Skip to main content

Errors and Lessons



I have on occasion described my life as a series of blunders. The mistakes taught me the inevitable lessons too. Perhaps, what makes life really meaningful, if not particularly charming, are the lessons we learn from our own mistakes. The errors and the subsequent learnings indicate that we have been on a quest of our own instead of blindly embracing given truths.

“The biggest mistake of my life was joining St Edmund’s as a lecturer,” as I write in my forthcoming memoirs, Autumn Shadows. “Shame was the ultimate gift I received from St Edmund’s, the ultimate recompense of the narcissist.” Narcissism is a grave sin unless you know how to piggyback on it to conquer peaks of success. I was a born loser for whom success was a tantalising mirage. The Principal, staff and students of Edmund’s caught hold of the shame of the loser in me, shook it out and held it up for the whole world to see. Then I became less than the shame.

The world will love narcissists provided they know how to be winners. Otherwise they are doomed. In one of the poems I wrote in those days, I described myself as a clown on the trapeze. The first half of the poem went thus:

Each faltering step, each fall of mine,
Makes you burst out into laughter:
Because I am the clown in the pack
Because the motley is my birthmark.

Each swing of leotards on trapezes
Sighs in comic relief in the tail of my coat:
Because the show must go on
Because the Master is watching it.

The Master remained beyond my visibility like the Orwellian Big Brother or the authority in Kafka’s worlds. The Big Brother finally succeeded in decimating my narcissistic ego, and me too in the process. I left the place in shame. I have never been able to cleanse myself of that inheritance from St Edmund’s College, Shillong.

The lessons I learnt from that shame have served me well in later life, however. It taught me modesty and reticence [except in writing]. It taught me the importance of silence in many places. I learnt to efface my soul so much so that the comic relief is my abiding consolation now. That comic relief is one of the greatest lessons I learnt, the best gift of my Edmundian blunder.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 242:



Comments

  1. Anita SabatOctober 9, 2018 at 11:36 AM

    Interesting poem.
    Great lessons. Glad that you exercised "reticence [except in writing]":)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 9, 2018 at 7:29 PM

      Writing is a therapeutic process, so no reticence 😉

      Delete
  2. wingsOctober 9, 2018 at 4:00 PM

    You are a wise learner, sir.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...
39 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...
16 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Dharma and Destiny

  Illustration by Copilot Designer Unwavering adherence to dharma causes much suffering in the Ramayana . Dharma can mean duty, righteousness, and moral order. There are many characters in the Ramayana who stick to their dharma as best as they can and cause much pain to themselves as well as others. Dasharatha sees it as his duty as a ruler (raja-dharma) to uphold truth and justice and hence has to fulfil the promise he made to Kaikeyi and send Rama into exile in spite of the anguish it causes him and many others. Rama accepts the order following his dharma as an obedient son. Sita follows her dharma as a wife and enters the forest along with her husband. The brotherly dharma of Lakshmana makes him leave his own wife and escort Rama and Sita. It’s all not that simple, however. Which dharma makes Rama suspect Sita’s purity, later in Lanka? Which dharma makes him succumb to a societal expectation instead of upholding his personal integrity, still later in Ayodhya? “You were car...
25 comments
Read more