Skip to main content

Lie in the Heart




Lying to yourself is one of the most self-destructive things, said one of Dostoevsky’s characters. “The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him or around him and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”

Have we as a nation arrived at the zenith of falsehood and the consequent impotence to love?

The latest incident that makes me raise this question is the removal of the CBI chief Alok Verma and his entire team. The Prime Minister misused his powers to take this illegal and unconstitutional action. As the Opposition has pointed out, “The only plausible explanation for this desperate and hasty move is an attempt to scuttle the ongoing investigations into the Special Director’s [Rakesh Asthana who is Modi’s mole] cases that might cause significant embarrassment to [the] Government.”

Too many individuals who became a threat to the Prime Minister’s dictatorial and depraved ways have been victimised in different ways. Hundreds of genuine NGOs were put to sleep merely to pave way for Modi’s free march on the royal road to despotism. Almost all institutions of any significant influence have been populated with right wing adherents. The country’s history is being rewritten. Textbooks are tampered with. Young minds have been perverted.

More and more people are learning to lie to their own hearts. Their survival depends on mastering that craft. Or they have been brainwashed without their own knowledge. The distinction between truth and falsehood has vanished. Rather, truth has vanished. Has become irrelevant, unsustainable.

There are 36 official and scores more unofficial organisations working in the country at present with a single-minded dedication towards a goal that does not seem to be quite noble if we consider the means employed. One can only hope that the elections coming next year will make a meaningful difference to the nation.






Featured post on IndiBlogger, the biggest community of Indian Bloggers

Comments

  1. जितेन्द्र माथुरOctober 26, 2018 at 8:25 AM

    The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him or around him and so loses all respect for himself and for others.' Very true Sir. It may be or may not be applicable to the Indian premier because, in my opinion, he never lies to himself and must be speaking out the truth only when talking to himself which certainly is - 'I need and value power only. Nothing else matters for me'. However let's see that we do not lie to ourselves and so are always able to distinguish the truth in and around us.

    ReplyDelete

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

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 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

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...
31 comments
Read more