Don’t fight with monsters

If you fight with monsters, you are likely to become a monster. If you gaze into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into you, as Nietzsche said. Stand in front of the mirror and see the beauty that stares back at you. If you don’t see beauty, discover it; wait in front of the mirror until it reveals the beauty to you, your beauty. If the mirror doesn’t reveal your beauty, you won’t ever discover it.

I know people who travel miles and miles in search of their own beauty. They go on pilgrimages. They ascend mountains. They traverse deserts. They cross oceans. And return weather-beaten.

If travel doesn’t make you younger, stand before your mirror and look at yourself again.

Your god is not in any temple, church or mosque. Your god lies in that mirror. If that god doesn’t smile back at you, you are a gonner. No pilgrimage, no religion, no ritual will ever save you.

Get back to the basics. Start from the scratch. It doesn’t matter how much you donate to temples, godmen, or even orphanages. What matters is that image in the mirror. Do you see a monster there? Stop fighting with that monster. Love that monster. Miracle is just a gaze away.

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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

Bihar Election

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The Little Girl

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Having entered the latter half of my sixties, I view each day as a bonus. People much younger become obituaries these days around me. That awareness helps me to sober down in spite of the youthful rush of blood in my indignant veins. Age hasn’t withered my indignation against injustice, fraudulence, and blatant human folly, much as I would like to withdraw from the ringside and watch the pugilism from a balcony seat with mellowed amusement. But my genes rage against my will. The one who warned me in my folly-ridden youth to be wary of my (anyone’s, for that matter) destiny-shaping character was farsighted. I failed to subdue the rages of my veins. I still fail. That’s how some people are, I console myself. So, at the crossroads of my sixties, I confess to a dismal lack of emotional maturity that should rightfully belong to my age. The problem is that the sociopolitical reality around me doesn’t help anyway to soothe my nerves. On the contrary, that reality is almost entirely re...

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