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 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...
18 comments
Read more

I’m Alive

Illustration by Copilot Designer How do you prove to anyone that you’re alive? Go and stand in front of the person and declare, “I’m Tom, Shyam or Hari”? No, that won’t work in India. Let me share my personal experience. It’s as absurd as the plight of Kafka’s protagonist in The Castle. A land surveyor is summoned for duty, only to be told that the mere fact a land surveyor was summoned does not prove he is that land surveyor though he has the appointment letter with him. I received a mail from the Life Insurance Corporation of India [LIC] that I should prove my existence in order to continue receiving my annuity on the sum I had invested with them five years ago. They’re only paying the interest on the sum I have given them. They’re not doing me any charity. Yet they want me to prove to them that I am still alive in order to continue getting the annual amount they are obligated to pay me. This is India. LIC is a government undertaking. If I don’t follow their injunction, I wil...
11 comments
Read more

Hindutva’s Contradictions

The book I’m reading now is Whose Rama? [in Malayalam] by Sanskrit scholar and professor T S Syamkumar. I had mentioned this book in an earlier post . The basic premise of the book, as I understand from the initial pages, is that Hindutva is a Brahminical ideology that keeps the lower caste people outside its terrain. Non-Aryans are portrayed as monsters in ancient Hindu literature. The Shudras, the lowest caste, and the casteless others, are not even granted the status of humans.  Whose Rama? The August issue of The Caravan carries an article related to the inhuman treatment that the Brahmins of Etawah in Uttar Pradesh meted out to a Yadav “preacher” in the last week of June 2025. “Yadavs are traditionally ranked as a Shudra community,” says the article. They are not supposed to recite the holy texts. Mukut Mani Singh Yadav was reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita. That was his crime. The Brahmins of the locality got the man’s head tonsured, forced him to rub his nose at t...
14 comments
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more