Skip to main content

December Chills



Kerala, where I now live, has three seasons: hot, hotter and hottest. I don’t miss winter anyway, not much at least. I spent my entire youth in Shillong where the winter really chilled people. And winter stretched from October to March, half the year. I detested the cold and yet never thought of leaving the place until the place chucked me out. That’s called destiny.
I never believed in destiny until Shillong’s variegated chills taught lessons the hardest way possible. There’s the chill that the mountains hurl at you mercilessly. Then there’s the chill that the mountain people send down your spine. I had enough of both.
My middle age was spent in Delhi where the winter was far more desirable if only because the summer was starkly unbearable. Delhi’s winters did not chill me much, anyway. The smog was a menace; the chill was a welcome contrast to the summer’s hell.
Now there’s no winter. Right now, at 7 pm in the latter half of December, I sit under a fan after my evening shower. My laptop shows the temperature of my place as 28 degree Celsius.

There’s a chill that’s running down my spine, however. People can give you the chills wherever you are. It’s my country’s government that gives me the chills now. From Kashmir through the Ayodhya verdict to the Citizenship Act, the past few months have been remarkably chilling for me. Hitler’s ghost visits me eerily even in the daytime.
What worries me more than the government’s decisions is the response of a large section of citizens. I go through the comments sections of social medias feeling numbing chills all over my body. I occasionally feel my heart stopping to beat. So much hatred! No, this is not good for any country. I know that my government is an utter failure even when a large section of citizens comment that the government is doing the right thing. If the government is doing the right thing, why is there so much fear in one section of citizens and so much hatred in the other?
Neither fear nor hatred can be good for anyone anywhere. A government that gives little more than these two emotions is wrong, terribly wrong, I know. That’s my December chills now.
PS. Written for Indispire Edition 303: The chill that December augurs #DecemberChills


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
25 comments
Read more

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

William and the autumn of life

William and I were together only for one year, but our friendship has grown stronger year after year. The duration of that friendship is going to hit half a century. In the meanwhile both he and I changed many places. William was in Kerala when I was in Shillong. He was in Ireland when I was in Delhi. Now I am in Kerala where William is planning to migrate back. We were both novices of a religious congregation for one year at Kotagiri in Tamil Nadu. He was older than me by a few years and far more mature too. But we shared a cordial rapport which kept us in touch though we went in unexpected directions later. William’s conversations had the same pattern back then and now too. I’d call it Socratic. He questions a lot of things that you say with the intention of getting to the depth of the matter. The last conversation I had with him was when I decided to stop teaching. I mention this as an example of my conversations with William. “You are a good teacher. Why do you want to stop
15 comments
Read more

Thomas the Saint

AI-generated image His full name was Thomas Augustine. He was a Catholic priest. I knew him for a rather short period of my life. When I lived one whole year in the same institution with him, I was just 15 years old. I was a trainee for priesthood and he was many years my senior. We both lived in Don Bosco school and seminary at a place called Tirupattur in Tamil Nadu. He was in charge of a group of boys like me. Thomas had little to do with me directly as I was under the care of another in-charge. But his self-effacing ways and angelic smile drew me to him. He was a living saint all the years I knew him later. When he became a priest and was in charge of a section of a Don Bosco institution in Kochi, I met him again and his ways hadn’t changed an iota. You’d think he was a reincarnation of Jesus if you met him personally. You won’t be able to meet him anymore. He passed away a few years ago. One of the persons whom I won’t ever forget, can’t forget as long as the neurons continu
16 comments
Read more

Uriel the gargoyle-maker

Uriel was a multifaceted personality. He could stab with words, sting like Mike Tyson, and distort reality charmingly with the precision of a gifted cartoonist. He was sedate now and passionate the next moment. He could don the mantle of a carpenter, a plumber, or a mechanic, as situation demanded. He ran a school in Shillong in those days when I was there. That’s how I landed in the magic circle of his friendship. He made me a gargoyle. Gradually. When the refined side of human civilisation shaped magnificent castles and cathedrals, the darker side of the same homo sapiens gave birth to gargoyles. These grotesque shapes were erected on those beautiful works of architecture as if to prove that there is no human genius without a dash of perversion. In many parts of India, some such repulsive shape is placed in a prominent place of great edifices with the intention of warding off evil or, more commonly, the evil eye. I was Uriel’s gargoyle for warding off the evil eye from his sc
12 comments
Read more