Skip to main content

Christmas and Some Thoughts


One of the best poems about Christmas that I’ve read is T. S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi.  My short story, The First Christmas, was largely inspired by this poem.

“The world went on with its usual activities of finding food, conquering lands, vanquishing other people, mating and reproducing, killing and plundering, building and destroying.”  The narrator of the story, one of the three magi, says that.  Caspar, the narrator, was on a quest because he could find no meaning in a life that revolved around eating, conquering, mating, and so on. 

“If human life is the progress from being a bold, free and above all creative child to cowardice, dependence and creativity that ends in procreation in a span of about 60 or 70 years and then succumbing to death as a child in the garb of an old creature, then, my beloved, I have nothing to be proud of being born a man.”  Thus says the narrator of a Malayalam novel (Manushyanu Oru AmukhamA Preface to Man) which I read soon after coming to Kerala having bid goodbye to Delhi’s gods, godmen and their women. 

Christmas celebration at Sawan Public School [RIP], Delhi in 2010
Christmas marks the birth of a child who went on to make an immense mark in history.  He divided the entire history into two, in fact: Before him and After him – BC and AD, which the world has now secularised into BCE and CE.  Whether Jesus himself made the historical mark or the religion created in his name did the job is a different question.

Two millennia after that first Christmas, it would not be futile to raise the question whether the birth and the subsequent death (martyrdom?) of that Messiah made the world any better a place.  The religion founded in his name turned out to be one of the most brutal ones with all the holy wars, inquisitions, and other such barbarities it inflicted upon mankind for a very long period in the short human civilisation.   [Today another religion has taken over those same jobs in a proportionately more malevolent manner.]

At the end of my story, The First Christmas, Caspar and his two companions are left with a longing for another special star because the visions of crosses and pain evoked by the infant at Bethlehem fail to satisfy the seekers.  They want, in other words, a life without the crosses and pain.  At the very least, they would want a Messiah who would not escape life by dying on the cross but would show people how to endure the crosses of their day-to-day life. 

The cross eventually became an object of veneration.  It became a means for imposing agonies upon people and also for justifying the impositions.  Life is a pain, endure it – that’s the message, in short.

Is that what Jesus really wanted to teach?  No, I’m not going to answer the question.  Rather, I have no answers.  It is because I have no answers that I prefer to write stories rather than essays. 

***
The First Christmas and 32 other stories of mine are now available in book form HERE.

Read Amit Agarwal’s review of the book HERE.

Sreesha Divakaran’s review: HERE

Comments

  1. When we were little, life was so different and full of hope. Christmas meant Santa and jingle bells. As we grew, so grew the burden of religion and its atrocities. It is difficult to find celebration amidst all the chaotic ruins we are surrounded with. The ending to your story could not have been any better. It had to ens there, so that the readers too can ask, or at least get the idea that there are questions that need to be asked.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In Richard Bach's 'Illusions' we learn how people are not interested in asking questions but want miracles. Religion for them is a miracle-worker. Prayers are applications for miracles. God is a law-breaker in the sense miracles cannot be worked without breaking natural laws.

      The problem is always for those who are condemned to think, think beyond the given answers and ways... Caspar in the story is one such character.

      Thanks a lot, Sunaina, for your comment. You always make me go a few more steps ahead. :)

      Delete
    2. My reading list in increasing....:)

      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

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

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...

The Parish Ghost

Illustration by Copilot Designer Fiction Father Joseph woke up hearing two sounds. One was his wall clock striking the midnight hour. The other was totally unfamiliar, esoteric. Like the faint sigh of someone too weary to knock at heaven’s door. Father Joseph thought it was the wind. Until the scent of jasmine, oddly out of season, began to haunt his bedroom in the presbytery which was just a few score metres from the parish cemetery. “Is someone there?” Father Joseph asked without getting up. He was more than a bit scared. He never liked this presbytery which was too close to the cemetery. But he had to endure it until his next transfer. “Yes, father,” an unearthly voice answered. From too close, not outside the room. “Pathrose.” “Pathrose who?” A family name was mentioned in answer. “But that family…” Father Joseph’s voice quivered, “no one of that family is alive as far as I know.” “You’re right,” Pathrose said. “We perished because we were too poor to survive what our...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...