Skip to main content

Love’s Intoxications



“You are the master of vanishing acts,” Kartik told the magician. “Make me vanish.”

The magician smiled.  “What do you mean by make you vanish?”

“I want to disappear from the world. I’m sick of the world.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You make even a train vanish. You made the Taj Mahal vanish once. Why can’t you then make a small creature like me vanish?”

“Magic is just illusions, young man,” the magician continued with his unfading smile which had a magical charm.  “The train doesn’t vanish actually.  Nor does the Taj.”

“Then?”

“I merely divert the viewer’s attention to something else.”

Kartik looked at the magician incredulously.

“Have you ever seen a circus?” Magician asked.

Kartik nodded his head. “Yes.”

“Have you watched the trapeze artistes?”

Kartik nodded again.

“Sometimes the artiste on a trapeze vanishes temporarily from the attention of the audience.  The audience is sitting mesmerised by the artistes jumping from trapeze to another, like a juggler’s pieces flying crazily in the air. Then comes the clown wearing a skirt-like loose garment over his motley.  We expect the clown to catch the next trapeze or to be caught by the artiste on that trapeze, as it happens with the other artistes. But the artiste only catches the clown’s skirt. The clown comes falling down, falling down, with a shriek and with his little limbs flying all around. The audience gasps for a moment. But the clown lands in the safety net and jumps in it comically like only a clown can.  All the while, the trapeze artistes have vanished. It’s their brief rest period. Actually they have not vanished. They are there at their high stations. But the audience’s attention is diverted from them. That’s the vanishing trick.”

Kartik was listening intently. “I understand. Living without attracting attention is the vanishing trick.”

“That’s not going to be easy for you,” Magician said as Kartik was about to turn and leave.

“Why?” Kartik was surprised.

“You belong to the type that can’t vanish even if you want to. You belong to the type that draws people’s attention to themselves even if they don’t want to.”

“How do you know that?”

“I was watching you come in.  As you were walking in, a little girl out there in the yard fell down.  Immediately you bent down, picked her up, patted the dust off her little dress, rubbed her hurt knee, and noticing that she had tripped on her untied shoelace you knelt down before her and tied the lace.”

“So?”

“You are addicted to love. You love the intoxication of love. Anyone who knows such love will draw attention even if he doesn’t want to.”

Kartik stared at Magician blankly. Wistfully. Confused.

“That little girl to whom you gave your love,” Magician continued, “is my daughter.”

“Does that make any difference?” Kartik wondered.

“Not to you, but to me, yes, it does.  And every person you love is somebody’s son or daughter, brother or sister. That way, everybody is connected to you, to any person who is addicted to love.”

Kartik didn’t know what to say.

“Savour your intoxication, young man,” Magician continued. “It’s a good intoxication though it’s dangerous too. It’s good. Dangerous too. Like other intoxications, it can make you what you are not sometimes. Many times. But it’s good. Dangerous too. Live dangerously. Don’t vanish.”


Comments

  1. This one is marvelous piece of writing with deep philosophy and logic.
    Presentation i very much intellectual.
    Loved it a lot.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you, Jyotirmoy. Sometimes a comment like this is a good pep pill :)

      Delete
  2. It was amazingly linked with our view to see the things and our problems. You really did excellent piece of work.

    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 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...

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...

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...

Our gods must have died laughing

A friend forwarded a video clip this morning. It is an extract from a speech that celebrated Malayalam movie actor Sreenivasan delivered years ago. In the year 1984, Sreenivasan decided to marry the woman he was in love with. But his career in movies had just started and so he hadn’t made much money. Knowing his financial condition, another actor, Innocent, gave him Rs 400. Innocent wasn’t doing well either in the profession. “Alice’s bangle,” Innocent said. He had pawned or sold his wife’s bangle to get that amount for his friend. Then Sreenivasan went to Mammootty, who eventually became Malayalam’s superstar, to request for help. Mammootty gave him Rs 2000. Citing the goodness of the two men, Sreenivasan said that the wedding necklace ( mangalsutra ) he put ceremoniously around the neck of his Hindu wife was funded by a Christian (Innocent) and a Muslim (Mammootty). “What does religion matter?” Sreenivasan asks in the video. “You either refuse to believe in any or believe in a...