Skip to main content

Between the eyes

Mini story

"Shoot me between the eyes." Rajmohan asked anyone who spoke to him in metaphors.  Truth is as terse and straight as a mathematical equation or a scientific principle and it doesn't need the crutches of metaphors. That was his religion.

But he had never imagined anyone would take his own metaphor literally and fire a bullet directly into his forehead.

Mr Pandit and Mr Sharma had approached him for a donation.  The trust established by their godman was constructing the largest temple in the world. (On land grabbed from a reserved forest.)

"Why do we need temples?" Rajmohan asked them.  "Spend your money on a hospital or school for the poor people who can't afford good treatment or good education."

"God's glory requires temples, bhaiyya,"said Mr Pandit.

The Godman's men used all the poetry they knew to explain god and his glory. God became a flower in the valley or milk in the udder or even the slit in the padlock...

"Shoot me between the eyes," said Rajmohan when poetry sickened him. He demanded a mathematical formula for god.

Mr Pandit took out his pistol and obeyed Rajmohan's order.  His godman had taught him obedience.


Indian Bloggers

Comments

  1. KalpanaJune 10, 2016 at 5:34 PM

    Chilling! Hmmmm.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Pranju chakrapaniJune 11, 2016 at 12:57 PM

    And thus he got his mathematical formula for god.. a null set.. a void.. a death. Cause god is non existent and the believers should seek the opinion on god from a dead. Simple, short but deep.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 11, 2016 at 1:33 PM

      The whole affair becomes comic and tragic at once whenever religion enters!

      Delete
  3. Easwar ArumugamJune 11, 2016 at 4:00 PM

    A victim of his own metaphor!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 11, 2016 at 5:50 PM

      One of the many ironies of life provided by religious people.

      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

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

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af
13 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