Skip to main content

Hemingway and the Yogi


Ernest Hemingway, Nobel laureate in literature, loved life passionately.  He loved adventure and relished the big game safaris in Africa as much as sailing through the dangers in the ocean or even punching the opponent in amateur boxing. More so, he trusted people just to know if they were trustworthy.  Many of the adventures he embraced had the potential to kill him.  He survived two plane crashes during his last safari in Africa and read with considerable amusement the obituaries that appeared in the morning’s newspapers which had presumed his death.

The Yogi, on the other hand, has no passions by profession.  He is supposed to be dispassionate.  He has conquered emotions and passions.  Rig Veda says that the whole spectrum of human passions ranging from enthusiasm and creativity to depression and agony, from the heights of spiritual bliss to the heaviness of earth-bound labour, belongs to the rank and file.  The Yogi has transcended these contrary forces. 

Between the extreme passion of Hemingway and the equally extreme dispassion of the Yogi, there exist an infinite variety of possibilities which we the ordinary mortals embrace.  A bit of adventure here and a bit of spirituality there is good enough for us.  We can extend the bits occasionally to protracted entertainments too, maybe in the mountains or in the temples.  We can be both passionate and dispassionate, as demanded by the occasion.  We can be secular and religious at the same time.  That’s why we are normal human beings.  Albert Einstein wondered many times, looking at people like us, whether he was crazy or the other people (that is, we) were.  

Hemingway was crazy anyway and his passions took his life in the end.  The Yogi may live a hundred years though I will never understand for what.  What’s the use of living like a vegetable even if you can exist for a hundred years?  I’d rather have much shorter life filled with joys and passions.  That’s my personal view: one of the infinite varieties of possibilities that lie between Hemingway and the Yogi.  But I love those Yogis who go around entertaining the world with passionately undulating bellies and selling us everything from fairness creams to Ayurvedic Soanpapdi.  They entertain us with a difference.



Comments

  1. Roohi BhatnagarFebruary 21, 2017 at 9:22 AM

    Hihihi, last line amused me.. Interesting post.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 21, 2017 at 9:10 PM

      Though the Yogi is supposed to be dispassionate, today's yogis are just the opposite: very passionate, even more so than us ordinary mortals :)

      Delete
  2. KalpanaFebruary 21, 2017 at 3:03 PM

    Hemingway was not crazy. I'm quite a big fan of his writing, if not of his lifestyle - his extreme sexism towards women and his desire to hunt. Can't say I agree with yogis either - bleached of feeling. What I'm curious about is your desire to juxtapose the two.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 21, 2017 at 9:13 PM

      Hemingway's insanity led him to commit suicide. I mentioned Einstein's view on sanity precisely to imply that sanity is a relative thing: by conventional standards Hemingway was not normal.

      It is the Rig Veda and other such scriptures that bleach the yogi, not me. It's not my personal view. My personal view is that our yogis are worse than us when it comes to greed, jealousy, craftiness, political chicanery, sensuality, deception... an endless list.

      I didn't juxtapose the two: I contrasted them, put them at the two ends of the passion-dispassion continuum.

      Delete
  3. DebashreeFebruary 22, 2017 at 11:38 AM

    I am practicing meditation offlate and also reading some books on spirituality and power of subconscious mind. You may have a look at Lost and found in Ranthambore, available in Amazon kindle version, you may like it

    ReplyDelete
  4. Allwyn ThanarajFebruary 22, 2017 at 11:58 PM

    What’s the use of living like a vegetable even if you can exist for a hundred years?
    This has raised a million questions within me.. Great 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 – 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

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...
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