Skip to main content

Perspective




Perspective matters more than anything else because it determines how you see the world and how you see determines what you do with it.  All these people who go about fighting and killing in the name of their gods and totems have their own perspectives.  Those who create the flyovers and skyscrapers have their perspectives too.  What should really worry us is the importance enjoyed by the fighter and the killer while the builder remains in the darkness of the background. 

The fighters and killers have become important because our own perspectives are so limited, so contaminated and so perverted.  If only we could see a world in a grain of sand, like William Blake, and heaven in a wild flower, we would be infinitely more spiritual than all these fighters and killers who claim to be god’s own people. 

As Albert Einstein said, a person who is religiously enlightened is one who has liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied with thoughts, feelings and aspirations that foster the welfare of all creatures, of the planet itself.  Religion is a relationship.  Religion is a benign relationship.  It can never seek the destruction of anyone.

That’s why what is being promoted in the country nowadays in the name of religion is not religion at all.  It is just a perversion. 

The remedy is to widen our perspectives.  Learn more.  Understand more.  Reach out for the stars and you will see the wild flower opening up a heaven at your feet.  The perspective makes all the difference. 

Comments

  1. Pranju chakrapaniJuly 16, 2017 at 1:13 PM

    The last paragraph is deep. I will remember to use it at an appropriate place in the near future.

    What creates a false sense of nationalism? The soldiers, the enemies, the deaths and the martyrs. Can building a bridge, hospitals, research institutes, museums etc have that effect on the spirit of nationalism?

    One has not only to see everything but be everything to have a broader perspective.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 16, 2017 at 5:38 PM

      False nationalism is a product of ignorance or sheer villainy. Villains generally have political agenda. Ignorance has many faces like a student of mine who is now a lawyer and believes that Hinduism is in danger and hence requires militant defenders!

      Being everything is an eminent idea. Mystics are capable of that.

      Delete
  2. PurbaJuly 18, 2017 at 12:38 PM

    Better to be a fence-sitter. Makes you open to perspectives from differing ideologies. But that's not so easy, is it?

    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

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...
17 comments
Read more

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...
31 comments
Read more

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...
9 comments
Read more

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...
13 comments
Read more