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

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...
39 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...
16 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...
9 comments
Read more