Skip to main content

Yours Iconoclastically


I'm breaking a rule I gave myself this month: that I will write blog posts only for the A2Z Challenge I took up. I'm breaking the rule for a creative cause: to write for my favourite blogger community, Indiblogger, whose current weekly theme is:

Do you follow rules? How do you feel when you see people flouting guidelines/culture/traditions etc.?

I have resisted the temptation thrown into my face by this topic for the last 5 days. I can't anymore. 

I am with Jesus with my whole heart and soul (add whatever else you wish) when it comes to rules: break them if required for promoting love. Love is more important than rules, Jesus said too many times which irritated the primary guardians of rules in those days: the priests. "Which one of you will sit at home watching your favourite movie in absolute obedience to the Covid-rule about coming out if you're told that your pet dog has got into trouble on the road?" Jesus would ask that. 

Love is a rather dangerous concept to be a foundation for any ethical system, let alone be the major premise of a logical argument. Goodness, let us say. What promotes the welfare of other people can be a better starting point. Mahatma Gandhi would immediately come to my support. 

Jesus was a rule-breaker. Gandhi was. Every great person was. You can't toe the line all the time and do anything great for the people. The ordinary chap obeyed the rule of Sati and put his brother's wife on her husband's funeral pyre. Thousands of Indians obeyed the caste system and perpetuated injustices of all sorts. Similar atrocities were perpetrated on large communities of people all over the world - in the name of traditions, culture, gods, and so on. 

It is easier to commit heinous crimes in the name of traditions or rules. That is what Hannah Arendt's banality of evil teaches us. An Adolph Erichmann could send millions of Jews to what the noble race of Hitler's Aryans called The Final Solution without feeling any remorse because he was obeying his master's rule. A lot of crimes like mass lynching became acceptable and even holy in the last few years in India because of a political system that resembled Hitler's in however small ways. 

My answer to the Indiblogger question is an emphatic No. I don't consider rules as holy even if they are written by gods in the sacred scriptures. What is good for my fellow beings is my rule. Traditions can go to hell for all I care unless they promote goodness. Culture is not a rotting fossil for me. 

I'll be writing next week about Albert Camus's book, The Rebel, as part of the A2Z series. A genuine person is a rebel. I choose to be as genuine as I can. 

Comments

  1. Keep flowing the words from your thoughts...no speed breakers...let the flow of thoughts finds its speedbreakers along the stream...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I hope to go on and on. Thank you for the encouragement.

      Delete
  2. I read an interesting quote recently that said tradition is mostly peer pressure from dead people. We often fail to look at the reasons behind it. And about rules, they need to be constantly reviewed as times change. Who is to say that something is right just because it is a rule?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. 'Peer pressure from dead people' has given me a hearty laugh. Thank you.

      Delete
  3. Right you are. Following rules / traditions considering them as sacrosanct and neglecting what is just, equitable, kind, humanitarian or rational is definitely convenient for the (blind) follower but seldom adds any value to the world or the mankind.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. People don't realise that usually. They're often like animals and hence require bridle and bit.

      Delete
  4. I remembered my seventh day Adventist friend and his defence of the Sabbath..no rules when love is at stake..good writing.

    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

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Book Review Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Author: Manu S Pillai Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2024 Pages: 564 (about half of which consists of Notes) There never was any monolithic religion called Hinduism. Different parts of India practised Hinduism in its own ways, with its own gods and rituals and festivals. Some of these were even mutually opposed. For example, Vamana who is a revered incarnation of Vishnu in North India becomes a villain in Kerala’s Onam legends. What has become of this protean religion of infinite variety and diversity today in the hands of its ‘missionary’ political leaders? Manu S Pillai’s book ends with V D Savarkar’s contributions to the religion with a subtle hint that it is his legacy that is driving the present version of the religion in the name of Hindutva. The last lines of the book, leaving aside the Epilogue titled ‘What is Hinduism?’, are telltale. “Life did not give Savarkar all he...