Skip to main content

Words



“Words, words, words,” says Hamlet when Polonius asks him what he is reading. When asked further what the words are about Hamlet’s answer is, “Slanders, sir.” Rumours and slanders abound in people’s usual conversations. We love conversations. Have you ever noticed that most of our conversations are about other people and that most of the time we speak bad things about others? Words can kill. People love to kill the reputations of other people.

But words can heal too. Words can be magical. Words create music. If we change the way we wield words, we can usher in magic to our life, to the world itself. A good word, a word of encouragement, a word of joy can transform the life of the person to whom it is uttered.

One of the tragedies in our life is to begin the day with the morning newspaper which brings us negative words: reports about rising prices and taxes, rapes by spiritual leaders, corruption of political leaders, and so on. It is difficult to sustain our smiles in such a world, let alone speak pleasant words. It is not impossible, however. We need to make that extra effort to smile and speak words that heal, sustain goodness, and transform evil into good.

Words can make the difference. They can bring joy where there is sorrow, hope where there is despair, and light where there is darkness. In the Bible, a gospel writer John says that word is god. Word is indeed god. It depends on us to give that divine power to word. We have the magic within us. Each one of us is a sorcerer. Word is our magic. We can transform the world with words.

We see powerful orators creating new realities using words and nothing else. There are gurus who heal people using words. There are books that transform lives. As Aldous Huxley said, words are like X-rays if you use them properly: they will go through anything, even the hardest of hearts.

#BlogchatterA2Z


Comments

  1. Loved this post. Yes " Words can make the difference"!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nice post 👍 the quote by Aldous Huxley is so true ☺

      Thanks for sharing 🙂

      Delete
    2. My pleasure. And welcome to this place, Sachin.

      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

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...

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...