Skip to main content

The greatest tragedy


Death is not the greatest tragedy, not even if it comes too early. The greatest tragedy is dying without having loved. Rather, the greatest tragedy is living without loving.

The essence of life is love. All the rest is peripheral. Achievements and conquests can add colours to life. Nationalism and other isms can add intoxication to life. But unless you have love in your heart, none of those things matter really.

What kind of patriotism is it that prompts people to hate certain sections of people in the country? What kind of religion is it that motivates people to take up arms in its name against whole sections of humanity?

I have been surprised again and again by people who are intellectually gifted but emotionally sterile, people who write wonderful blogs but nurture hatred in their hearts. Some of these people even think that those who advocate love without borders are antinational!

Why should my love have national borders? Why should my love have a religion?

Experience has taught me that love makes me a wholesome person, a happy person. Hatred makes me small and embittered. I choose to be happy. I choose to love.

Questioning certain wrongs is not hatred. On the contrary, it is an act of love. Wrongs have to be corrected, not condoned.



Comments

  1. Rajeev MoothedathAugust 6, 2019 at 12:06 PM

    "Experience has taught me that love makes me a wholesome person, a happy person. Hatred makes me small and embittered. I choose to be happy. I choose to love"- Kudos and best wishes!

    ReplyDelete
  2. LehaSeptember 12, 2019 at 8:32 PM

    This is beautiful. Love is ultimate. If we cannot love, no other achievement matters.

    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
37 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
13 comments
Read more

Fantasy

  My nights are generally haunted by nightmares. Amorphous creatures who pretend to be benign lead me on familiar paths and leave me in alien territories. I had a surprise last night, however. I was abandoned in some kind of a wonderland where everyone smiled like angels who were carrying some happy message to some Virgin Mary somewhere. Yet another virgin birth. The dream left me in a half-awake state. I knew I wasn’t dreaming. I knew I was fantasising. And I found it all quite amusing. Here are some of those delightful fantasies of semi-wokeness. One All the money in the world’s banks, all banks included, is distributed equally to all the adults in the world. Ambani, Adani, Advani, Kolani, Indrani, Malini, Shalini… everyone on earth now has equal wealth. And everyone is told by some mysterious angel that they will always have the same wealth as anyone else on earth as long as they don’t misuse it. If they misuse it – on drugs, for example – then the amount spent won’t be replen
14 comments
Read more

Women as Victims or Survivors

Book Title: The Blue Scarf and other stories Author: Anu Singh Choudhary Translator: Kamayani Sharma Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 Pages: 188 There is no doubt that the Indian social system is overtly patriarchal and hence a lot of women endure restrictions of all sorts. There are exceptions like the matrilineal tribes of the Northeast. The 12 short stories in this volume by Anu Singh Choudhary focus on some women from the patriarchal societies of India, particularly North India. Originally written in Hindi, the stories have been translated quite effortlessly by Kamayani Sharma though the book does show a few signs of poor proofreading. The very first story, First Look , shows us the rising aspirations of a few women from a remote village and the futility of those aspirations in a world where even marriage is a business deal. “With this deal, we’re interested only in maximizing profits for both parties,” The boy’s father says. But the girl’s family can’t ever tou
4 comments
Read more

Everything is Politics

Politics begins to contaminate everything like an epidemic when ideology dies. Death of ideology is the most glaring fault line on the rock of present Indian democracy. Before the present regime took charge of the country, political parties were driven by certain underlying ideologies though corruption was on the rise from Indira Gandhi’s time onwards. Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology was rooted in nonviolence. Nothing could shake the Mahatma’s faith in that ideal. Nehru was a staunch secularist who longed to make India a nation of rational people who will reap the abundant benefits proffered by science and technology. Even the violent left parties had the ideal of socialism to guide them. The most heartless political theory of globalisation was driven by the ideology of wealth-creation for all. When there is no ideology whatever, politics of the foulest kind begins to corrode the very soul of the nation. And that is precisely what is happening to present India. Everything is politics
25 comments
Read more