Skip to main content

Is the dawn far?



For a considerably long period of my youth I was important enough to draw the attention of too many unwanted people who didn’t like whatever I said or did. One of the too many things they didn’t like was my love for old Malayalam film songs. The well-wishers thought that my love for old songs was a sign of my regressive tendencies or equally unhealthy romanticism. It is true that I was not happy with the ‘present’ that was available to me then. It is also true that there was a pining romantic in me. My well-wishers tried their best to cure me of the perceived disease as they did with everything about me.

   I’m not blaming them, of course. The truth is that even I didn’t like me; how could I expect others to like me? They were not successful, however, in curing me of anything. But I must acknowledge their relentless endeavours that lasted about five years to wean me off a whole continuum of evils that befriended me like original sins.  

   When their good wishes and better actions became an unbearable pain in my posterior, I quit the place and migrated to Delhi where people have neither the time nor the inclination to be universal do-gooders. When the well-wishers and do-gooders vanished from my life, many of my original sins too vanished. One such sin was my love for songs, old or new. I simply stopped listening to music. I don’t know why it happened. The cassettes were dumped in the store box built above the window in one of the rooms in the staff quarters of Sawan Public School where I worked as a teacher. Soon I discarded the cassette player too.

   When the henchmen and the harrying hags of a godman encroached into Sawan a decade and a half after I lost the music in my soul, I found myself becoming a romantic once again. I longed for music, for the countryside, for solitude, for goodness, for whatever the religious people normally find sinful.

   Today I live in a sylvan village in Kerala and I have a few hundred Malayalam movie songs in the pen drive that plays when I’m driving which I do every day. The songs belong to the period from about 1970 to the present. I started my driving this morning with a song from 1971, auto-selected by the player. Like the other songs of my boyhood days in the collection, this too is written by Vayalar and the music composed by Devarajan. You can watch the video clip below, if you wish:


   It is addressed to the prophets. The poet asks them whether the dawn is still far. The song laments the loss of genuine spirituality and morality. Even god stands as a helpless entity on the street strewn with the debris of broken morals and principles. Arjun stands disarmed in the Kurukshetra. Philosophies burn in some nondescript pyres.

   As I listened to it, I wondered why Vayalar wrote those lines in 1971. Aren’t they more relevant today?


Comments

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

Shooting an Elephant

George Orwell [1903-1950] We had an anthology of classical essays as part of our undergrad English course. Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell was one of the essays. The horror of political hegemony is the core theme of the essay. Orwell was a subdivisional police officer of the British Empire in Burma (today Myanmar) when he was forced to shoot an elephant. The elephant had gone musth (an Urdu term for the temporary insanity of male elephants when they are in need of a female) and Orwell was asked to control the commotion created by the giant creature. By the time Orwell reached with his gun, the elephant had become normal. Yet Orwell shot it. The first bullet stunned the animal, the second made him waver, and Orwell had to empty the entire magazine into the elephant’s body in order to put an end to its mammoth suffering. “He was dying,” writes Orwell, “very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further…. It seeme...
11 comments
Read more

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...
14 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...
19 comments
Read more

Egregious

·       Donald Trump terminated all trade negotiations with Canada “based on their egregious behaviour.” ·       Pakistan has an egregious record of assassinations among its leaders. ·       Benjamin Netanyahu’s egregious disregard for civilian suffering has drawn widespread international condemnation. Now, look at the following sentences. ·       Archias is an egregious and most excellent man. [Cicero’s speech in 62 BCE] ·       “An egregious captain and most valiant soldier.” [Roger Ascham in 1545] U p to about 16 th century, the word egregious had a positive meaning: excellent or outstanding . Cicero was defending Greek poet Aulus Licinius Archias’s request for Roman citizenship. Archias had left his country out of disgust for the corruption of its Seleucid rulers. Ascham was speaking about the qualities of valiant soldiers when he used the ...
6 comments
Read more