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

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 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

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