Skip to main content

Friends



An old friend of mine underwent angioplasty recently and I decided to visit him today. I asked Maggie to join me since she knew him and more since I loved company for the hour-long drive. The friend is a Catholic priest who was a classmate of mine for 6 years in the seminary. Let me call him S.

   Our conversation happened to graze religion and I mentioned that I was no church-goer. Maggie thought that the priest would find that scandalous. On the contrary, S asked, “What’s the use of going to church if that doesn’t make one a good person? I know a lot of people who attend church as a mere duty. If you are a good person doing good to others, it hardly matters whether you go to church or not.”

   “He has his own spirituality. He meditates.” Maggie offered.

   “What more do you want?” S asked. “God is not the private property of the church.”

   Maggie was neither shocked nor scandalised. Living with me had made her familiar with similar, if not much more radical, views.  I didn’t mention, however, that my meditations didn’t require even a god. My morality and my goodness (however whatever little that is) are founded on the pure logic that goodness is the foundation of healthy living.

   I recalled how a student of mine resorted to a small trick last year to get me along with Maggie to pray in the school’s prayer room during the lunch break. “Would you do something for me during the lunch break?” She had asked me. “Please,” she pleaded. “Why not?” I said without realising what she was up to. However, when she got Maggie to the prayer room I refused to accompany her because I had been assigned a duty by the coordinator. The student wouldn’t believe that I couldn’t take a minute off from that duty for her sake. She felt hurt more because I broke my promise to her than because I refused to join her in prayer. A few months later, however, she told a friend of hers that it didn’t matter whether I prayed or not because I was a good human being.

   “That’s all what matters,” said S. “And people always see through what you are whether you go to church or not.”

   Maggie understood that my friends, very few as they are, are indeed a different breed of people.


Comments

  1. It is easy to go to any temple or church or masjid or mausoleum and say prayers. Being good is an unattainable pinnacle for both believers and disbelievers. Most of the disbelievers are ideal and strive to be good. They are indeed spiritual.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I have also noticed that non-believers tend to be better at heart. Probably, they think and act unlike believers who do what they like assuming the confessional or the Ganga or something like that will wash away their sins.

      Delete
  2. I so agree that going to temples or churches or mosques doesnt make one spiritual or a good human being. Being true to ones work and self does. Work is worship. Clear conscious is the only mirror where one should see the reflection and not in the eyes of the others.
    A heartwarming story.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you for joining me here and endorsing my views on this topic. I too take work as worship. I too believe in keeping the conscience clear.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Blind Lady’s Descendants

Book Review Title: The Blind Lady’s Descendants Author: Anees Salim Publisher: Penguin India 2015 Pages: 301 Price: Rs 399 A metaphorical blindness is part of most people’s lives.  We fail to see many things and hence live partial lives.  We make our lives as well as those of others miserable with our blindness.  Anees Salim’s novel which won the Raymond & Crossword award for fiction in 2014 explores the role played by blindness in the lives of a few individuals most of whom belong to the family of Hamsa and Asma.  The couple are not on talking terms for “eighteen years,” according to the mother.  When Amar, the youngest son and narrator of the novel, points out that he is only sixteen, Asma reduces it to fifteen and then to ten years when Amar refers to the child that was born a few years after him though it did not survive.  Dark humour spills out of every page of the book.  For example: How reckless Akmal was!  Sleeping with his mouth wide open righ

Romancing the Past

A few years back, when I was teaching Jack Finney’s story The Third Level in a section of grade 12, I put a question to the entire class: “If you get a chance to live in another time, which would you choose – past or future?” Ann [not her real name] put up her hand first. “Future,” she said. In Finney’s story, Charley chooses to go back to Galesburg of 1894. He loves those big old frame houses, huge lawns, and tremendous trees with branches roofing the streets. It’s a ‘cool’ place whose evenings were “twice as long.” Life was a relaxed affair. People had time to sit out in the evenings, sipping tea and playing music on their guitars. There would be fireflies all around. Peaceful world. Charley wanted that world. My question to the class was in relation to that description of an old world. “My father speaks about the horrors of his childhood,” Ann said. “There was poverty. Not enough food to eat, no proper clothes to wear, no vehicles to carry you… Who wants to go back there?” An

Kashmir and Politics

Book Title: Farooq of Kashmir Authors: Ashwini Bhatnagar & R C Ganjoo Publisher: Fingerprint, New Delhi, 2023 Pages: 330 This book is much more than a biography of Farooq Abdullah. It is a short history of the trouble-torn Kashmir. Though Farooq remains at the centre of the history, his father Sheikh Abdullah is given ample space in the first few chapters. Towards the end of the book, Farooq’s son Omar gets due attention too. Kashmir went through a lot of pain and misery ever since India became independent. Its political leaders as well as their religious counterparts were mostly responsible for all that pain and misery. Add to that the nefarious role played by the neighbouring country of Pakistan. Pakistan has been a thorn in the very heart of Kashmir right from Independence. The political leaders and religious terrorists of that country have left no stone unturned to make Kashmir their own. Understanding Kashmir’s unique condition, independent India had given the st

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

Happy Women's Day

I have had more female colleagues than males in my entire teaching career. Probably why I survived so long in the job. Let me celebrate this Women's Day with them. I haven't been able to get hold of the pics all of them and I express my immense grief on leaving out quite many.  That's my first school where I was a math teacher. You may not recognise me. I'm the second one from left in the last row. This was St Joseph's School, Shillong. I learnt the art of teaching in that school. It was a convent school with only girl students. I still remember a lot of them, my first students. I know I wasn't very kind to them. Math teachers can't be kind - that was what I thought in those days. My own teachers had created that impression in my consciousness and the subconscious as well. All those girls are now mothers and some of them may be grandmothers. Let me tell them that I never meant any harm. I was happy in those days to see them learning math well. Hi, dear ladie