Skip to main content

Anomaly



When I officially turned a senior citizen last month, one of the birthday greetings that came on Facebook described me as “the kindest man born in the cruellest month”. The greeting was from an old friend who had long ago referred to me as a paradox. Paradox sounds too elite and I know that I am not any kinder than April is cruel. So I choose to describe me as an ‘anomaly’ for my young friend, Aditya Narayan Mohanty, who is asking fellow bloggers to "Define your life in a single word and tell me the story behind that" #SingleWordThatCanDefineMe.

An anomaly is something or someone that deviates from the standard, normal, or the expected. That is quite an apt description of me in a single word, Aditya, when aptness has to coexist with brevity. A deviation, an aberration, a wart that might as well be excised.

I’m sure you’re familiar with Swift’s Gulliver. I often feel like Gulliver. Whether in Lilliput of miniature people or Brobdingnag of giants, Gulliver is a misfit. He doesn’t belong. Nor does he belong to Laputa of scientists. He wants to belong to the Houyhnhnms, the noble horses, but he is not a horse and the horses find him way too sub-equine. Gulliver’s resemblance with the despicable Yahoos is not lost on the Houyhnhnms. So Gulliver returns home and befriends the horses in his stable. A man making a horse stable his habitat is an anomaly, isn’t he?

The truth is a lot of us are anomalies. Look at the most powerful man in our country, for example. He uses all foreign goods. His pen is foreign, his shoes are, his glasses, his wallet, his bags, his car, everything except his genes is foreign and he tells us all the time to ‘Make in India’ and ‘Local is Vocal’ and so on.

Look at a friend of his who claims to be a sadhu who has renounced the world. He owns a multi-billion business enterprise which sells ordinary commercial things labelled as ayurvedic products. What’s more, people in our country trust him just because he uses religious symbols in his commerce. Religion, commerce, swindling – isn’t there an anomaly somewhere, Aditya?

There is another even more interesting star in that illustrious constellation. He was an encounter specialist, a mastermind of encounter killing – I mean, before he took upon himself the job of looking after the country’s public security. Under the new mantle, he perfected the art of horse-trading in all the states where his party was voted out by people. [May Gulliver’s Houyhnhnms forgive us for such crass commercialisation of their race!] Now when a pandemic is sweeping across the country, this custodian of public security is not even visible – in spite of the corpulence of his gigantic ego. Anomaly?

Well, Aditya, I can go on. But one of my new year decisions was to stay positive and these anomalies don’t look positive at all. So I stick to my own private anomaly and retire to my personal cabal of raging horses on my living room wall.





Comments

  1. Saibal BarmanMay 16, 2020 at 9:56 PM

    Nice read....blended with wisdom and humour

    ReplyDelete
  2. DashyMay 17, 2020 at 2:37 PM

    Seems like the perfect word to describe someone feeling like an outsider. :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Pradeep NairMay 17, 2020 at 6:02 PM

    If one doesn't fit in one place, I am sure there is a place elsewhere one will fit in. :-)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 17, 2020 at 6:20 PM

      Usually that happens. But some people don't fit in anywhere :)

      Delete
  4. Aditya Narayan MohantyMay 29, 2020 at 10:28 AM

    Loved your thoughts sir.

    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

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...
19 comments
Read more

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...
14 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

Insecurity and Exclusivism

“ Hindu khatare mein hai.” This was one of the first slogans that accompanied the emergence of Narendra Modi on the national scene. It means Hindus are in Danger . It reveals a deep-rooted feeling of insecurity. Hindus constitute an overwhelming majority in India – 80%. All the high positions in governance, judiciary, academics, any significant place, are occupied by Hindus. Yet the slogan was born. Strange? It will be facile to argue that Modi used this slogan and its concomitant hatred of Muslims and Christians as a political weapon for winning votes. True, he was successful in that; he rose to the highest political post in the country using minority-bashing. But the hatred did not end with that achievement; rather it spread outward and became more exclusive. Muslim and European rulers of India were booted out from the country’s history books and wherever else possible like the names of roads and institutions. With vengeance. Now there is a concerted effort going on to place In...
9 comments
Read more