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. 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. 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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Prelude to AtoZ

  From Garden of 5 Senses, Delhi [file pic] Hindsight gives an unearthly charm and order to the past. There can be pain too. A lot of things could have been different, much better, if only we possessed the wisdom of our old age back in those days. As a writer put it, Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear and a lot of those guys must have thought, “I wish I had known this some time ago.” Life is a series of errors with intermittent achievements. The only usefulness of the errors may be the lessons they teach us. Probably, that is their purpose too. We are created to err so that we learn, I dare to put it that way. I turn 64 in a month’s time. It’s not inappropriate to look back at some of the people whom life brought into my life so that I would learn certain lessons. No, I don’t mean to say that life has any such purpose or design or anything. Life is absurd. People come into your life as haphazardly as vehicles ply on your road or birds poop on your head. Some of these people change the chemist

Why I won’t vote

From Deshabhimani , Malayalam weekly Exactly a month from today is the Parliamentary election in my state of Kerala. This time, I’m not going to vote. Bernard Shaw defined democracy , with his characteristic cynicism, as “ a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve .” We elect our government in a democracy. And the government invariably sucks our blood – whichever the party is. The BJP and the Congress are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee though the former makes all sorts of other claims day in and day out. BJP = Congress + the holy cow. The holy cow has turned out to be quite a vampire and that makes a difference, no doubt. In our Prime Minister’s algebra, it is: (a+b) 2 which should be equal to a 2 and b 2 . There is an extra 2ab which is the holy cow. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm , the animals revolt against the human master and set up their own nationalist republic. Soon politics develops in the republic and some pigs become leaders. The porcine

How Arvind Kejriwal can save himself

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have a clear vision. Eliminate all opposition. Decimate them or absorb them. My previous post [link below] showed a few people decimated by them. Today let’s look at the others: those who are saved by joining the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]. 1. Himanta Biswa Sarma  This guy was in Congress and faced serious charges related to the multi-crore Saradha chit fund scam. He also faced corruption charges related to drinking water supply in Guwahati. His house was raided by the Central Bureau of Investigation [CBI]. Then he switched over to BJP and all his crimes just vanished. It’s as simple as taking a dip in the Ganga and all your sins are forgiven. Today he is the chief minister of Assam. Nothing is heard of all the charges that were levelled against him. 2. Amarinder Singh  This former Captain in the Indian Army was a Congressman until Modi’s Enforcement Directorate [ED] started raiding him, his son and his son-in-law. He put an end to all those raid

The Good Old World

Book Review Title: Dukhi Dadiba and irony of fate Author: Dadi Edulji Taraporewala Translators: Aban Mukherji and Tulsi Vatsal Publisher: Ratna Books, Delhi, 2023 Pages: 314 If you want to return to the good old days of the late 19 th century, this is an ideal novel for you. This was published originally in Gujarati in 1913. It appeared as a serial before that from 1898 onwards in a periodical. The conflict between good and evil is the dominant motif though there is romance, betrayal, disappointment, regret, and pretty much of traditional morality. Reading this novel is quite like watching an old Bollywood movie, 1960s style. Ardeshir Bahadurshah, a wealthy Parsi aristocrat in Surat, dies having obligated his son Jehangir to find out his long-lost brother Rustom. Rustom was Bahadurshah’s son in his first marriage. The mother died when the boy was too small and the nurse who looked after the child vanished with it one day. Ratanmai, Bahadurshah’s present wife, takes her

Kejriwal’s Arrest in Modi’s Kurukshetra

For some mysterious reason, Arvind Kejriwal’s arrest reminded me of Haren Pandya. Maybe, because Pandya’s 21 st death anniversary is approaching (26 March). Have you forgotten Haren Pandya? He was the Home Minister of Gujarat before Narendra Modi assumed dictatorial powers in that state. Modi chose to teach humility to Pandya by making him the Minister of State for revenue. Pandya chose not to learn humility from Modi and resigned from that post in Aug 2002. Remember Gujarat of 2002? You should. A fire engulfed a train on 27 Feb 2002 killing 58 Hindu pilgrims who were returning from Ayodhya where they had gone to discover their god, not very unlike Christopher Columbus undertaking a voyage to discover India and messing it all up. What caused the fire in the train? Lord Ram knows probably. The upshot was that there was a riot in Gujarat by Hindus against Muslims. Haren Pandya is one of the BJP leaders who gave statements in many places indicting Modi for the riots. He asser