Skip to main content

Deceptions


Here is a little story from the novel, The Palace of Illusions, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.

            Once a boy came running in from play and asked, Mother, what is milk?  My friends say it is creamy and white and has the sweetest taste... Please, mother, I want milk to drink.

            The mother, who was too poor to buy milk, mixed some flour in water, added jaggery, and gave it to the boy.

            The boy drank it and danced in joy, saying, Now I, too, know what milk tastes like!

            And the mother, who through all the years of her hardship had never shed a tear, wept at his trust and her deception.

I am amazed by both the jejune credulousness seen in the country today and also the amount of deception being perpetrated because of that credulousness.  There is a lot of false propaganda going on among bloggers, social network users, the mass media, and even in the Parliament.  A lot of falsehood is dished out as gospel truths.  Many of our eminent parliamentarians are actors by profession and they continue that profession even in the parliament.  Acting is in the blood of all politicians, it seems.  Deception seems to have become part and parcel of life. 

Why are people so eager to lap up falsifications?  Political scientist, Dr Lawrence Britt, wrote a famous article listing the 14 defining characteristics of fascism.  If you read it, you will understand why this deception of the self and others is going on in our country.


Comments

  1. Replies
    1. Touching. Thought-provoking. It made me think of our country.

      Delete
  2. Replies
    1. Life in India is becoming very challenging for many people. Some students from Kerala studying in Bangalore were beaten up today because they are "outsiders". Who is an insider in India today? Who decides it?

      Delete
  3. The plight of the mother is so heart-wrenching. And so is the plight of every daughter and son of India, who have to see and witness such stories around every single day, and I am not just referring to the politicians.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Not only politicians, you're right. There is a whole lot of pseudo-nationalists who have become a pain in the posterior of the nation.

      Delete
  4. Such a touching tale! And, you correctly compared it to country's current state.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The country has plunged into a crisis. A lot of people who call themselves nationalists are fishing in the troubled waters. Who is antinational here?

      Delete
  5. An apt fable to illustrate the hysteria going on in India today. It saddens and frustrates me.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Any right-thinking person will be saddened and frustrated. What have we made of this nation? What promises and what outcomes?!

      Delete
  6. The issues very well connected with the story.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The trust as well as the deception are similar. Only the grief of the deceiver is missing.

      Delete
  7. Heart-rending tale. The fourteen points brought out are interesting too. Reminded me also of the Panopticon that controls and keeps surveillance.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. India is becoming a Panopticon under the BJP regime. Deceptions are part of that process. What is being served as milk is flour solution and people don't realise it. The only difference is that now the mother is delighted with her deception!

      Delete
    2. Is the mother really delighted? Her delight is a fascade that hides her helplessness, doesn't it?

      Delete
    3. I'm not sure, Sunaina. There's a kind of triumphalism among the deceivers of today. You should read the comments that appear in the relevant reports in the Indian Express and the Hindu.

      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...

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...

Emergency - then and now

  When Indira Gandhi imposed a draconian Emergency on India 50 years ago on this day (25 June), I had just completed the first train journey of my life and started an entirely different kind of life. I had just joined a seminary as what they call an ‘aspirant’. One of the notice boards of the seminary always displayed the front page of an English newspaper – The Indian Express , if I recall correctly. I was only beginning to read English publications and so the headlines about Emergency didn’t really catch my attention. Since no one discussed politics in the seminary, it took me all of six months to understand the severity of the situation in the country. When I was travelling back home for Christmas vacation, the posters on the roadsides caught my attention. That’s how I began to take note of what was happening in the name of Emergency. A 15-year-old schoolboy doesn’t really understand the demise of democracy. It took me a few years and a lot of hindsight to realise the gravit...

Goodbye, Little Ones

They were born under my care, tiny throbs of life, eyes still shut to the world. They grew up under my constant care. I changed their bed and the sheets regularly making sure they were always warm and comfortable. When one of them didn’t open her eyes after a fortnight of her birth, I rang up my cousin who is a vet and got the appropriate prescription that gave her the light of day in just two days. I watched each one of them stumble through their first steps. Today they were adopted. I personally took them to their new home, a tiny house of a family that belongs to the class that India calls BPL [Below Poverty Line]. I didn’t know them at all until I stopped my car a little away from their small house, at the nearest spot my car could possibly reach. They lived in another village altogether, some 15 km from mine. Sometimes 15 km can make a world of difference. A man who looked as old as me had come to my house in the late afternoon. “I’d like to adopt your kittens,” he said. He...