Skip to main content

Valentine and Valmiki



“Happy Valentine’s Day, darling,” Socrates came home earlier than usual to greet his wife on love’s own day.

Xanthippe frowned.  “What’s wrong with you?  First of all, you come home leaving your real Valentines behind, your beloved disciples, I mean, and then you forget that we’re now living in Hindu-satan where Valentine is a phoren demon.”

“What’s in a name?” Socrates asked.  “Hindu-satan is just a counterpart of Paki-satan, names, just names.  My Plato will tell you that names are illusions thrice removed from the essence.”

“Plato is your real Valentine, isn’t he?” Xanthippe threw a sidelong glance at her husband.

“Plato was amused when they said that Valentine was a corruption of Valmiki,” Socrates said ignoring his wife’s insinuation about his relationship with Plato. What does she know about Platonic love?

“Valmiki?” Xanthippe’s eyebrows rose to form two mighty arches on her broad forehead where the greying hairline had begun to recede.

Source: Ma Nishada
“Yup.  You know the story, don’t you, about the bird couple making love when the hunter shot down the male bird.”

“Ma Nishada something.”  She had not learnt the divine language of their new country.

“Maa Nishada Pratistham Tvamagamahsāsvati Samaa / Yat raunchamithunaadekam Avadhi Kaamamohitam,” Socrates quoted Vamiki’s very first sloka, the primordial love song, the alpha of romance.  “Even animals should not be hurt when they are making love, being kaamamohitam, driven by kaama.  Would Valentine of Isai-satan ever say such a thing?”

Xanthippe was dismayed.  “So what they say about everything having its origin in Hindu-satan is true?”

“Well, there is nothing in the universe that is not in the epics of this great country, it seems.  Valmiki and Vyasa are the originators of all wisdom and technology, all, nothing less.”

“Oh! We’re so privileged to live in such a great country, my beloved Valentine.” She moved closer to her husband.

“Valmiki,” Socrates corrected her as he stretched out his arms to embrace her on Valentine’s, sorry, Valmiki’s day.


 PS. Happy Valmiki - I mean, Valentine Day - to all who can love. 



Comments

  1. JaiFebruary 14, 2018 at 7:17 PM

    Wonderfully written Sir ! This is what the goons in power have reduced a wonderful country to. Truly Hindu satanic...

    ReplyDelete
  2. NISHANTH CHALAMANAMELFebruary 14, 2018 at 9:16 PM

    If you try ......there will be another epic....sir

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anita SabatFebruary 15, 2018 at 7:42 PM

    Valmiki Day indeed :)
    Love knows no borders.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 15, 2018 at 7:48 PM

      The very first sloka of Valmiki Ramayana is a love song par excellence.

      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...
18 comments
Read more

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so...
39 comments
Read more

Dine in Eden

If you want to have a typical nonvegetarian Malayali lunch or dinner in a serene village in Kerala, here is the Garden of Eden all set for you at Ramapuram [literally ‘Abode of Rama’] in central Kerala. The place has a temple each for Rama and his three brothers: Lakshmana, Bharata, and Shatrughna. It is believed that Rama meditated in this place during his exile and also that his brothers joined him for a while. Right in the heart of the small town is a Catholic church which is an imposing structure that makes an eloquent assertion of religious identity. Quite close to all these religious places is the Garden of Eden, Eden Thoppu in Malayalam, a toddy shop with a difference. Toddy is palm wine, a mild alcoholic drink collected from palm trees. In my childhood, toddy was really natural; i.e., collected from palm trees including coconut trees which are ubiquitous in Kerala. My next-door neighbours, two brothers who lived in the same house, were toddy-tappers. Toddy was a health...
10 comments
Read more

Goodbye, Little Ones

They were born under my care, tiny throbs of life, eyes still shut to the world. They grew up under my constant care. I changed their bed and the sheets regularly making sure they were always warm and comfortable. When one of them didn’t open her eyes after a fortnight of her birth, I rang up my cousin who is a vet and got the appropriate prescription that gave her the light of day in just two days. I watched each one of them stumble through their first steps. Today they were adopted. I personally took them to their new home, a tiny house of a family that belongs to the class that India calls BPL [Below Poverty Line]. I didn’t know them at all until I stopped my car a little away from their small house, at the nearest spot my car could possibly reach. They lived in another village altogether, some 15 km from mine. Sometimes 15 km can make a world of difference. A man who looked as old as me had come to my house in the late afternoon. “I’d like to adopt your kittens,” he said. He...
6 comments
Read more