Skip to main content

Invisible to the Eye


One of the many creatures that Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s classical Little Prince encounters on the earth is a fox.  The creature approaches the Prince with a weird request.  “Please tame me,” pleaded the fox.  The Prince did not know the meaning of ‘tame’.  “It means to establish ties,” explained the fox.  Without the ties, the boy would be just another boy for the fox just as the fox would be just another fox for the boy who don’t need each other in any way.  “But if you tame me,” continues the fox, “then we shall need each other.  To me, you will be unique in all the world.  To you, I shall be unique in all the world.”

Little Prince and the Fox
When you establish the “ties” the person or thing becomes unique to you, the Prince understands.  He remembers the rose which he used to look after on his own planet.  He watered it, he made a special glass enclosure for its safety, he killed caterpillars for its sake.  The Prince refers to the rose with the personal pronoun ‘she’.  “It is she that I have listened to when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing,” he says. “Because she is my rose.”

Relationships do not require many words, reminds the fox.  “Words are the source of misunderstandings.  But you will sit a little closer to me, every day...”  The fox goes on to share its personal secret with the Prince.  “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”  He also reminds the Prince that he must not ever forget what he has tamed. “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”

Men have forgotten this, accuses the fox.  “Men have no more time to understand anything.  They buy things all readymade at the shops.  But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends anymore.”

The latest Indispire theme [What do women need more today: equality or empathy?] brought the Little Prince and his fox to my mind.  Man has established his lordship not only over his own planet but also over the infinite cosmos whose mysteries are being probed by man-made telescopes roaming the interstellar spaces.   Yet why has he not been able to shape a civilisation in which the question of equality and empathy should not arise at all, especially for the whole half of the species?  Or are some of the fears grossly exaggerated?  Personally, I have seen many women who have wielded tremendous powers over men in workplaces.  I have seen men being made dumb asses by clever women who ascended the winding staircases and dark corridors of power in a world that reminded me of Kafka and his Castle.  Yet, of course, there are women too who still languish outside the Castle, I suppose, waiting for the corridors to open, waiting to ascend the staircases...

Perhaps, the question should not be about equality and empathy.  Perhaps, it is about the taming that the fox speaks about.

“The men where you live,” the Little Prince tells the narrator-human, “raise five thousand roses in the same garden – and they do not find in it what they are looking for.”  A little later he adds, “And yet what they are looking for could be found in one single rose, or in a little water.”  Then he concludes, “But the eyes are blind.  One must look with the heart...”

But our hearts are up there in the telescopes that are conquering the stars.



Labels:

Comments

  1. sunaina sharmaOctober 4, 2015 at 5:42 PM

    An interesting post here.....do you think 'taming' or 'establishing ties' as you mentioned, leads to empathy which in turn can lead to equality? Because what ties will teach will be a sense of belonging, a kind of bonding that will make the sharers responsible for each other....and from that responsibility will spring the ideas of respect and equality.....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 4, 2015 at 7:30 PM

      Yes. And the only genuine solution lies in establishing those bonds, ties. Everything else will remain plastic surgeries or facelift attempts. But people, both men and women, don't want genuine solutions today. There are a lot of other things to be gained!

      Delete
  2. Roohi BhatnagarOctober 5, 2015 at 11:15 AM

    Whoa.. deep, very deep philosophy. I am enjoying the regular doses of your posts now and the way you tried to explain the problem and the solution :)
    True love is the harbinger of respect. It is the absence of ego within. Any man or a woman is unequal unless they understand and practice what exactly is meant by loving truly. And the ones who do, the question never arises for them. For rest, they are just lost in the world of maya, forgetting that our true nature is to love!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 5, 2015 at 6:39 PM

      What differentiates between maya and real is ignorance. I saw you mentioned ignorance in your comment on my post on Gandhi. What is maya for the Buddha is what is real for the layperson and vice-versa. The Buddha is as out of place in the world of the layperson as the layperson will be in the world of the Buddha. Hence the Buddha has to perish so that the ordinary persons will flourish.

      What is ego but ignorance, again? Lack of self-knowledge.

      Delete
  3. Sunshine-struckOctober 10, 2015 at 7:09 AM

    Great post. I have no words. Just glad to see your posts after a long break.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 10, 2015 at 12:50 PM

      I tried my best to stay away but couldn't. Certain things suffocate me until I get them out through words....

      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

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...
14 comments
Read more

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...
11 comments
Read more

A Government that Spies on Citizens

Illustration by Copilot Designer India has officially decided to keep an eagle eye on its citizens. Modi government has asked all smartphone manufacturers to preinstall a government app, Sanchar Saathi , on every phone in such a way that no citizen can ever uninstall it. The firms have been also ordered to install the app on existing phones too using software-update technology. The stated objective is to strengthen cybersecurity and protect users from fraud. The question is why any government should go out of its way to impose “security” on its citizens. For over a month now, I have been receiving a message every single day from the Government of India’s Telecom Department to install the app on my phone. I wanted to block the sender, but there is no such option. Even that message is an imposition. I don’t trust any government that imposes benefits on me. “ Beneficent beasts of prey ,” Robert Frost would call such governments. When Modi government imposes security on me, I ha...
8 comments
Read more

Five Microtales

1.        Development             Chamar, Lohar, Mehtar and many others stood at a distance, along with their families, and watched their huts being pulled down by a bulldozer. They were asked to leave the place where they had been living for decades. “The government has taken over this land for development works,” an officer said. Chamar, Lohar, Mehtar and the others spread their bedsheets under a flyover over which flew opulent vehicles of development.   2.        Impersonation             The old woman went to the Women’s Welfare office. She wanted to register herself for the Prime Minister’s monthly welfare scheme for the old and unemployable women. She placed her thumb on the scanner for Aadhar authentication. “Not matching,” the officer said. She was arrested for trying to impersonate. Sitti...
8 comments
Read more