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.