Skip to main content

A Phone Call and a Destiny



Some phone calls are ominous.  There was a time when I used to dread them.  Mercifully they are very rare.  They come from someone or the other associated with an institution of which I was a member for ten years of my youth.  Though I bid final adieu to the institution somewhere down the line, the institution took a diabolic interest in haunting me throughout my life and making as much a mess of it as it could. 

Image from ArtStation
When the call came today, I ignored it as I often do with unknown numbers. But when the call was repeated a few hours later, I answered it.  As soon as I heard the connections mentioned by the caller, I knew I was doomed.  It meant that they are going to mess up my life now that I have brought some order to it after I dealt with a protracted depression and the concomitant downsides of it.

A couple of days back, ‘destiny’ cropped up in a discussion in a class I was taking. I told my students that I never believed in ‘destiny’ as a young man.  I narrated how I questioned Thomas Hardy’s fatalist vision as delineated in The Mayor of Casterbridge.  As an undergrad student, I wrote my essay on the novel ascribing Michael Henchard’s (the protagonist of the novel) failures to his character.  It was his fault that he lost his wife and child in a frenzy of drunkenness.  It was his fault that he didn’t sustain his love for Lucetta.  His fault again that he lost his step-daughter 18 years later.  Whose fault else is it that he turns to drinking once again?  And so on.  I put the entire blame on Henchard.

But – I continued my class – as an older man now, having gone through a life of failure after failure, I know better.  I know that Hardy became a neo-classical writer not for nothing: his vision of the world and human life in it has its relevance.  Destiny does play a role in our life, a major one at that.  You can be a Mayor today and a buffoon tomorrow.  Destiny is Shakespeare’s gods to whom we are “as flies to wanton boys… they kill us for their sport.”

I have described myself as the “Joker in the pack” in my Facebook profile.  That’s what the particular institution made me.  I hope to continue my entertainment.
Asking Destiny what its motive is like asking Shakespeare’s boys why they play with the flies.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why I won’t vote

From Deshabhimani , Malayalam weekly Exactly a month from today is the Parliamentary election in my state of Kerala. This time, I’m not going to vote. Bernard Shaw defined democracy , with his characteristic cynicism, as “ a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve .” We elect our government in a democracy. And the government invariably sucks our blood – whichever the party is. The BJP and the Congress are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee though the former makes all sorts of other claims day in and day out. BJP = Congress + the holy cow. The holy cow has turned out to be quite a vampire and that makes a difference, no doubt. In our Prime Minister’s algebra, it is: (a+b) 2 which should be equal to a 2 and b 2 . There is an extra 2ab which is the holy cow. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm , the animals revolt against the human master and set up their own nationalist republic. Soon politics develops in the republic and some pigs become leaders. The porcine

Prelude to AtoZ

  From Garden of 5 Senses, Delhi [file pic] Hindsight gives an unearthly charm and order to the past. There can be pain too. A lot of things could have been different, much better, if only we possessed the wisdom of our old age back in those days. As a writer put it, Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear and a lot of those guys must have thought, “I wish I had known this some time ago.” Life is a series of errors with intermittent achievements. The only usefulness of the errors may be the lessons they teach us. Probably, that is their purpose too. We are created to err so that we learn, I dare to put it that way. I turn 64 in a month’s time. It’s not inappropriate to look back at some of the people whom life brought into my life so that I would learn certain lessons. No, I don’t mean to say that life has any such purpose or design or anything. Life is absurd. People come into your life as haphazardly as vehicles ply on your road or birds poop on your head. Some of these people change the chemist

How Arvind Kejriwal can save himself

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have a clear vision. Eliminate all opposition. Decimate them or absorb them. My previous post [link below] showed a few people decimated by them. Today let’s look at the others: those who are saved by joining the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]. 1. Himanta Biswa Sarma  This guy was in Congress and faced serious charges related to the multi-crore Saradha chit fund scam. He also faced corruption charges related to drinking water supply in Guwahati. His house was raided by the Central Bureau of Investigation [CBI]. Then he switched over to BJP and all his crimes just vanished. It’s as simple as taking a dip in the Ganga and all your sins are forgiven. Today he is the chief minister of Assam. Nothing is heard of all the charges that were levelled against him. 2. Amarinder Singh  This former Captain in the Indian Army was a Congressman until Modi’s Enforcement Directorate [ED] started raiding him, his son and his son-in-law. He put an end to all those raid

The Good Old World

Book Review Title: Dukhi Dadiba and irony of fate Author: Dadi Edulji Taraporewala Translators: Aban Mukherji and Tulsi Vatsal Publisher: Ratna Books, Delhi, 2023 Pages: 314 If you want to return to the good old days of the late 19 th century, this is an ideal novel for you. This was published originally in Gujarati in 1913. It appeared as a serial before that from 1898 onwards in a periodical. The conflict between good and evil is the dominant motif though there is romance, betrayal, disappointment, regret, and pretty much of traditional morality. Reading this novel is quite like watching an old Bollywood movie, 1960s style. Ardeshir Bahadurshah, a wealthy Parsi aristocrat in Surat, dies having obligated his son Jehangir to find out his long-lost brother Rustom. Rustom was Bahadurshah’s son in his first marriage. The mother died when the boy was too small and the nurse who looked after the child vanished with it one day. Ratanmai, Bahadurshah’s present wife, takes her

The Blindness of Superficiality

An Essay on Anees Salim’s novel The Blind Lady’s Descendants Superficiality is a deadly human vice though most people seldom realise it. It is easy to live on the surface of everything from one’s profession to religion. Anees Salim’s novel, The Blind Lady’s Descendants , tells us a story of superficiality as lived by quite many people. Amar, the protagonist of the novel, is 26 when he thinks that life is not worth living. He became an atheist at the age of 13. He had become a half-Muslim at the age of 5 when his little penis was circumcised partly since he ran away in pain during the process. Amar’s atheism, however, is as superficial as most believers’ religion is. What initiated little Amar to atheism is “Dr Ibrahim’s farting fit.” Islamic prayer has to follow many a rule. “If you break wind during namaaz, you break a big rule, and you are to discontinue the prayer then and there, with no second thoughts.” Little Amar was unable to control his giggles as Dr Ibrahim struggled to