Skip to main content

Melancholy Philosophers versus Cheerful Godmen




“You are a philosopher, Dr Johnson,” said Oliver Edwards.  “I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.”

Philosophers are grim creatures.  Imagine Immanuel Kant with a smile on his lips.  It would be easier to visualise Jesus cracking an adult joke about King David’s sexcapade with Bathsheba.  From Descartes to Wittgenstein, the whole lot of them were damn serious about strangling the conceited bourgeois spirit of their time.  And they all failed, each one of them, inevitably.  Because the triumph of humanity is the triumph of the middle class pretensions and hypocrisy.

There are no more philosophers left in the world.  The hypocrisy of the middle class has killed the philosophers.  Nietzsche would have said that the philosophers died laughing, laughing at the caricatures that walked about wearing expensive branded suits and smelling of cheap morality sold from all sorts of pulpits.

Oliver Edwards went through life without experiencing it really.  So cheerfulness frothed in him as it did in King David while watching Bathsheba taking bath in the moonlight.  21st century is the century of King Davids and Bathshebas.  Not of philosophers with their off-putting melancholic cerebrations.  It is the age of godmen who sell happiness in yogic concoctions and art of living conventions. 

Comments

  1. We live in a world where happiness can be packaged in silver gold and platinum schemes and where people buy such schemes. There are even sachets of happiness for the poor! They sell hypocrisy and we buy hypocrisy and that is how the economy flows from the poor to the rich, making rich richer and poor dalit-ers!!

    You left out Diogenes. That man lived his life with no pretension and we can see how happy he was.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I left out the ancients intentionally. Even Socrates with his apparent severity had a sense of humour.

      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

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Book Review Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Author: Manu S Pillai Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2024 Pages: 564 (about half of which consists of Notes) There never was any monolithic religion called Hinduism. Different parts of India practised Hinduism in its own ways, with its own gods and rituals and festivals. Some of these were even mutually opposed. For example, Vamana who is a revered incarnation of Vishnu in North India becomes a villain in Kerala’s Onam legends. What has become of this protean religion of infinite variety and diversity today in the hands of its ‘missionary’ political leaders? Manu S Pillai’s book ends with V D Savarkar’s contributions to the religion with a subtle hint that it is his legacy that is driving the present version of the religion in the name of Hindutva. The last lines of the book, leaving aside the Epilogue titled ‘What is Hinduism?’, are telltale. “Life did not give Savarkar all he...