Skip to main content

The Universe is Crazy


Through the haze of the twilight walked in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince.  He was still the same old Little Prince (LP).  That’s why he appeared in the twilight.  When they grow up they become princes or princesses of darkness.

“The Universe is a crazy place,” said LP when I asked what he had learnt after so many years of wandering among the stars and meteors.  Just imagine your own situation, he said.  Right now you are moving at about a speed of 1500 km per hour. 

“You mean the speed of the rotation of the earth?” I ventured to ask.  It is dangerous to ask questions to enlightened people.  You never know how they will take your questions. They live in a different universe altogether.

Precisely, he said.  If the earth is rotating at a speed of about 1500 km per hour on its axis, you are moving at that speed, aren’t you?

“The earth is also revolving around the Sun at about 30 km per second,” I said. 

Indeed, he consented immediately.  So you are spinning at about half a kilometre per second and rushing in the space at about 30 km per second. 

He had converted 1500 km per hour into km per second, I understood.

Then there are your airplanes and maglev trains and what not, said LP.  So much rush, so much rush.  He shook his head as if he didn’t like all that rush.

“Rush is the law of the universe, it seems,” I ventured again.

That’s why, I said, it’s a crazy system.

The madness is perhaps its beauty too, he went on.  There’s a method to that madness.

“Yup.  Our scientists have found out the formulas of those methods.”  I wanted to add that the formulas make the system very sane.  Not crazy. 

Well, you never know when a shooting star will appear from nowhere, said LP.  I have had to dodge quite a lot of craziness during my cosmic wanderings.

“Maybe even the shooting stars follow some formulas,” I suggested.  “Our scientists...”

Little Prince
What is essential remains beyond the formulas and rules, said LP cutting me short.  What is essential reveals itself only to the heart.

“But the heart is crazier than the universe,” I blurted out. Every terrorist is a lover at heart, I thought. Every hater is.  Every fanatic is. 

The heart is the root that keeps you from being tossed about in this crazy universe.  LP peered into my eyes as if to check whether I had a heart.  Your religious people haven’t discovered the heart, he said, they only discovered gods.


Comments

  1. Jyotirmoy SarkarFebruary 7, 2017 at 8:59 AM

    Beautiful presentation and loved the last line a lot...that's actually happening all over the world.
    Loved it a lot.

    ReplyDelete
  2. sunaina sharmaFebruary 8, 2017 at 4:53 AM

    Yes, they have discovered only gods, their gods - his god, and her god and they are all antagonistic to all the other gods or others' gods.....there is no heart in the matter - absolutely no heart - just blindness.....

    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

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...
18 comments
Read more

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so...
39 comments
Read more

Dine in Eden

If you want to have a typical nonvegetarian Malayali lunch or dinner in a serene village in Kerala, here is the Garden of Eden all set for you at Ramapuram [literally ‘Abode of Rama’] in central Kerala. The place has a temple each for Rama and his three brothers: Lakshmana, Bharata, and Shatrughna. It is believed that Rama meditated in this place during his exile and also that his brothers joined him for a while. Right in the heart of the small town is a Catholic church which is an imposing structure that makes an eloquent assertion of religious identity. Quite close to all these religious places is the Garden of Eden, Eden Thoppu in Malayalam, a toddy shop with a difference. Toddy is palm wine, a mild alcoholic drink collected from palm trees. In my childhood, toddy was really natural; i.e., collected from palm trees including coconut trees which are ubiquitous in Kerala. My next-door neighbours, two brothers who lived in the same house, were toddy-tappers. Toddy was a health...
10 comments
Read more

Goodbye, Little Ones

They were born under my care, tiny throbs of life, eyes still shut to the world. They grew up under my constant care. I changed their bed and the sheets regularly making sure they were always warm and comfortable. When one of them didn’t open her eyes after a fortnight of her birth, I rang up my cousin who is a vet and got the appropriate prescription that gave her the light of day in just two days. I watched each one of them stumble through their first steps. Today they were adopted. I personally took them to their new home, a tiny house of a family that belongs to the class that India calls BPL [Below Poverty Line]. I didn’t know them at all until I stopped my car a little away from their small house, at the nearest spot my car could possibly reach. They lived in another village altogether, some 15 km from mine. Sometimes 15 km can make a world of difference. A man who looked as old as me had come to my house in the late afternoon. “I’d like to adopt your kittens,” he said. He...
6 comments
Read more