Skip to main content

Terrible Beauty

Photo by Tomichan Matheikal
at Jim Corbett National Park (some years ago)


“A terrible beauty is born,” lamented poet W. B. Yeats when the Irish rebellion against the British in 1916 was suppressed brutally by the Empire. Though Yeats supported the independence movement, like all enlightened souls he was against violence. When the fighters insisted on using violence, Yeats could only pass by “with a nod of the head / Or polite meaningless words.”

Many people including me in Modi’s India find themselves in Yeats’ position: incapacitated by mindless violence and hatred. In spite of the totally vitiated atmosphere, a formidably sizeable section of the country seem to be labouring under a monstrous delusion that they are living in a beautiful period of the country’s history. It is a terrible beauty indeed!

Someone like Shashi Tharoor cannot even express his opinion by making a metaphorical comparison about that terrible beauty. His office was attacked a criminal case was charged against him. Yet what he said is the obvious truth. Mercifully, he has refused to backtrack. I hope he continues to be brave to the end of this black drama that is unfolding in the country with more sound and fury than any normal citizen can endure without taking recourse to poetry and metaphors.

A genuine sage like Swami Agnivesh is attacked, beaten and kicked by some self-appointed guardians of the nation’s ethos. Swami Agnivesh has always been a voice of sanity. He has advocated fraternity and compassion. “We must liberate people from religion,” he has rightly said again and again. The assault on him by religious people vindicate his stand vis-à-vis religion.

The institutions run by the Missionaries of Charity are being raided because an employee of theirs committed a crime. The motive behind the raids is too obvious: tarnish the image of a particular minority community and make them the targets of the kind of assault that Swami Agnivesh suffered and Shashi Tharoor would have suffered had he been available on the street ruled by thugs donning the garb of nationalists.

 Amnesty International reports that in the last six months alone 100 hate crimes have been committed against Dalits, adivasis and minority communities in the country. Uttar Pradesh with a Yogi as its Chief Minister leads the list while the Prime Minister’s own state of Gujarat follows close behind. There undoubtedly is a clear game plan: elimination of certain sections of the country’s population by hook or by crook.

And then the terrible beauty will be born, perhaps: the beauty of a homogenised nation much like the Hindu Pakistan that Shashi Tharoor mentioned. In the meanwhile, I would have liked to pass “with a nod of the head / Or polite meaningless words.” I tried, in fact. But my neurons rage within me. There is a man within me who refuses to buckle under the monstrous stupidity that is being peddled as nationalism.




Comments

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 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...

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so...

Dine in Eden

If you want to have a typical nonvegetarian Malayali lunch or dinner in a serene village in Kerala, here is the Garden of Eden all set for you at Ramapuram [literally ‘Abode of Rama’] in central Kerala. The place has a temple each for Rama and his three brothers: Lakshmana, Bharata, and Shatrughna. It is believed that Rama meditated in this place during his exile and also that his brothers joined him for a while. Right in the heart of the small town is a Catholic church which is an imposing structure that makes an eloquent assertion of religious identity. Quite close to all these religious places is the Garden of Eden, Eden Thoppu in Malayalam, a toddy shop with a difference. Toddy is palm wine, a mild alcoholic drink collected from palm trees. In my childhood, toddy was really natural; i.e., collected from palm trees including coconut trees which are ubiquitous in Kerala. My next-door neighbours, two brothers who lived in the same house, were toddy-tappers. Toddy was a health...

Goodbye, Little Ones

They were born under my care, tiny throbs of life, eyes still shut to the world. They grew up under my constant care. I changed their bed and the sheets regularly making sure they were always warm and comfortable. When one of them didn’t open her eyes after a fortnight of her birth, I rang up my cousin who is a vet and got the appropriate prescription that gave her the light of day in just two days. I watched each one of them stumble through their first steps. Today they were adopted. I personally took them to their new home, a tiny house of a family that belongs to the class that India calls BPL [Below Poverty Line]. I didn’t know them at all until I stopped my car a little away from their small house, at the nearest spot my car could possibly reach. They lived in another village altogether, some 15 km from mine. Sometimes 15 km can make a world of difference. A man who looked as old as me had come to my house in the late afternoon. “I’d like to adopt your kittens,” he said. He...