Skip to main content

Dmitry Karamazov and Father Zosima


Almost twenty years ago I attended a week-long retreat at a religious centre in Kerala.  A few circumstances in my life had conspired together to throw my inner life into absolute chaos.  When you are going through a protracted ordeal, you are quite sure to attract a lot of well-wishers.  Though many of these well-wishers are actually people who derive a secret delight by peeping into your agony, a few of them are genuinely interested in putting into practise all their pastoral skills.  A universal verdict was passed by all those who claimed to have diagnosed the condition of my soul: that I should attend a retreat.

A Catholic retreat usually consists of a series of sermons or religious lectures interspersed with prayer services culminating in the purgation of one’s sins through the confession.  Like the drowning man clutching at the floating straw, I embraced the retreat as fanatically as I could.

The preacher, the retreat guru, was informed by some of my well-wishers much before I enlisted about all the cardinal sins that had eaten into my soul like a pernicious cancer.  So I was the particular focus of the preacher’s devout attention throughout the retreat.  When the week was finally over – what a relief it was to be liberated! – I packed my bag and went to bid goodbye to the preacher.  There he was standing just at the gate of the retreat centre looking eager to ensure that I left the place.   As soon as he saw me approaching he joined his palms in a fervent Namaste.  His demeanour reminded me of Father Zosima in Dostoevsky’s Karamazov Brothers.

Dmitri Karamazov is a very troubled soul in the novel.  He is passionate, headstrong and reckless.  He goes to Father Zosima’s monastery to settle his quarrel with his father with the help of the monk.  Far from coming to an amicable resolution of their problem, the father and the son shout at each other in the presence of the monk.  Father Zosima suddenly kneels and bows his head to the ground at Dmitri’s feet. 

Father Zosima later attributed his gesture to his foresight of the great suffering that awaited Dmitri. 

My retreat preacher’s demeanour has remained in my memory like a vignette.  I abandoned religion altogether a little after the retreat.  Religion failed to dispel the darkness that was apparently smothering my soul.  But there was no way of extricating my soul from my religious well-wishers.  Hence I quit my job and left the place once and for all. 

A new place.  A new beginning.  Many years passed in peace since there were no altruistic well-wishers in the new place.  Nevertheless, the vignette continues to remain in my mind with undaunted tenacity.  Looking back at those days, I sometimes miss those well-wishers who gifted me the vignette.


PS. This post was provoked by the latest theme at Indispire: #Missme

Comments

  1. Some people just fail to understand the futility of religious lectures when they come across a true seeker of answers. I prefer silently trudging my path to find truth, so as not to get the attention of such well-wishers :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There are always a few people who view themselves as the sole custodians of truth. I was fortunate enough to escape their attention for a pretty long while. But gods have an uncanny knack for catching up with people like me, I think. :)

      Delete
  2. Brilliant comment on society and religion. #Respect Sir

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Life is a great teacher, Lata. Interestingly the more people tried to make me religious, the more I grew to detest it.

      Delete
  3. Our society is full of such self proclaimed experts on everything - or as you called, custodians of truth. Many a times I feel that people listen to these lectures or indulge in religious activities more as a peer/societal pressure than any other reason spiritual or whatsoever...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Whose concern is spirituality? Religious organizations have more wealth than any others. And they don't even pay taxes!

      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 ...

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...