Skip to main content

The bastard and the dwarf




“Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not.  Make it your strength.  Then it can never be your weakness.  Armor yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.”  Tyrion Lannister, a character in Game of Thrones gives this counsel to Jon, another character, who is a bastard.  

Tyrion Lannister
Lannister is a dwarf and all dwarfs are bastards according to his experience.  “All dwarfs are bastards in their father’s eyes,” he says.  No man likes to admit that he has sired a dwarf.  It is better to cast aspersions on his wife. Since his mother died giving birth to him, he could not ask her who his real father was, says Lannister sardonically.  He goes on to say that “All dwarfs may be bastards, yet not all bastards need be dwarfs.”

Jon is a bastard.  But he has great qualities which make him better than many other people.  It is only the fact that he is a bastard that deters him from discovering his own greatness.  As long as he keeps fighting that fact he is going to remain just there: fighting an unalterable fact.  Come on, Jon, you are a bastard, admit it, let the whole world call you that, the world will, the world has no better sense, the world loves to poke your wound, rub salt on it and then watch you writhe in pain.  That’s what Lannister is saying without saying it.  Jon understands.  He understands that he doesn’t have to be apologetic for being a bastard.  How can that be his fault anyway? 

The world loves to put on your head other people’s faults.  You are a girl, let us say.  You happen to be walking along the road a little late in the evening.  You are raped.  Then it becomes your fault.  Why did you walk on the road so late in the evening when you know, or should have known, that a woman’s place is home at such hours?  Why did you wear such a dress that drew the attention of the boys?  Don’t you know that boys are boys?

Being poor is a crime too.  You don’t have a right to choose your food if you are poor.  Your children may die in the hospital if you are poor.  Belonging to certain religions can be a crime too.  Anything can be a crime, in fact, depending on which side you are. 

The biggest criminals may be perceived as the greatest heroes.  Depends on which side they are. 

So what do you do?  Forget that you are a bastard.  And just be the bastard.

Jon understood what Lannister was saying.  For a moment Tyrion Lannister the dwarf stood tall as a king before Jon the bastard.

Comments

  1. Very strong message. Loved the way you related it to present day situations.

    ReplyDelete
  2. That is the reason I don't shy away from calling myself a loser and a fool. The world, irrespectively, will always regard me as such. I have come to accept it and hence there isn't any shame to it. Now, I can do whatever I want and say whatever I feel like. What is liberation if not accepting and embracing the adjectives. As if they mattered anyway.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I belong to the same species :) But some people still accuse me of arrogance. Maybe that's also part of the loser that I am! The best thing is, as you've said, adjectives don't matter any more.

      Delete
  3. This is such a powerful message, explained so beautifully. Thanks for the post, Sir :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Perhaps it is right. Many of the problems in life could just end when we realize what we are or who we are. All the troubles in life arises due to pride. But once we realize what we are, pride melts away.

    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

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Hate Politics

Illustration by Copilot Hatred is what dominates the social media in India. It has been going on for many years now. A lot of violence is perpetrated by the ruling party’s own men. One of the most recent instances of venom spewed out by none other than Mithun Chakraborty would shake any sensible person. But the right wing of India is celebrating it. Seventy-four-year-old Chakraborty threatened to chop the people of a particular minority community into pieces. The Home Minister Amit Shah was sitting on the stage with a smile when the threat was issued openly. A few days back, a video clip showing a right-winger denying food to a Muslim woman because she refused to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’ dominated the social media. What kind of charity is it that is founded on hatred? If you go through the social media for a while, you will be astounded by the surfeit of hatred there. Why do a people who form the vast majority of a country hate a small minority so much? Hatred usually comes from some