.  Looking backward, looking forward.  Don’t keep skeletons in the cupboard like Narendra Modi, for example, so that you won’t have ghosts haunting you everafter. 

Can I have optimism still?

My optimism is simple.  I want to see faces.  

Faces. 

Faces, not masks.

Not the best cravat available in the market.

Hope.

Hope sustains.


“Let noble thoughts come from every side,” said Rig Veda. 


Wish you a Better New Year.


Top post on IndiBlogger.in, the community of Indian Bloggers


Comments

  1. Sir, A post full of HOPE! Lots of wishes.
    May the New Year be fine for us all & for India too...
    May we see the better future through Janus & forget the past!
    May the AAP rise & shine & shut the mouths of the critics...
    New Year wishes to you & your family!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Anita. I look forward to telling you a bigger story.

      Delete
  2. Wonderful post! I too have hopes for a wonderful 2014! :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. If one wants to know a person's true worth, give him a mask to wear. It's easier to catch him in the act then.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. When masks begin to rule the roost, what will people without masks do?

      Delete
    2. Unmask the masked. One cannot live in a kleptocracy.

      Delete
    3. We live in a kleptocracy called India. Can you unmask it?

      Delete
  4. Happy new year Sir - very rightly said about masks and who we idolize without knowing the face we see is real or a mask.

    This yes has been very challenging and difficult for me - having to see both my father and my child falling severely ill, a tough time I had never been through and now I look forward to hope.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Happy new year!! I too hope for a better year ahead..
    (My knowledge of the political scene is embarrassingly shaky, so I will not comment about that part of your post...)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Never mind the politics, Sreesha. Let's look forward with renewed hope and vigour.

      Delete
  6. Wish you a very hopeful New Year too although I can't help being pessimistic about what is to come.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Do or die - what else is left, Brendan, when your very survival is at stake?

      Delete
  7. A wonderful post Sir..

    The year 2013 was not a good year for many of us ..but as 2014 is approaching let's have new hopes and dreams,,,happy new year to you and your family :-)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Let me reciprocate the wishes, Maniparna. I know it's going to be an extremely tough year ahead for me.

      Delete
  8. I hope you have a much better year Tomichan. The worse is over :)

    ReplyDelete
  9. 2013 has been a worst year to me as well... maybe the number 13 doesn't work out as it remains unlucky to me :P

    Anyways, loved this post! Wishing you a happy and optimistic new year :)

    ReplyDelete
  10. 2013 was a super year for me...Full of new beginnings and new hopes. Hope 2014 continues the trend. Awesome post full of hopes.
    A very Happy New Year to you sir..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. May you have equally wonderful new year, Preethi. And thanks for the wishes.

      Delete
  11. A great read! Like you, I too feel a glimmer of hope cutting through my cynicism. All we can do is hope that those eager faces can, and will be allowed, to remain unmasked.
    Hope you will have many reasons to celebrate in the year ahead.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I intend to create reasons for celebration, Madhu. Thanks for your wishes.

      Delete
  12. Wonderful post, Sir. Wishing you a very Happy New Year :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you, Deepa, and wish you too a very rewarding New Year.

      Delete
  13. Replies
    1. Thanks Gowtham. May you too have a great year ahead.

      Delete
  14. Hoping for good times ahead. Happy New Year!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Here's me sharing your optimism and wishing you a wonderful new year.

      Delete
  15. Ah and on hope we continue to live! Fabulous post...wishing you and your family a fantastic 2014!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Let us not just live, Aditi, let us flourish. Wish you a New Year which will allow you to flourish.

      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

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

Two Women and Their Frustrations

Illustration by Gemini AI Nora and Millie are two unforgettable women in literature. Both are frustrated with their married life, though Nora’s frustration is a late experience. How they deal with their personal situations is worth a deep study. One redeems herself while the other destroys herself as well as her husband. Nora is the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House , and Millie is her counterpart in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version . [The links take you to the respective text.] Personal frustration leads one to growth into an enlightened selfhood while it embitters the other. Nora’s story is emancipatory and Millie’s is destructive. Nora questions patriarchal oppression and liberates herself from it with equanimity, while Millie is trapped in a meaningless relationship. Since I have summarised these plays in earlier posts, now I’m moving on to a discussion on the enlightening contrasts between these two characters. If you’re interested in the plot ...

Hindutva’s Contradictions

The book I’m reading now is Whose Rama? [in Malayalam] by Sanskrit scholar and professor T S Syamkumar. I had mentioned this book in an earlier post . The basic premise of the book, as I understand from the initial pages, is that Hindutva is a Brahminical ideology that keeps the lower caste people outside its terrain. Non-Aryans are portrayed as monsters in ancient Hindu literature. The Shudras, the lowest caste, and the casteless others, are not even granted the status of humans.  Whose Rama? The August issue of The Caravan carries an article related to the inhuman treatment that the Brahmins of Etawah in Uttar Pradesh meted out to a Yadav “preacher” in the last week of June 2025. “Yadavs are traditionally ranked as a Shudra community,” says the article. They are not supposed to recite the holy texts. Mukut Mani Singh Yadav was reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita. That was his crime. The Brahmins of the locality got the man’s head tonsured, forced him to rub his nose at t...