Skip to main content

Ghar Vapsi


“... Give us our daily peg and forgive us our hangovers as we forgive those who hang over us...”

Moopan had just finished his prayer before decanting his daily quota of Scotch on the rocks as I entered his house.  Moopan is my great grandfather, holder of the wisdom (and vicedom, as he acknowledges) of generations.

A Malayalam TV channel was showing a documentary on the Ghar Vapsi being conducted among the poor tribal people in Chhattisgarh.    

“It’s always the poor,” said Moopan with his mischievous smile, “who have to keep changing their identity like the chameleon according to the given situation.  Thank god, there is no vapazi in life,” he laughed in his mirthful way.  “Otherwise we would have to return to Mesopotamia or Harappa.”

That’s Moopan’s wisdom just for which I visit him every now and then.  He started with Manu himself.  A flood and a god.  Myths begin there.  Myths have to begin somewhere and a flood is an ideal place.  A fish comes to rescue Manu.  The fish becomes the first incarnation of Vishnu.  Fish-vish, says Moopan.  Vishnu continued to take on avatars as and when required by those who wielded the power on the earth.

A bard am I, my father a leech,
And my mother a grinder of corn,
Diverse in means, but all wishing wealth,
Alike for cattle we strive.

Moopan sang.  Rig Veda, Mandala 9, he said.  My great, great, great, infinite times great grandfather lived in Harappa.  And they came.  The Aryans.  Armed with cattle.  Cows and bulls.  Cows were the currency.   Cows were the maal.   

Cows conquered Harappa and Mohenjo-Daru.  Moopan sipped his whisky.

They brought a language too along with the cattle, the language of their gods.  The language with which they enslaved people.  The language was a fire, a great sacrificial fire which merged everything into itself.  The local deities burnt in it and were reborn like phoenixes adding themselves to the burgeoning pantheon.  Ghar Vapsi is today’s avatar of the fire. 

“Hindutva is a cultural and civilisational ideology,” said Mohan Bhagwat on the TV, “and everybody living in India should consider himself a Hindu.  Ek bhasha, ek devta, ek sampraday banana hoga.  For unity we need uniformity ...”

Moopan laughed.  “Yet another aswamedha is going on,” he said.  “Varanasi was originally the city of God Shiva, you know?  He was dispossessed of it by the King Divodasa and God Brahma together.  Shiva was not one of the Vedic gods.  The Dasaswamedha ghat in Varanasi got its name from the ten horse-sacrifices made by the King of men to the King of gods. ”

The political power and the divine entities conspire together to dispossess whoever they choose of whatever they choose.  Without the gods, however, imagine where the human world would have been.  Moopan looked into my eyes.  Our science and technology have taken us already far beyond our own planet, to the divine milieu, to the realm of the stars.  That’s the aswamedha of science.  Conquests.  Somebody has to apply the brakes to the rockets.  That’s why gods are still required. 

“To dispossess man of the heavens?” I asked.

“Yes.”  Moopan refused to explain it further.  Some truths are so profound that they cannot be explained, Moopan had told me once.  “I can only ignite the spark,” he had said, “it’s your duty to keep it burning.”


As I walked back home I dreamt of the infinite cosmos as my ghar.  Is it ‘unity with uniformity’ that holds the cosmos together?
Labels:

Comments

  1. AmitaFebruary 9, 2015 at 2:14 PM

    Hi dear,
    I have nominated you for the Versatile Blogger award - check it out at :
    http://mydatewithbooks.blogspot.com/2015/02/Versatile-Blogger-Award.html

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 9, 2015 at 5:34 PM

      Thank you, Amita. I feel both honoured and flattered.

      Delete
  2. DMR SekharFebruary 9, 2015 at 9:49 PM

    Come back to sulekha and post this blog there.

    May see my comment here:

    http://creative.sulekha.com/the-so-called-educated-mass-of-india_621950_blog

    Thanks,
    DMR Sekhar

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 10, 2015 at 11:32 AM

      Sulekha community can't absorb hard truths. No return :)

      Delete
  3. Saru SinghalFebruary 9, 2015 at 9:53 PM

    As a man who drinks, he has a lot of wisdom to share. There is deeper meaning to each of the things he said.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 10, 2015 at 11:33 AM

      It's a falsehood and utter injustice to good drinkers perpetrated by the movies that only villains drink. :)

      Delete
  4. Lata SaunFebruary 9, 2015 at 11:54 PM

    very insightful post.... thanks for sharing it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 10, 2015 at 11:33 AM

      My pleasure, Lata. I love writing this sort of thing.

      Delete
  5. Anand MaraladFebruary 10, 2015 at 10:16 AM

    Abki bar Kejrival sarkar!

    Hope you appreciate that democracy has a last say over communism.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 10, 2015 at 11:34 AM

      What a fall my countrymen! That's what Mr Modi should be saying now.

      Delete
    2. Anand MaraladFebruary 10, 2015 at 11:49 AM

      Could be. And you know well why the magic of Amit Shah or Kiran Bedi did not work out.

      That is why I say, India cannot end as it keeps reinventing. In today's world, there is no place for Aurangzeb or Hitler. The most dangerous person on this Earth now (Putin) too is so helpless these days.

      You were worried about one person but he is product of the times. When times change, I wonder you will worry about new problems it brings.

      Delete
    3. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 10, 2015 at 1:14 PM

      Of course, problems will always be there. But they will be the usual ones - like corruption, poverty... but not the ones created by a colossal ego.

      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

Shooting an Elephant

George Orwell [1903-1950] We had an anthology of classical essays as part of our undergrad English course. Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell was one of the essays. The horror of political hegemony is the core theme of the essay. Orwell was a subdivisional police officer of the British Empire in Burma (today Myanmar) when he was forced to shoot an elephant. The elephant had gone musth (an Urdu term for the temporary insanity of male elephants when they are in need of a female) and Orwell was asked to control the commotion created by the giant creature. By the time Orwell reached with his gun, the elephant had become normal. Yet Orwell shot it. The first bullet stunned the animal, the second made him waver, and Orwell had to empty the entire magazine into the elephant’s body in order to put an end to its mammoth suffering. “He was dying,” writes Orwell, “very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further…. It seeme...
11 comments
Read more

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...
19 comments
Read more

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...
10 comments
Read more

Raging Waves and Fading Light

Illustration by Gemini AI Fiction Why does the sea rage endlessly? Varghese asked himself as he sat on the listless sands of the beach looking at the sinking sun beyond the raging waves. When rage becomes quotidian, no one notices it. What is unnoticed is futile. Like my life, Varghese muttered to himself with a smirk whose scorn was directed at himself. He had turned seventy that day. That’s why he was on the beach longer than usual. It wasn’t the rage of the waves or the melancholy of the setting sun that kept him on the beach. Self-assessment kept him there. Looking back at the seventy years of his life made him feel like an utter fool, a dismal failure. Integrity versus Despair, Erik Erikson would have told him. He studied Erikson’s theory on human psychological development as part of an orientation programme he had to attend as a teacher. Aged people reflect on their lives and face the conflict between feeling a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction (integrity) or a feeli...
7 comments
Read more