Skip to main content

Our real Power


One of the many quotes that has refused to fade from my memory is Thomas Gray’s couplet in his classical poem, Elegy written in a country churchyard, which I studied decades ago. 

            Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
            And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

When the lines dug their roots into the limbic system of my being even before I had thought about my career, little did I realise that it was going to be an oracle in my life.  

I believe each one of us is a centre of power.  Our individuality, our uniqueness, our very identity is that power.  Given the appropriate ambience, that power will unfold and spread a beautiful fragrance.  Deprived of the ambience, it may droop and drop into dust having achieved little more than existing vacuously.

Is the existence of the flower in the desert, “unseen”, a mere “waste”?  That’s an interesting question which touches the realms of metaphysics.  Does anything even exist unless perceived by someone?  Unless fondled by someone?  The flower in the desert is born, lives a day or two or even more, and then withers and dies.  It just disappears.  Has it existed?  How do you know that it has? 

The flower has left no mark on anyone’s psyche.  That’s how most people vanish from the planet, having left nothing to be remembered by.  Like the simple country folk in Gray’s churchyard. 

Yet each one of us is a unique creature that has the potential to leave memorable imprints somewhere.  Most of us are debilitated by our own environment, mostly the people that populate the environment. 

When I realised like Jean-Paul Sartre that “hell is other people” I woke up to an epiphany, to a special self-discovery.  I saw the real faces behind masks.  Suddenly godmen metamorphosed into gadflies.  Many religious people who tried to reform or redeem my soul shed their masks and revealed blood-dripping grins. 

There are the innocuous people drifting on dusty lanes outside paradises reserved for the shrewd and the privileged.  I always belonged to those lanes.  The moment of that realisation was my deliverance. 


PS. Written for Indispire Edition 148: #SelfDiscovery

Indian Bloggers


Comments

  1. sunaina sharmaDecember 16, 2016 at 7:43 PM

    To vanish without a trace - will it be bad or good....I wonder too....In Jodi Picoult's book The Storyteller, Sage, the protagonist is horrified thinking of the countless victims of Nazi cruelty who died without leaving a single imprint on the mind of their murderer - this comes at a point when Josef, the former SS soldier is narrating to her the effect of a toddler's death - she speculates on the invisibility, the ineffectiveness of the death of 'others' - where are they? Coming to the second part of your post, hell is other people - makes me think - Are we heaven for our own souls and hell for others....?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 16, 2016 at 9:14 PM

      The book example you provided is apt. The murderer learns nothing and precisely because of that the victim's sacrifice becomes futile in spite of its visibility. Invisibility may save you from victimisation at best!

      Yes, I'm sure I was a hell to quite a lot of people. Clash of hells!

      Delete
  2. UnknownDecember 16, 2016 at 8:05 PM

    gr8 lines Sir !

    ReplyDelete
  3. AmanJanuary 11, 2017 at 4:13 PM

    nice article

    ReplyDelete

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
47 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 4

The footpath between Park Avenue and Subhash Bose Park The Park Avenue in Ernakulam is flanked by gigantic rain trees with their branches arching over the road like a cathedral of green. They were not so domineering four decades ago when I used to walk beneath their growing canopies. The Park Avenue with its charming, enormous trees has a history too. King Rama Varma of Kochi ordered trees to be planted on either side of the road and make it look like a European avenue. He also developed a park beside it. The park was named after him, though today it is divided into two parts, with one part named after Subhash Chandra Bose and the other after Indira Gandhi. We can never say how long Indira Gandhi’s name will remain there. Even Sardar Patel, whom the right wing apparently admires, was ousted from the world’s biggest cricket stadium which was renamed Narendra Modi Stadium by Narendra Modi.   Renaming places and roads and institutions is one of the favourite pastimes of the pres...
11 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 3

Street leading to St Francis Church, Fort Kochi There were Christians in Kerala long before the Brahmins, who came to be known as Namboothiris, landed in the state from North India some time after 6 th century CE. Tradition has it that Thomas, disciple of Jesus, brought Christianity to Kerala in the first century. That is quite possible, given the trade relationships that Kerala had with the Roman Empire in those days. Pliny the Elder, Roman author, chastised in his encyclopaedic work, Natural History (published around 77 CE), the Romans’ greed for pepper from India. He was displeased with his country spending “no less than fifty million sesterces” on a commodity which had no value other than its “certain pungency.” Did Thomas sail on one of the many ships that came to Kerala to purchase “pungency”? Possible.   Even if Thomas did not come, the advent of Christianity in Kerala precedes the arrival of the Namboothiris. The Persians established trade links with Kerala in 4 ...
10 comments
Read more

Five Microtales

1.        Development             Chamar, Lohar, Mehtar and many others stood at a distance, along with their families, and watched their huts being pulled down by a bulldozer. They were asked to leave the place where they had been living for decades. “The government has taken over this land for development works,” an officer said. Chamar, Lohar, Mehtar and the others spread their bedsheets under a flyover over which flew opulent vehicles of development.   2.        Impersonation             The old woman went to the Women’s Welfare office. She wanted to register herself for the Prime Minister’s monthly welfare scheme for the old and unemployable women. She placed her thumb on the scanner for Aadhar authentication. “Not matching,” the officer said. She was arrested for trying to impersonate. Sitti...
8 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...
7 comments
Read more