Skip to main content

Butterflies and Perspectives


Horse: If you don’t want to be a caterpillar, how can you become a butterfly?

Caterpillar: Did you pass through so many stages before you became a horse?

Horse: Not exactly the same stages.  But stages, yes.

Caterpillar: Was it hard?  The stages, I mean.

Horse: It depends.  Being a caterpillar is not hard for all caterpillars, I guess.

Caterpillar: One grows up only by passing through the stages?

Horse: One grows real only by passing through the stages.

Caterpillar: Real?

Horse: Opposite of fraud, let’s say.

Caterpillar: Why should anyone be a fraud?

Horse: Discontent, I guess.  Not happy being what you are.  Wanting to be something else.  Somebody else.

Caterpillar: Like me?

Horse: Well.  There are many creatures who are unhappy about what they are.  Who want to be somebody else.  Becoming real is a slow process, I guess.  It needs patience.  Like being a caterpillar crawling on leaves.  And then a chrysalis. 

Caterpillar: But only we butterflies go through all those stages.

Horse: Not at all.  Everyone does.  The names of the stages differ.  Infancy, childhood, adolescence, and so on.  Many break while going through these stages.  Those who have blunt edges, glass shells, air bags, and such things. 

Caterpillar: And then?  After the break up, I mean.

Horse: Some vanish from the earth.  Some survive and learn to live without those attachments like blunt edges or glass shells.  That’s how they become real. Shedding the unwanted attachments.  It’s tough.  Shedding attachments is tough.

Caterpillar: For us that happens naturally.

Horse: So you’re luckier than the others.

Caterpillar: And I thought I was the most unlucky creature!

Horse: Perspectives.  Perspectives make the difference.

Comments

  1. Some great points here Sir.....I am wondering what stage I am in.....what perspectives I hold.....and whether I will vanish with the vanities I hold or whether I will survive.....very thought-provoking......

    ReplyDelete
  2. Very thought provoking!Discontent is often the cause of misery.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. On the other hand, discontent can lead to creativity.

      Delete
  3. By the time we know we have pass through the stages and know what is real, we get old and lose physical vigor. Life is funny for an outsider!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Corrected*

      By the time we pass through the stages and know what is real, we get old and lose physical vigor. Life is funny for an outsider!

      Delete
    2. True. The process is pretty long. Quite many people are happy being fake!

      Delete
  4. Replies
    1. Personal experience, in fact. ... Thanks for the compliment.

      Delete
  5. Inspirational! And I thought, I am the unlucky one. :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Um......Have a look at the name of my blog!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Um......Have a look at the name of my blog!

    ReplyDelete

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 Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...

Indian Knowledge Systems

Shashi Tharoor wrote a massive book back in 2018 to explore the paradoxes that constitute the man called Narendra Modi. Paradoxes dominate present Indian politics. One of them is what’s called the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). What constitute the paradox here are two parallel realities: one genuinely valuable, and the other deeply regressive. The contributions of Aryabhata and Brahmagupta to mathematics, Panini to linguistics, Vedanta to philosophy, and Ayurveda to medicine are genuine traditions that may deserve due attention. But there’s a hijacked version of IKS which is a hilariously, if not villainously, political project. Much of what is now packaged as IKS in government documents, school curricula, and propaganda includes mythological claims treated as historical facts, pseudoscience (e.g., Ravana’s Pushpaka Vimana as a real aircraft or Ganesha’s trunk as a product of plastic surgery), astrology replacing astronomy, ritualism replacing reasoning, attempts to invent the r...

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...

Ghost with a Cat

It was about midnight when Kuriako stopped his car near the roadside eatery known as thattukada in Kerala. He still had another 27 kilometres to go, according to Google Map. Since Google Map had taken him to nowhere lands many a time, Kuriako didn’t commit himself much to that technology. He would rather rely on wayside shopkeepers. Moreover, he needed a cup of lemon tea. ‘How far is Anakkad from here?’ Kuriako asked the tea-vendor. Anakkad is where his friend Varghese lived. The two friends would be meeting after many years now. Both had taken voluntary retirement five years ago from their tedious and rather absurd clerical jobs in a government industry and hadn’t met each other ever since. Varghese abandoned all connection with human civilisation, which he viewed as savagery of the most brutal sort, and went to live in a forest with only the hill tribe people in the neighbourhood. The tribal folk didn’t bother him at all; they had their own occupations. Varghese bought a plot ...