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. Dipanwita ChakrabortyAugust 22, 2017 at 11:11 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
  2. Pranju chakrapaniAugust 23, 2017 at 1:26 PM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 23, 2017 at 7:34 PM

      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. Purba chakrabortyAugust 23, 2017 at 7:37 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
  4. None to be knownAugust 25, 2017 at 4:27 PM

    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
47 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Truths of various colours

You have your truth and I have mine. There shouldn’t be a problem – until someone lies. Unfortunately, lying has been elevated as a virtue in present India. There are all sorts of truths, some of which are irrefutable. As a friend said the other day with a little frustration, the eternal truth is this: No matter how many times you check, the Wi-Fi will always run fastest when you don’t actually need it – and collapse the moment you’re about to hit Submit . Philosophers call it irony. Engineers call it Murphy’s Law. The rest of us just call it life. Life is impossible without countless such truths. Consider the following; ·       Change is inevitable. ·       Mortality is universal. ·       Actions have consequences. [Even if you may seem invincible, your karma will catch up, just wait.] ·       Water boils at 100 o C under normal atmospheric pressure. ·    ...
13 comments
Read more