Skip to main content

Self-importance

Image courtesy: Onedio

New Year resolutions never worked for me.  So I stopped making them long ago.  But this year I made a resolution.  And I know it will work.  Because I have already made it work to a large extent in the past year.  That was one of my few achievements in 2017. 

To live without any feeling of self-importance.  That’s my New Year resolution.  I have already tried it quite successfully in the past year and it is immensely rewarding.  I’ll tell you why.

I used to feel hurt by the deeds and misdeeds of other people.  Then came a flash of inspiration at some point in 2017.  Probably, it was not a moment; it was a gradual realisation, the result of a protracted self-examination which started some time in 2015 when I lost my job in Delhi which was one of the best things in my life.  The depression that followed lasted months and made me extremely contemplative. 

Why do I feel hurt easily?  It’s because I consider myself important.  What if I just let go that ego and see myself as an insignificant person?  I tried it out.  Eventually life became easy and fun too.  In fact, I simply ceased being hurt by anything that people did.  On the contrary, events became entertaining.  I began to be amused by what people did.  I realised how silly I had made myself earlier with my pompousness. 

It is in those days of contemplation that I reached out to the stars.  I thought of the billions of galaxies out there.  The vastness of the cosmos overwhelmed me enough to make me realise my diminutiveness.  What am I in this cosmos of billions of galaxies with infinity of stars? 

The stars taught me humility.  I know that my New Year resolution will work this year. 


Comments

  1. JaiJanuary 1, 2018 at 8:48 PM

    Yes. It is silly of human beings to take themselves so seriously... I too had this problem till I realized how small I am in this vast universe that stretches infinitely on all sides...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 2, 2018 at 12:29 PM

      Your writings exude that egolessness. Glad to have encountered you in the blogosphere.

      Delete
  2. Sreedhar BhattaramJanuary 1, 2018 at 9:10 PM

    Right introspection and evaluation.. This attitude helps us a lot in retaining our peace with us.. A nice Post, Tomichan.. Wish you and your family a Happy New Year!

    ReplyDelete
  3. parwatisingariJanuary 2, 2018 at 6:16 AM

    :) great going.

    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

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...
31 comments
Read more

Helpless Gods

Illustration by Gemini Six decades ago, Kerala’s beloved poet Vayalar Ramavarma sang about gods that don’t open their eyes, don’t know joy or sorrow, but are mere clay idols. The movie that carried the song was a hit in Kerala in the late 1960s. I was only seven when the movie was released. The impact of the song, like many others composed by the same poet, sank into me a little later as I grew up. Our gods are quite useless; they are little more than narcissists who demand fresh and fragrant flowers only to fling them when they wither. Six decades after Kerala’s poet questioned the potency of gods, the Chief Justice of India had a shoe flung at him by a lawyer for the same thing: questioning the worth of gods. The lawyer was demanding the replacement of a damaged idol of god Vishnu and the Chief Justice wondered why gods couldn’t take care of themselves since they are omnipotent. The lawyer flung his shoe at the Chief Justice to prove his devotion to a god. From Vayalar of 196...
10 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

Sex and Sin

Disclaimer: This is not a book review The first discovery made by Adam and Eve after they disobeyed God was sex. Sex is sin in Christianity except when the union takes place with the sole intention of procreation like a farmer sowing the seed. Saint Augustine said, Adam and Eve would have procreated by a calm, rational act of the will if they had continued to live in the Garden of Eden. The Catholic Church wants sex to be a rational act for it not to be a sin. The body and its passions are evil. The soul is holy and belongs to God. One of the most poignant novels I’ve read about the body-soul conflict in Catholicism is Sarah Joseph’s Othappu . Originally written in Malayalam, it was translated into English with the same Malayalam title. The word ‘othappu’ doesn’t have an exact equivalent in English. Approximately, it means ‘scandal’ as in the Biblical verse: “ If anyone causes one of these little ones to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around t...
12 comments
Read more