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

Shooting an Elephant

George Orwell [1903-1950] We had an anthology of classical essays as part of our undergrad English course. Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell was one of the essays. The horror of political hegemony is the core theme of the essay. Orwell was a subdivisional police officer of the British Empire in Burma (today Myanmar) when he was forced to shoot an elephant. The elephant had gone musth (an Urdu term for the temporary insanity of male elephants when they are in need of a female) and Orwell was asked to control the commotion created by the giant creature. By the time Orwell reached with his gun, the elephant had become normal. Yet Orwell shot it. The first bullet stunned the animal, the second made him waver, and Orwell had to empty the entire magazine into the elephant’s body in order to put an end to its mammoth suffering. “He was dying,” writes Orwell, “very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further…. It seeme...
11 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

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...
14 comments
Read more

Raging Waves and Fading Light

Illustration by Gemini AI Fiction Why does the sea rage endlessly? Varghese asked himself as he sat on the listless sands of the beach looking at the sinking sun beyond the raging waves. When rage becomes quotidian, no one notices it. What is unnoticed is futile. Like my life, Varghese muttered to himself with a smirk whose scorn was directed at himself. He had turned seventy that day. That’s why he was on the beach longer than usual. It wasn’t the rage of the waves or the melancholy of the setting sun that kept him on the beach. Self-assessment kept him there. Looking back at the seventy years of his life made him feel like an utter fool, a dismal failure. Integrity versus Despair, Erik Erikson would have told him. He studied Erikson’s theory on human psychological development as part of an orientation programme he had to attend as a teacher. Aged people reflect on their lives and face the conflict between feeling a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction (integrity) or a feeli...
7 comments
Read more