Skip to main content

Great people are strange



“Great people are very strange,” Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s protagonist Little Prince comes to that conclusion after his encounter with a king of a tiny asteroid. The king was delighted to see Little Prince because he didn’t have anyone to rule over in his kingdom. Without subjects to rule over, no one can feel like a king. To be a king means to boss over others.

Little Prince is bored by the king’s desire for a subject. He yawns. Yawning in front of a king is contrary to etiquette, the king points out. Little Prince explains that he is tired after his long trip and loss of sleep. “Then,” says the king, “I command you to yawn.”

Everything must go according to the king’s commands. When Little Prince says that he cannot yawn as per orders, the king says, “Then I … I order you to yawn sometimes and…” Little Prince can yawn whenever he likes. But he should pretend that all his yawns are in tune with the king’s orders.

“May I sit?” Little Prince asks.
“I order you to sit down,” King answers.
Little Prince has some doubts like what the king is actually ruling over on a tiny planet like this.
“I order you to question me,” King says before answering Prince’s question. He reigns over everything, he says. His own planet, other planets and stars.
“And the stars obey you?” Prince asks.
“Of course. They obey at once. I do not tolerate indiscipline.”

Prince longs to see a sunset, he says. King can order the sun to set. After all, he rules over the sun too.

That’s an unjust demand, says the king. “We must demand of each one what each one can give. Authority should rest on reason. If I command the people to go and throw themselves into the sea, there will be a rebellion.” Little Prince will have his sunset. But he should wait, wait until its time.

Prince wants to leave. This King is a big bore. [Which king is not?]

King doesn’t want to lose the only subject he has managed to get. Don’t leave, he says. I’ll make you a minister. King offers to make Prince his minister of justice. “You can judge that old rat,” he says. “You will condemn him to death from time to time. So his life will depend on your righteousness. But you will pardon it every time to save it. There is only one.”

When Prince insists on leaving this wretched place, King lets him go but appoints him his ambassador.

As we Indians commemorate the Kargil victory today, I was reminded of this King. Of course, I am patriotic enough to celebrate national victories over marauding enemies. What amuses me is the marauding itself. Whenever a puny mind wishes to assert his power over others, he attacks. That is what wars are in essence. The yawn of a boring ego.

All these great people ruling over countries are not very unlike the king in the story above. Their mammoth egos could be hilarious entertainments for ordinary mortals like us had they not been perverted marauders. Anyway, patriotism requires proofs and occasional marauds offer proofs or at least opportunities for creating proofs.


Comments

  1. DashyJuly 26, 2020 at 8:59 PM

    Politics is a hilarious entertainment nevertheless. :P

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 26, 2020 at 9:23 PM

      Absolutely. I find news channels more entertaining than any others today.

      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
44 comments
Read more

Life of a Transgender

Book Review Title: From Manjunath to Manjamma Authors: B Manjamma Jogathi with Harsha Bhat Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 Pages: 171 I had an aversion towards the transgender people I met on the trains during my frequent travels as a younger man. These people came across as rude and vulgar. They would enter the train compartment in a large group, clapping hands loudly, waking up sleeping passengers and insisting on being given generous alms. They would go to the extent of hectoring the passengers, even making physical intrusions like poking and caressing body parts that we won’t let strangers touch. Reading Arundhati Roy’s novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , a few years ago, made me look at transpersons with some empathy. Anjum, the transperson protagonist, is also a Muslim. Double alienation. Anjum is an undesirable citizen of the country by virtue of being a transperson who is also a Muslim. She is pushed out of the mainstream literally and driven to living i
7 comments
Read more

Hate Politics

Illustration by Copilot Hatred is what dominates the social media in India. It has been going on for many years now. A lot of violence is perpetrated by the ruling party’s own men. One of the most recent instances of venom spewed out by none other than Mithun Chakraborty would shake any sensible person. But the right wing of India is celebrating it. Seventy-four-year-old Chakraborty threatened to chop the people of a particular minority community into pieces. The Home Minister Amit Shah was sitting on the stage with a smile when the threat was issued openly. A few days back, a video clip showing a right-winger denying food to a Muslim woman because she refused to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’ dominated the social media. What kind of charity is it that is founded on hatred? If you go through the social media for a while, you will be astounded by the surfeit of hatred there. Why do a people who form the vast majority of a country hate a small minority so much? Hatred usually comes from some
8 comments
Read more

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation
4 comments
Read more

Trapped in Pandora’s Shadows

Anjana Alphons George I wanted this to be a guest post from a former student. However, getting this poem from Anjana Alphons George wasn’t quite easy. So this is going to be a hybrid of the guest and the host coming together like the waves and the intertidal zone in the ocean. “I’ve become your fan,” I said to Anjana. She was in grade 10. I wasn’t teaching her since my classes were confined to grades 11 and 12. It was a few years back. Anjana had delivered a speech in the weekly morning assembly. Her speech was entirely different from all the speeches of students I had ever listened to. It sounded impromptu. It carried feelings from the heart. Convictions, rather. It was motivational. Inspiring. It moved goosebumps on my skin. “Your speech was splendid,” I told her when I met her on the corridor later in the day. She became my student in grades 11 and 12 and I watched her grow up into intellectual and emotional maturity. When I asked her to write a guest post on my blog, I ha
16 comments
Read more