Skip to main content

No Salvation, sonny!


One of the many well-wishers I have managed to gather along the way, much against my wish, sent me the above video a little while ago via Whatsapp.  Having watched it, I replied to my well-wisher: "I agree with him (the speaker in the video) totally.  But my experience: those who preach love are the greatest peddlers of hatred.  Or they are self-righteous and want to reform others.  And ruin many in the process." [I don't know anything about the speaker in the video and my remark was not against him.]

My response was spontaneous and it came from my experience that goes back to decades, not just years. I have been ill-fated to attract a lot of self-appointed well-wishers in my life for reasons that I never managed to understand.  There are so many murderers, drug addicts, corrupt politicians, and all kinds of evil-doers in the world, but why are these well-wishing moralists bothered about me even when I try to live as far away from people as possible except for the virtual contact through my blog?

My well-wisher, who expected me to acknowledge my alleged hatred or whatever and go like the biblical Prodigal Son to a confessor, replied in a language other than English and is translated as: "There's no salvation for you, sonny."

Never mind the patronisation; I'm used to that.  Used to the condemnation too.

My response was: "That's what I am saying.  The only salvation lies in death."

I meant it.  My experience teaches me that these well-wishing moralists won't leave people like me alone simply because we are easy targets for their paternalisation and moralisation.  Who else can be moralised so easily but petty bloggers like me?

Interestingly, I come across more and more of them as I go along trying my best to avoid them. I would never have written this post had the situation not become sickening.



PS. I'll return to my novel in the next post.  This post is just for the intermission.

Comments

  1. Interesting! But these are self evident truths which makes me wonder why this man is telling them to us. To be honest I watched only half the video. That was enough for me. Very moralising.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The man in the clipping may be an innocuous doc with some classical longings still left in his ageing soul.

      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...

Ram, Anandhi, and Co

Book Review Title: Ram C/o Anandhi Author: Akhil P Dharmajan Translator: Haritha C K Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2025 Pages: 303 T he author tells us in his prefatory note that “this (is) a cinematic novel.” Don’t read it as literary work but imagine it as a movie. That is exactly how this novel feels like: an action-packed thriller. The story revolves around Ram, a young man who lands in Chennai for joining a diploma course in film making, and Anandhi, receptionist of Ram’s college. Then there are their friends: Vetri and his half-sister Reshma, and Malli who is a transgender. An old woman, who is called Paatti (grandmother) by everyone and is the owner of the house where three of the characters live, has an enviably thrilling role in the plot.   In one of the first chapters, Ram and Anandhi lock horns over a trifle. That leads to some farcical action which agitates Paatti’s bees which in turn fly around stinging everyone. Malli, the aruvani (transgender), s...

The Blind Lady’s Descendants

Book Review Title: The Blind Lady’s Descendants Author: Anees Salim Publisher: Penguin India 2015 Pages: 301 Price: Rs 399 A metaphorical blindness is part of most people’s lives.  We fail to see many things and hence live partial lives.  We make our lives as well as those of others miserable with our blindness.  Anees Salim’s novel which won the Raymond & Crossword award for fiction in 2014 explores the role played by blindness in the lives of a few individuals most of whom belong to the family of Hamsa and Asma.  The couple are not on talking terms for “eighteen years,” according to the mother.  When Amar, the youngest son and narrator of the novel, points out that he is only sixteen, Asma reduces it to fifteen and then to ten years when Amar refers to the child that was born a few years after him though it did not survive.  Dark humour spills out of every page of the book.  For example: How reckless Akmal was! ...

The Venerable Zero

Ancient India was a powerhouse of new concepts in mathematics and astronomy, asserts William Dalrymple’s new book, The Golden Road . India stood out most dramatically in scientific rather than spiritual ideas. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, wrote in his classic Discovery of India : “It is remarkable that the Indians, though apparently detached from life, were yet intensely curious about it, and this curiosity led them to science.” Why does the present prime minister of the country choose to highlight the religious contributions? Well, you know the answer. While reading Dalrymple yesterday, I was reminded of a math prof I had for my graduation course. Baby was his first name and I can’t recall the surname. ‘Baby’ was a common name for men in Kerala of the mid-twentieth century. The present General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is a 71-year-old Baby from Kerala. Our Prof Baby was a middle-aged man who knew a lot more than mathematics. One day ...