Skip to main content

Pride and Love



They can destroy me, my boy,
but not defeat me.
The surge of pride in my veins is what keeps me alive.

They mocked me when I returned from the sea
day after day
without fish.
Unlucky fisherman.
Santiago the doomed.
Santiago the accursed.
Santiago the beaten.

No, Manolin, no,
I could embrace bad luck
I could swallow damnation.
But defeat?
No, Manolin, no.
I am Santiago, masterful fisherman.
I am Santiago, more man than I am.
Old man who wakes up early in order to have one longer day.
Beaten I cannot be; destroyed yes if need be.

Mine is the turtle’s heart, boy,
It beats for hours after it has been cut up.
The marlin I hooked had such a heart too.
We were brothers, the marlin and I,
each one with a heart whose beats
matched each other’s.
The marlin was my friend and foe at once,
my strength and my weakness,
my pride and my humility,
my master and my victim.

I love you, Marlin,
That’s why I have to kill you.
Else you will kill me.
You have to.
We are in it together.

PS. Santiago is the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway’s novel Old Man and the Sea. Manolin is a boy who is devoted to him.




Comments

  1. Hope remains eternal in human breast

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hope is a dominant theme of the novel. It's a sin not to hope, as Santiago says. But I love the theme of 'destruction versus defeat.'

      Delete
  2. It revived my memory of the book. Santiago, the salo, the worst form of unlucky. But he didn't care. Deep within him was the lion who still had the pride and the perseverance. Who cares about luck when one has got perseverance to live one more day.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Indeed. Thus Santiago becomes the real hero, an inspiration.

      Delete
  3. Nice to see you write more poetry. Always loved it when you wrote though rarely.

    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 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...

Are human systems repressive?

Salma I had never heard of Salma until she was sent to the Rajya Sabha as a Member of the Parliament by Tamil Nadu a couple of weeks back and a Malayalam weekly featured her on the cover with an interview. Salma’s story made me think on the nature of certain human systems and organisations including religion. Salma was born Rajathi Samsudeen. Marriage made her Rukiya, because her husband’s family didn’t think of Rajathi as a Muslim name. Salma is the pseudonym she chose as a writer. Salma’s life was always controlled by one system or another. Her religion and its ruthlessly patriarchal conventions determined the crests and troughs of her life’s waves. Her schooling ended the day she chose to watch a movie with a friend, another girl whose education was stopped too. They were in class 9. When Rajathi protested that her cousin, a boy, was also watching the same movie at the same time in the same cinema hall, her mother’s answer was, “He’s a boy; boys can do anything.” Rajathi was...

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...

Modi’s Art of Censorship

One of the infinite ironies about Narendra Modi’s India is its flagrant censorship while claiming to be the most tolerant civilisation. A Guardian report today informs us that Arundhati Roy’s 2020 book, Azadi , is banned in Kashmir for promoting a “false narrative and secessionism.” Being a fan of Ms Roy’s rebellious spirit, I buy her books as they are published. I had reviewed this book ( Azadi ) back in 2020 when it was published. The Congress government that ruled India for a very long period, before Modi’s rhetoric mesmerised the Indian electorate, was highly flawed. Corruption ran in its every single vein. Yet it was far better than what Modi brought in its place. The glaring hypocrisy of the Congress was a glue that held India together, Ms Roy says in this censored book of hers. What she means to say is that though secularism was not practised sincerely or consistently the pretence of it acted as a binding force that maintained a kind of social and political equilibrium. T...