Skip to main content

Secret



Every secret has a certain degree of power. The moment you reveal a secret to anyone, you are giving that power to the other person. The more the secrets you keep in your heart, the greater your personal power. It is not power over other people; it is power within.

You don’t know how a revealed secret will come back to you with a sting. People love to play games with other people just for the sake of preserving whatever ascendancy they have over others. People love power. Worse, they don’t know how to use power for the welfare of others. Why do you want to give your power to another person and be his slave?

There are only two kinds of secrets: the kind you don’t want to share and the kind you don’t dare to share. There may be a few, a third kind, which may do a little good by sharing: like reduce a burden in your heart. It may be quite alright if you have a good friend who can share your burden. But the question is how many such good friends does anyone really have? The ideal friend is one who helps you keep your own secrets.

In Joseph Conrad’s story, The Secret Sharer, the Captain of a ship is confronted with a dilemma when a naked man swims his way through the ocean to the ship. The man who introduces himself as Leggatt was the chief mate of another ship on which he accidentally killed an insolent fellow crewman. He was kept under custody and would have to face trial for murder on landing. He escaped by jumping into the ocean. The Captain feels an uncanny affinity to Leggatt especially when he puts on the Captain’s clothes. According to seamen’s morality, the Captain should report him to the concerned authorities. But the Captain conceals him in his stateroom and saves him even when the people of the latter’s ship come in search of him. Finally the Captain goes out of his way to help him escape.

The secret gives a unique power to the Captain who was considered a weak man especially by himself. Leggatt is a murderer even though the murder was committed accidentally and the victim was a bully who posed a threat to the very safety of the ship. Leggatt symbolises the irrational but brave side of humankind, while the Captain represents the more civilised and refined rational side. The crew on the Captain’s ship are the normal human beings who have their fair share of irrationality. The Captain’s refinement is powerless before them. His secret, however, gives him a mysterious power.

Critics have suggested that Leggatt is the Captain’s doppelganger, an alter ego. Our secrets constitute our doppelganger which has a mysterious power. As long as our secrets are not evil or supportive of evil, it is better to trust them to the doppelganger who will eventually vanish into the ocean and the unknown beyond, having empowered you.

PS. #BlogchatterA2Z

Comments

  1. जितेन्द्र माथुरApril 21, 2018 at 10:03 AM

    Invaluable lesson for life it is. I am in complete agreement with this thought.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anita SabatApril 23, 2018 at 12:54 AM

    Secrets give the holders power.
    Do agree with you.
    Tough to keep secrets. They need a lot of willpower & control.
    'A secret is something that everyone tells everyone not to tell anyone!' :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. जितेन्द्र माथुरApril 23, 2018 at 1:11 PM

      A secret is something that everyone tells everyone not to tell anyone. Very well said Anita Ji. So true at least for the Indians.

      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

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 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