Skip to main content

Distance


A desire to run away from the oppressiveness of the world into the solace of solitude is mounting in me restlessly these days.  I’m no sage and the Himalayas don’t entice me with all their gods and nymphs.  In fact, it’s more important to escape from gods these days.  Gods have capitulated to the insanity of their devotees.

My home and the little garden around it will do for me as long as priests and politicians stay away. 

A priest was arrested yesterday from a place not too far from my home for impregnating a minor girl.  The girl must have been helpless before the suave exterior of the priest who is taken by the faithful flock as the representative of God on earth.  The priest is the one who listens to the confessions of the ordinary sinners and absolves their sins in the name of God.  It is easy for a 16-year old to fall prey to the devil that comes wearing a priest’s robe.

It is easy for us to dismiss the issue labelling it a one-off affair.  Far from being singular, such venality is more prevalent today than ever in every religion particularly among the priestly classes.  Look at the number of godmen who are already behind the bars for grotesque abuse of their female devotees.  There are more of their ilk outside the prison walls than inside.

It is not just about abuse of women, however.  We find religions infiltrated with criminals.  We find a nefarious nexus between crime, religion and politics.  They all ride tandem to pick cherished trophies from the Mount of Success.

A 20-year old girl who says that Pakistan did not kill her father (who died in an Indo-Pak war) but the war did is trolled mercilessly and even threatened with rape by people who claim to be patriots and guardians of Bharatiya culture.  The youthful idealism of that girl who merely wanted to say that she does not hate anyone merely because they are born in a different country and practise a different religion was drowned in the cacophony raised by hooligans who beat the tin drums of patriotism. 

I live in a country whose criminals live in prisons enjoying VVIP status or in grand palaces with goons and thugs at their beck and call, while the simple, ordinary, good citizens keep struggling endlessly to get food and water.  I live in a country which glorifies perverts and cowards in the name of religion and culture.  I live in a country whose leaders mouth hollow promises and actually deliver hatred and violence.

Insanity reigns supreme here.  The one who shouts loudest gets the throne.  That’s why I need the distance. 





Comments

  1. sunaina sharmaMarch 1, 2017 at 4:42 PM

    I am shocked with the way people have distorted the message of Guemehar Kaur. Hatred makes people blind. Mix it with political agenda and all one gets is chaos, destruction. Utter hopelessness.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 1, 2017 at 7:54 PM

      We have reached the end of the tether. Hopelessness. The air is vitiated so much by the Right wing people that hatred is what froths like the bubbles in the drains.

      Delete
  2. CifarMarch 2, 2017 at 12:53 PM

    By taking a part of her one year old video her message that she didn't afraid of ABVP goons is dissolved

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 2, 2017 at 3:51 PM

      ABVP seems to be a Frankenstein monster possessing nothing but malice.

      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
47 comments
Read more

Break Your Barriers

  Guest Post Break Your Barriers : 10 Strategic Career Essentials to Grow in Value by Anu Sunil  A Review by Jose D. Maliekal SDB Anu Sunil’s Break Your Barriers is a refreshing guide for anyone seeking growth in life and work. It blends career strategy, personal philosophy, and practical management insights into a resource that speaks to educators, HR professionals, and leaders across both faith-based and secular settings. Having spent nearly four decades teaching philosophy and shaping human resources in Catholic seminaries, I found the book deeply enriching. Its central message is clear: most limitations are self-imposed, and imagination is the key to breaking through them. As the author reminds us, “The only limit to your success is your imagination.” The book’s strength lies in its transdisciplinary approach. It treats careers not just as jobs but as vocations, rooted in the dignity of labour and human development. Themes such as empathy, self-mastery, ethical le...
3 comments
Read more

Rushing for Blessings

Pilgrims at Sabarimala Millions of devotees are praying in India’s temples every day. The rush increases year after year and becomes stampedes occasionally. Something similar is happening in the religious places of other faiths too: Christianity and Islam, particularly. It appears that Indians are becoming more and more religious or spiritual. Are they really? If all this religious faith is genuine, why do crimes keep increasing at an incredible rate? Why do people hate each other more and more? Isn’t something wrong seriously? This is the pilgrimage season in Kerala’s Sabarimala temple. Pilgrims are forced to leave the temple without getting a darshan (spiritual view) of the deity due to the rush. Kerala High Court has capped the permitted number of pilgrims there at 75,000 a day. Looking at the serpentine queues of devotees in scanty clothing under the hot sun of Kerala, one would think that India is becoming a land of ascetics and renouncers. If religion were a vaccine agains...
8 comments
Read more

Indian Knowledge Systems

Shashi Tharoor wrote a massive book back in 2018 to explore the paradoxes that constitute the man called Narendra Modi. Paradoxes dominate present Indian politics. One of them is what’s called the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). What constitute the paradox here are two parallel realities: one genuinely valuable, and the other deeply regressive. The contributions of Aryabhata and Brahmagupta to mathematics, Panini to linguistics, Vedanta to philosophy, and Ayurveda to medicine are genuine traditions that may deserve due attention. But there’s a hijacked version of IKS which is a hilariously, if not villainously, political project. Much of what is now packaged as IKS in government documents, school curricula, and propaganda includes mythological claims treated as historical facts, pseudoscience (e.g., Ravana’s Pushpaka Vimana as a real aircraft or Ganesha’s trunk as a product of plastic surgery), astrology replacing astronomy, ritualism replacing reasoning, attempts to invent the r...
9 comments
Read more

Ghost with a Cat

It was about midnight when Kuriako stopped his car near the roadside eatery known as thattukada in Kerala. He still had another 27 kilometres to go, according to Google Map. Since Google Map had taken him to nowhere lands many a time, Kuriako didn’t commit himself much to that technology. He would rather rely on wayside shopkeepers. Moreover, he needed a cup of lemon tea. ‘How far is Anakkad from here?’ Kuriako asked the tea-vendor. Anakkad is where his friend Varghese lived. The two friends would be meeting after many years now. Both had taken voluntary retirement five years ago from their tedious and rather absurd clerical jobs in a government industry and hadn’t met each other ever since. Varghese abandoned all connection with human civilisation, which he viewed as savagery of the most brutal sort, and went to live in a forest with only the hill tribe people in the neighbourhood. The tribal folk didn’t bother him at all; they had their own occupations. Varghese bought a plot ...
8 comments
Read more