Skip to main content

Inspiration

Rowing on

The highest form of inspiration has the signature of love somewhere in it.  Even a great intellectual giant like Albert Einstein had love in his neurons.  His love, however, was not confined to a few individual human beings; it encompassed the whole cosmos.  When he said that "there are only two ways to live your life” one of which is “as though nothing is a miracle” and “the other is as though everything is a miracle,” his love for the cosmos is what came across.  The cosmos was a miracle for him.  He loved it.  His love led to his theories born out of his ardent desire to understand what he loved so much. 

Novelist Joseph Conrad could not have mapped the dark depths of the human heart had he not been inspired by love of human beings.  “Men alone are quite capable of every wickedness,” he knew.  But he also knew that men alone could seek themselves in the work they do.  What makes a man great is not the work he does, Conrad would have said, but discovering himself in the work: “for yourself not for others.”

I would couple the above two views to analyse what inspires me: an urge to understand my world (the whole cosmos) and my self (my microcosm).  The world fascinates me with its beauty and horror, compassion and cruelty, its resplendence and its obscurity.  All of them are present within me too.  You don’t know how much effort I require to control the demons within me.  My writing is an exercise in that process.  I wish there was more love in it than anger. 

PS. Written for IndiSpire Edition 198: #myinspiration



Comments

  1. Pranju chakrapaniDecember 8, 2017 at 11:44 AM

    That makes you a human, to control the demons present within. Of course, most of them don't realize that. The effort to bring the best from within is inspirational.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 8, 2017 at 3:55 PM

      You're right: most people don't even know their inner demons. They think only others have the problem. Most religious people have that attitude.

      Delete
  2. AbhiDecember 8, 2017 at 4:31 PM

    Beautiful. As they say , Love heals. True love heals completely.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 9, 2017 at 6:57 AM

      No doubt. The world is always eroding our love, however. That's the challenge.

      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
47 comments
Read more

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...
19 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

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...
14 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