Skip to main content

Hope Springs Eternal

Image from videohive


Hope was the last item in Pandora’s Box. Pandora was the Greek predecessor of the biblical Eve. Like Eve, Pandora was the first woman of mankind and the sole purpose of her creation was to bring evils and misery into the world of men. She descended on mankind with a box that contained all the evils which were let loose as soon as she reached the earth. Hope was left behind in the box where it still remains like a mirage.

Was hope left behind in the box because it was another evil, the ultimate evil? Hope can be a terrible evil if it gives you false aspirations and destinations. Imagine the common man on the street or the adivasi in the jungle who hopes that one day a Messiah will come to deliver them from the exploiting and mendacious politicians.

Messianic hopes are quite asinine if you know the story of this donkey from the circus which was asked by a launderer’s donkey, “Why do you endure such painful and risky acts? Why don’t you run away and join us at the launderers where you’ll only have to carry linen and not ride bicycles or bray at lions?”

“Ah, but you don’t know what fortune is awaiting me here in the circus,” said our protagonist.

“Fortune?”

“Yup. The other day the master told that beautiful girl you see over there, practising on the tight rope, that if she fell down again he’d marry her to this donkey and I was the donkey he pointed at. I’m hoping and waiting for her fall.”

Hope has continued to sustain that donkey to this day, I hope.

Messiahs have come and gone and the world has continued to become worse and worse, but we still continue to hope. If we can still place our trust and hope in our politicians, then we have all the more reason to hope for our eternal reward somewhere up there in a place the Messiahs have pointed at again and again.

Hope is universal simply because without it life would be unbearable. The other day I learnt that chickens too have hopes. One of the chicks in my brood asked the mother hen, “The puppies drink their mother’s milk and so do the calves and the kittens. Why are we chicks condemned to eat worms?”

“Wait till the 2019 general elections, my darling,” Mama Hen said. “The dominant political party is very animal-friendly. The Murg Sena has submitted a supplication to them to provide nipples to chicken breasts.”

“And make the breasts meaningful,” muttered Papa Cock who was listening all the while. He hoped to demand a sacred status for cocks, if not for hens too, eventually.

“Hope springs eternal in chicken breasts,” Pope hummed. Alexander Pope, that is.


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
37 comments
Read more

Everything is Politics

Politics begins to contaminate everything like an epidemic when ideology dies. Death of ideology is the most glaring fault line on the rock of present Indian democracy. Before the present regime took charge of the country, political parties were driven by certain underlying ideologies though corruption was on the rise from Indira Gandhi’s time onwards. Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology was rooted in nonviolence. Nothing could shake the Mahatma’s faith in that ideal. Nehru was a staunch secularist who longed to make India a nation of rational people who will reap the abundant benefits proffered by science and technology. Even the violent left parties had the ideal of socialism to guide them. The most heartless political theory of globalisation was driven by the ideology of wealth-creation for all. When there is no ideology whatever, politics of the foulest kind begins to corrode the very soul of the nation. And that is precisely what is happening to present India. Everything is politics
14 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
36 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
13 comments
Read more

Kochareekal’s dead springs

“These rubber trees have sucked the land dry,” the old woman lamented. Maggie and I were standing on the veranda of her house which exuded an air of wellbeing if not affluence. A younger woman, who must have been the daughter-in-law of the house, had invited us there to have some drinking water. We were at a place called Kochareekal, about 20 km from our home. The distances from Kochi and Kottayam are 40 and 50 kilometres respectively. It is supposed to be a tourist attraction, according to Google Map. There are days when I get up with an impulse to go for a drive. Then I type out ‘tourist places near me’ on Google Map and select one of the places presented. This time I opted for one that’s not too far because the temperature outside was threatening to cross 40 degrees Celsius. Kochareekal Caves was the choice this time. A few caves and a small waterfall. Plenty of trees around to give us shade. Maggie nodded her assent. We had visited Areekal, just 3 km from Kochareekal [Kocha
8 comments
Read more