Skip to main content

The Betrayer Within


Have you read Reading Lolita in Tehran? I have just begun reading it. I am stuck on something. 

On the very first page, I find the words "that in the final analysis we are our own betrayers, playing Judas to our own Christ."

If and when you have sometime, can you please write something on it?

I received this email from a blogger friend yesterday.  My impulsive response was to say ‘No’ because I know the statement in the quote is true and, worse, I know that I have a Judas within me.  On a second thought, I decided to honour the trust placed in me by a good friend.

When I began my contemplation on the topic, the first thing that came to my mind was a story that appears in the opening pages of Richard Bach’s novel, Illusions.  There are some aquatic creatures that spend their entire life sticking to the bottom of the river.  They just cling.  Life is nothing but that clinging for them.  One day they spot a creature just like them floating on the water and moving on.  They think it’s a miracle.  They ask that creature to deliver them too.  The floating creature tells them that deliverance is their choice.  Leave the clinging and you are delivered.  But nobody was bold enough to leave the clinging.  And so they clung on.  And they made an epic about a Messiah who came along once upon a time to deliver them. 

My memory may have added personal tinges to the story.  But the message is that the Judas is within us just as much as the Christ is.  We are our own liberators.  We are our own enslavers.  It is a choice we make.  It is our choice to cling.  To cling to traditions, customs, culture, religion.  To cling to prejudices, envy, greed.  To cling to possessions or positions or whatever.   The clinging is the betrayer within us.

But aren’t we helpless sometimes?  Aren’t we forced by circumstances to cling?  The Judas within me is mostly a creation of external forces.  Is it? 

The external forces are often beyond my control.  I can only choose my responses to them.  My responses determine whether I’m following the Christ in me or the Judas. 

As Oscar Wilde said, we are all in the muck, but some of us see the stars.  Some of us choose to see the stars.  Seeing the stars and following them is the deliverance when the Judas encourages us to wallow in the muck. 

I need to make a personal clarification.  My writings often criticise certain people related to religion directly or indirectly.  It is not the work of any Judas.  I am fully conscious of what I’m doing.  I am following certain stars knowing well that I am also in the ineluctable muck.  I am not a fan of popular positive thinking which is actually the fast food of those who are fortunate enough to encounter fairly benign external forces.  I have struggled with extremely malicious external forces for the best part of my life.  So there is a cynic in me who is the real Judas.  But I also know well that the Christ is within me too. 

I have used the religious symbols only because of the mail which triggered this post.  I would rather use the word ‘betrayer’ for Judas and ‘redeemer’ for Christ.  Both the betrayer and the redeemer are within us.  Life is constant struggle between those two for many people like me. 


Comments

  1. sunaina sharmaMarch 16, 2016 at 6:32 PM

    First of all, thank you so much Sir for writing this post. The quick response even after you said that it would be difficult to write, is sincerely appreciated. The richness you bring to your posts by references to texts and socio-religious forces is something that not just enriches the argument, it also helps the readers to think. The betrayer and the redeemer is within us. But how many of us are able to see the stars. You aptly quoted Wilde on this. When we 'choose' to see the stars, is it a choice that has been given shape by a mix of external and internal forces? When we become 'betrayers', do most of us ever realize what we are doing?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 16, 2016 at 6:47 PM

      Choice has to be a conscious process, isn't it? Otherwise it wouldn't a choice. But many people are fortunate to be able to see the stars without having to make that choice. The stars are given to them by circumstances of birth, opportunities, people who help, etc. So the external factors do play a vital role.

      When it comes to the betrayer within, I think most of us don't realise what's happening to them. They are falling victims to their circumstances mostly out of helplessness and ignorance. We have a lot of ancient sages including the Buddha who thought that vice was a product of ignorance. People who don't see beyond what their inner betrayer shows commit crimes.

      Delete
  2. Ravish ManiMarch 16, 2016 at 10:20 PM

    I cent per cent agree with you word by word. Great post.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Saru SinghalMarch 16, 2016 at 11:10 PM

    Basically we have to let things go to attain peace. We have to make the right choices as external factors are beyond our control.

    ReplyDelete
  4. UnknownMarch 17, 2016 at 5:10 PM

    Read and contemplate. That's what all Matheikal's posts do! This one reminded me of a family chat one day when one of the next generation said, "Aunty, sab mein Ram hai; aur Ravaan bhi". Translated, that reads, "Everyone has Ram in them; and Ravan as well."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 17, 2016 at 7:39 PM

      Thanks for the compliment, Lata. Contemplation is what my life has become :)

      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
44 comments
Read more

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand
6 comments
Read more

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation
4 comments
Read more

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv
10 comments
Read more

Hate Politics

Illustration by Copilot Hatred is what dominates the social media in India. It has been going on for many years now. A lot of violence is perpetrated by the ruling party’s own men. One of the most recent instances of venom spewed out by none other than Mithun Chakraborty would shake any sensible person. But the right wing of India is celebrating it. Seventy-four-year-old Chakraborty threatened to chop the people of a particular minority community into pieces. The Home Minister Amit Shah was sitting on the stage with a smile when the threat was issued openly. A few days back, a video clip showing a right-winger denying food to a Muslim woman because she refused to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’ dominated the social media. What kind of charity is it that is founded on hatred? If you go through the social media for a while, you will be astounded by the surfeit of hatred there. Why do a people who form the vast majority of a country hate a small minority so much? Hatred usually comes from some
8 comments
Read more