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...

Dopamine

Fiction Mathai went to the kitchen and picked up a glass. The TV was screening a program called Ask the Doctor . “Dopamine is a sort of hormone that gives us a feeling of happiness or pleasure,” the doc said. “But the problem with it is that it makes us want more of the same thing. You feel happy with one drink and you obviously want more of it. More drink means more happiness…” That’s when Mathai went to pick up his glass and the brandy bottle. It was only morning still. Annamma, his wife, had gone to school as usual to teach Gen Z, an intractable generation. Mathai had retired from a cooperative bank where he was manager in the last few years of his service. Now, as a retired man, he took to watching the TV. It will be more correct to say that he took to flicking channels. He wanted entertainment, but the films and serial programs failed to make sense to him, let alone entertain. The news channels were more entertaining. Our politicians are like the clowns in a circus, he thought...

The Vegetarian

Book Review Title: The Vegetarian Author: Han Kang Translator: Deborah Smith [from Korean] Publisher: Granta, London, 2018 Pages: 183 Insanity can provide infinite opportunities to a novelist. The protagonist of Nobel laureate Han Kang’s Booker-winner novel, The Vegetarian , thinks of herself as a tree. One can argue with ample logic and conviction that trees are far better than humans. “Trees are like brothers and sisters,” Yeong-hye, the protagonist, says. She identifies herself with the trees and turns vegetarian one day. Worse, she gives up all food eventually. Of course, she ends up in a mental hospital. The Vegetarian tells Yeong-hye’s tragic story on the surface. Below that surface, it raises too many questions that leave us pondering deeply. What does it mean to be human? Must humanity always entail violence? Is madness a form of truth, a more profound truth than sanity’s wisdom? In the disturbing world of this novel, trees represent peace, stillness, and nonviol...

The RSS does not exist

An organisation that has 80,000 branches in India does not exist legally in any document. This is the cover story of The Caravan this month. By the way, The Caravan is one of the very few publications that still continues to exist in spite of being overtly critical of Narendra Modi and his Sangh Parivar. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is not registered as an organisation under any of the usual Indian registration laws such as the Societies Registration Act or as a trust or company. It functions as an unregistered voluntary organisation, though it is arguably the largest public organisation in the country. This situation makes the organisation absolutely unaccountable to anyone, argues The Caravan . The RSS is not legally required to file annual returns to the Tax department or disclose its financial details publicly though it deals with thousands of crores of rupees every year especially after Modi became the Prime Minister of the country. The membership of the organisat...