Skip to main content

Clichés

'I don't like meeting people,' I explained when a friend asked why I showed little interest in meeting him after a long period.

People are clichés wherever you go.  They keep repeating themselves.  The repetition may take slightly different avatars.  Some do it in the name of the Christ, some others in Krishna's. Or Allah's. Or some Baba or other fraud.

Fraud is a perpetual cliche from which mankind has no salvation, my friend said. Your problem is that you looked for salvation from them. Silly romantic dreamer! He laughed.

So I am a fraud too? I asked. Living in an illusion!

Aren't all people doing just that?  Living in one illusion or another? In perceived paradises?  Maybe paradise of wealth, power, positions, Babadom, kingdom of heaven... Clichés.  What else?

Solitude is my cliché, I said.

You are a cliché trying to run away from other clichés, he said.


Comments

  1. We all are actors on this stage haranguing our cliches in front of an audience full of actors.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Precisely. We have no escape from cliches: our own as well as others'. Life is the cliche. We can only make the cliche look colourful.

      Delete
  2. "Solitude is my cliché"
    well written and rightly said.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Solitude was the refuge of many people... Some went as far as the Himalayas in search of it...

      Delete
  3. This conversation was an interesting read.

    Sab moh maya hai - world is indeed an illusion. Every individual has his own version and many times it overlaps with others. Even who is a recluse is busy creating his own illusory world. Humans existing for the last 200000 years is a fact that turns us into cliches...whatever number of permutations and combinations of thoughts are possible have been perhaps explored.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, Bushra, the species has been around for tediously too long and turned into miserable clichés.

      Delete
  4. Solitude is often mistaken with Loneliness. Lonliness is marked by a sense of isolation.Solitude, on the other hand, is a state of being alone without being lonely and can lead to self-awareness. so you are not running away from any cliche, in my view. Your thought always provokes my grey matter sir. Awesome you are.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Solitude is my conscious and informed choice and hence i'm not running away. But maybe i'm running away from other people.

      Delete
  5. "Solitude is my cliche". I'm going to steal this line from you whenever I want to avoid social engagements, which is most of the time :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. All the best, Hema. Society is for those who are more crustaceous.

      Delete
  6. Yes, cliche indeed.....we run from one to some other cliche...preferring our own over that of the others....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I wish you were more active in this space.

      I know intelligent people find useful occupations 😀

      Delete
  7. We're all running away from something. We're all hopelessly cliche'd. Ah, nice read this one. I know my appreciation sounds a little cliche'd. But hey, now it's out in the open.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's funny isn't it, that life makes running away inevitable? 😊

      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

Joys of Onam and a reflection

Suppose that the whole universe were to be saved and made perfect and happy forever on just one condition: one single soul must suffer, alone, eternally. Would this be acceptable? Philosopher William James asked that in his 1891 book, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life . Please think about it once again and answer the question for yourself. You, as well as others, are going to live a life without a tinge of sorrow. Joyful existence. Life in Paradise. The only condition is that one person will take up all the sorrows of the universe on him-/herself and suffer – alone, eternally. What do you say? James’s answer is a firm no . “Not even a god would be justified in setting up such a scheme,” James asserted, knowing too well how the Bible justified a positive answer to his question. “It is expedient that one man should die for the people, so that the nation can be saved” [John 11:50]. Jesus was that one man in the Biblical vision of redemption. I was reading a Malayalam period...

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 Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Loving God and Hating People

Illustration by Gemini AI There are too many people, including in my extended family. who love God so much that other people have no place in their hearts. God fills their hearts. They go to church or other similar places every day and meet their God. I guess they do. But they return home from the place of worship only to pour out the venom in their hearts on those around them. When I’m vexed by such ‘religious’ people I consult Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov in which there are some characters who are acutely vexed by spiritual questions. Let me leave Ivan Karamazov to himself, as he has been discussed too much already. In Book II, Chapter 4 [ A lady of Little Faith ], a troubled woman comes to Father Zosima, the wise monk, and confesses her spiritual struggle. “I long to love God,” she says. She knows that she cannot love God without loving her fellow human beings, or at least doing some service to them. The truth is, she says, “I cannot bear people. The closer they ...