Skip to main content

Illusions

Fiction

Ravinder was a fighter.  But that was once upon a time.  When youth boils in the blood like a witches’ brew, it’s easy to be a fighter.  Time, however, puts out the fire beneath the brew eventually.  Experience, rather than time. 

You keep fighting with monsters for years, monsters some of whom are real, some illusions and some others are like Quixote’s windmills.  Real monsters have varying motives.  Some want to capture positions of power, some want to swindle money out of the system, and some others want to appear great by belittling others.  Motives abound in the world of monsters.  Monsters are the most motivated creatures, mused Ravinder.

And you keep fighting them all through life.  Fight for your dignity, for your principles, or sometimes even for your survival.  And then comes a time when you give up fighting.  You get used to the arrows.  Your skin becomes thick enough to be a shield.

Why can’t the world be a place of cooperation rather than competition, mutual support rather than mutual screwing? 

“Because the world is always young,” said Arjun who had come to pay a visit.  “The old will have to retire like this,” Arjun pointed at Ravinder’s leg.  Ravinder was on bed rest with a fracture in a leg.  He had met with an accident.  Boys in metro-haste on a zooming bike had no patience for a snail-paced man with a stoop.

"What happened is for good, what's happening is for good and what will happen is also for good," said Arjun quoting Krishna of the Gita.  Arjun was Ravinder's colleague.
                            
"Dhritarashtra was physically blind and Duryodhana’s blindness was not in his eyes," said Ravinder.  "But don’t ever think that the Pandavas possessed all the light.  Arjuna fattened himself on the thumb of Ekalavya.  Bhima was sidelined unjustly.  Draupati was not insulted for her own mistake.  Whose mistake descends as phenomenal wrath on us today?  Multi-tier attack has become more common today than in those days of thumb-swallowing and sidelining. The Gita needs to be revised.  By Abhimanyu.  Abhimanyu whose mother would not fall asleep irresponsibly."

"You are that Abhimanyu," said Arjun.  "The secret for penetrating the chakravyuha lies dormant in your breast. Covered with layers and layers of protective shields you donned for each arrow that came."

If you lie down, people will walk over you.  Ravinder knew it.  You can't blame people for doing that. 

Come back as Rama
Forgive us for what we've done
Come back as Allah
Come back as anyone

Krishna nee begane baro

Hariharan was singing on the TV channel.
                       
No.  No one is going to come as anything.  We are our own redeemers.

"What if I don't want to be Abhimanyu?" asked Ravinder looking wearily into Arjun’s eyes. 

"Don't join the battle.  Withdraw from it if you're already in it," said Arjun.

"Run away?"

"You can't run, man.  Your leg is broken."  Arjun laughed.  "Stay on the side.  And observe.  You'll learn.  Learn the miasmic patterns of the battle.  Learn the odour of blood and the stench of greed.  Learn the lurid colours of futile quests.  Then you won't have to run any more.  You won't have to fight either."

"Abhimanyu will become the Buddha."

"The chakravyuha will be an illusion."


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


Comments

  1. OMG! This is really beautiful!

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is inspiring... purifying....

    "Abhimanyu will become the Buddha."
    "The chakravyuha will be an illusion."

    I am deeply moved by the thought.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm grateful to you, Namrata, for inspiring and purifying me with your comment.

      Delete
  3. The story is a timely reminder (always timely) that this life is but an illusion. Minute interpretation of Abhimanyu's story! You are really dissolving into subatomic particles, sir! This is really the fiction of superior order. A stage very difficult to reach for the ordinary mortals ( I'm one). Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, M, for taking it at a literary level. It I am to be grateful to life for all the variety of experiences it threw in my path, stories such as these are the real reasons for the feelings of gratitude.

      Delete
  4. Really a different take and I loved the approach.... :-)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Very nice.. I truly believe in being a Buddha as the ultimate goal :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If you become the Buddha, nothing will matter after that, Roohi. Neither cold nor heat. Neither capitalism nor socialism. Neither job nor unemployment. :)

      Delete
    2. So true.. Nice to meet u friend and read ur stories :)

      Delete
  6. What a nice post sir!! I loved the way you have concluded in the end - Abhimanyu will become the Buddha. The chakravyuha will be an illusion....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Abhimanyu does not become the Buddha, Hemant. Abhimanyu learns to cheat, to swindle... Did you read Asa Ram baba's latest news? I'm thinking of writing a blog on that.

      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

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...

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...

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...

The Life of an Activist

Book Review   Title: I am What I am: A Memoir Author: Sunitha Krishnan Publisher: Westland, Chennai, 2024 Pages: 284 Sunitha Krishnan is more of a conqueror than a survivor. She was gangraped at the age of 15, and that too because she had started working for the uplift of the girls in a village. She used to interact with the girls, motivate them to go back to school, give them remedial classes, and discuss topics like menstrual hygiene “and other intimate issues”. Some men of the village didn’t like such “revolutionary” moves coming from a little girl. Eight such men violated Sunitha Krishnan one evening as she was returning home from the village. “Any sexual assault is a traumatic event and leaves deep scars on the psyche of the survivor. The shame, the guilt, the feeling of being tainted, the self-loathing that it brings in its wake is universal. I was no exception.” That is how the third chapter, title ‘The Girl Who Did Not Cry’, begins. Sunitha Krishnan didn’t l...