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

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
26 comments
Read more

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
37 comments
Read more

William and the autumn of life

William and I were together only for one year, but our friendship has grown stronger year after year. The duration of that friendship is going to hit half a century. In the meanwhile both he and I changed many places. William was in Kerala when I was in Shillong. He was in Ireland when I was in Delhi. Now I am in Kerala where William is planning to migrate back. We were both novices of a religious congregation for one year at Kotagiri in Tamil Nadu. He was older than me by a few years and far more mature too. But we shared a cordial rapport which kept us in touch though we went in unexpected directions later. William’s conversations had the same pattern back then and now too. I’d call it Socratic. He questions a lot of things that you say with the intention of getting to the depth of the matter. The last conversation I had with him was when I decided to stop teaching. I mention this as an example of my conversations with William. “You are a good teacher. Why do you want to stop
15 comments
Read more

Uriel the gargoyle-maker

Uriel was a multifaceted personality. He could stab with words, sting like Mike Tyson, and distort reality charmingly with the precision of a gifted cartoonist. He was sedate now and passionate the next moment. He could don the mantle of a carpenter, a plumber, or a mechanic, as situation demanded. He ran a school in Shillong in those days when I was there. That’s how I landed in the magic circle of his friendship. He made me a gargoyle. Gradually. When the refined side of human civilisation shaped magnificent castles and cathedrals, the darker side of the same homo sapiens gave birth to gargoyles. These grotesque shapes were erected on those beautiful works of architecture as if to prove that there is no human genius without a dash of perversion. In many parts of India, some such repulsive shape is placed in a prominent place of great edifices with the intention of warding off evil or, more commonly, the evil eye. I was Uriel’s gargoyle for warding off the evil eye from his sc
12 comments
Read more

Victor the angel

When Victor visited us in Delhi Victor and I were undergraduate classmates at St Albert’s College, Kochi. I was a student for priesthood then and Victor was just another of the many ordinary lay students. We were majoring in mathematics with physics and statistics as our optionals. Today Victor is a theologian with a doctorate in biblical studies and is a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission in the Vatican. And I have given up religion for all practical purposes. Victor and I travelled in opposing directions after our graduation. But we have remained friends notwithstanding our religious differences. Victor had very friendly relationships with some of the teachers in college and it became very helpful for me towards the end of my three-year study there when I had quit the pursuit of priesthood. The final exams approached and I needed a convenient accommodation near college. An inexpensive and quiet place was what I wanted during the period of the university exams. “What a
10 comments
Read more