Skip to main content

Belong somewhere

Source: Dreamstime


What makes Narendra Modi a hero is that he belongs, or claims to belong, to a particular culture or religion or history that a lot of other people too belong to or claim to belong to.

People in general can be divided into two groups: the geniuses who belong to the stars and the commoners who belong to the soil. Albert Einstein and Salvador Dali would not have bothered themselves with Facebook or Instagram (let alone Tick Tock) and the absurdly noisy 8 pm debates on news channels. Geniuses do and silly mortals follow. Bhakti is the ordinary soul’s shakti. Bhakti makes you belong somewhere. You belong to a god or many gods. You belong to a political party. You belong somewhere.

Life looks like a rainbow when you belong somewhere if you are commoner: very charming and nothing less than infinity. Our gods are infinite. And we belong to them. How nice!

Creating your own space because you know you don’t belong is the job of the genius. Let the genius alone. You and I need to belong. Since the gods are a bit far away and apparently listless, we choose to belong to their religions. Religions are close by. And they give us very strong feelings of belonging. Especially when we attack those who don’t belong to our own religions. Enemies give us stronger feelings of belonging than anybody else. If you don’t have enemies, create them.

Narendra Modi is the best Prime Minister of India because he is good at creating enemies and giving us the much-needed feeling of belonging to a galaxy. Only he can gift us that glib feeling that we don’t belong to the thousands who walk hundreds of kilometres to their homes having been evicted from their workplaces by joblessness and hunger. Only he can create real or imaginary enemies all around us and give us that glib feeling that we are better than them, stronger than them, superior to them.

Belonging. Isn’t that what drove those thousands of migrant labourers to hit the endless roads?

Belonging. Isn’t that what drives you to your killing gods?

We all need to belong somewhere. The geniuses are lucky that they belong to their private realms. To the relativity of reality in the infinite spaces. To the psychedelic bizarreness of that reality. To absurdity.

But we need our gods and their bloodthirst.

Suppose we start seeing gods in our fellow beings. That is what our religions teach actually, isn’t it? Suppose we actually start practising what our religions teach. The world can be a far better place. But we won’t practise what we preach. Because we are not geniuses who see infinity and the stars there. We are the little moths that belong to the candle flame. We belong. And that belonging makes us happy. Even if it is killing little lights that we belong to.

PS. Inspired primarily by Indispire Edition 327: What you have learned from life so far? #life. And boozed up by a friend’s comment on Facebook this morning about the need to belong to certain lights.





Comments

  1. DashyMay 31, 2020 at 2:45 PM

    Belonging gives us a feeling of warmth and safety. It is scary to not belong, atleast for us commoners. In that manner, I guess it makes sense to be lured with a promise of belonging. It is sad.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 31, 2020 at 3:19 PM

      Sad and happy simultaneously, right Dashy? I think so. The security feeling is good. But the narrowmindedness it breeds is wretched.

      Delete
    2. DashyMay 31, 2020 at 4:03 PM

      Yes the feeling is great, what is sad is the way this feeling is exploited.

      Delete
  2. जितेन्द्र माथुरMay 31, 2020 at 6:06 PM

    Your thoughts are completely agreeable. However sometimes geniuses need such a sense of belonging not to some cult or community or religion but to someone special (or some special ones) because, after all, they also are human-beings like the ordinary ones with ordinary IQ. (Materialistically) successful people like Mr. Modi do create such illusions not for themselves but for those whom they have to keep subservient or devoted to them consistently so that their own success (say power) remains unscathed.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 31, 2020 at 9:18 PM

      The need to belong is at another level for geniuses. That's what I meant.

      Modi is not and never will be a genius. He belongs to a clan. His mind is the narrowest among all PMs we have had so far. But yes, he is clever enough to delude a large population.

      Delete

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

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

You Don’t Know the Sky

I asked the bird to lend me wings. I longed to fly like her. Gracefully. She tilted her head and said, “Wings won’t be of any use to you because you don’t know the sky.” And she flew away. Into the sky. For a moment, I was offended. What arrogance! Does she think she owns the sky? As I watched the bird soar effortlessly into the blue vastness, I began to see what she meant. I wanted wings, not the flight. Like wanting freedom without the responsibility that comes with it. The bird had earned her wings. Through storms, through hunger, through braving the odds. She manoeuvred her way among the missiles that flew between invisible borders erected by us humans. She witnessed the macabre dance of death that brought down cities, laid waste a whole country. Wings are about more than flights. How often have you perched on the stump of a massive tree brought down by a falling warhead and wept looking at the debris of civilisations? The language of the sky is different from tha...
12 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...
10 comments
Read more