Skip to main content

A few quotes from myself

I wish to present a few quotes from my own book, Autumn Shadows. The purpose, obviously, is to tempt you to buy a copy of the book. Let me caution you that it is an e-book and it has no print version. 

 Quotes:
Guilt is the very foundation of Christianity.  Man is a fallen creature, according to its theology.  The Bible begins with the Fall of Adam and Eve from divine grace.  The biblical history of mankind begins with an irate God who hurls curses on the first man and the first woman.  Having subordinated the woman to the man, God gifts her the severe pain of childbearing as a punishment for her sins.  He curses the whole ground on which Adam was to walk and work. Guilt is the very foundation of Christianity.  Man is a fallen creature, according to its theology.  The Bible begins with the Fall of Adam and Eve from divine grace.  The biblical history of mankind begins with an irate God who hurls curses on the first man and the first woman.  Having subordinated the woman to the man, God gifts her the severe pain of childbearing as a punishment for her sins.  He curses the whole ground on which Adam has to walk and work. [Chapter 3: A Rite of Passage]

*
However austere one may be, however strict one may be, there is a very human heart within. Ultimately, it is love that makes all the difference. All our intellect and rationality fail to bring us happiness and meaning in life. [Chapter 4: Stargazing]
*
What is destiny but a creation of our own deeds and misdeeds? [Chapter 9: The best of both worlds]
*
One of those nights I woke up drenched with sweat. The nightmare had taken me to Hell. Lucifer sat on a massive boulder holding a spear in his left hand while his right hand was pointed at me. His serrated tail rose behind him towering above his head with a pointed metallic arrow at its end. The hell-fire raged behind that.
“Why is this man here?” Lucifer asked the devils pointing at me. There was contempt in the fire that emanated from his eyes.
The devils were puzzled. “Where else would this evil soul go?” They seemed to ask.
“This man is too evil for my Hell. Take him away and throw him out.” [Chapter 14:  Sisyphus carries water]

*
During my second year at Carmel, I met with a scooter accident and was on leave for a month and a half from school. In the second month, a note was delivered personally at my home. It was from a student. “We all miss your lively presence,” it said, “and we want you to know that our best thoughts are with you. You are the best person we have ever known and we wish we had the magic to make you healthy. We don’t need a hero to make our days lively at school. We need you. We miss you and look forward to the day you come back.”
Such expressions of affection have not been rare at Carmel. And affection has no religion. [Chapter 20: Autumn Shadows]
***
You can order your copy here.
Go to Amazon

Comments

  1. Rajeev MoothedathAugust 18, 2019 at 9:49 AM

    I have ordered your book.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Neeraj KumarAugust 21, 2019 at 7:52 PM

    Congratulations sir on this gargantuan achievement of finishing of a full-fledged book. Wish you all the success.

    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

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...
6 comments
Read more

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...
14 comments
Read more

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...
11 comments
Read more

A Government that Spies on Citizens

Illustration by Copilot Designer India has officially decided to keep an eagle eye on its citizens. Modi government has asked all smartphone manufacturers to preinstall a government app, Sanchar Saathi , on every phone in such a way that no citizen can ever uninstall it. The firms have been also ordered to install the app on existing phones too using software-update technology. The stated objective is to strengthen cybersecurity and protect users from fraud. The question is why any government should go out of its way to impose “security” on its citizens. For over a month now, I have been receiving a message every single day from the Government of India’s Telecom Department to install the app on my phone. I wanted to block the sender, but there is no such option. Even that message is an imposition. I don’t trust any government that imposes benefits on me. “ Beneficent beasts of prey ,” Robert Frost would call such governments. When Modi government imposes security on me, I ha...
8 comments
Read more