Vis: a dream destination

Like poet Yeats I too long for Innisfree. Unlike him, however, I am not in search of peace. I want to see some places and have a different experience of life. Both India, my country, and Kerala, the state where I live, have disappointed me terribly. India has been swallowed by the hydra-headed monster of sectarianism. Every institution in the country including the judiciary has been converted into one of those many heads of the vicious monster. Kerala was doing pretty well until recently when one woman called Swapna emerged as a phantasmagorical nightmare that roams the corridors of power in the state. Moreover, the Covid pandemic has kept me home for too long shrinking my horizons pathetically.

I want to be in some place like Yeats’s Innisfree: with water lapping with low sounds by the shore on one side and mountains towering like seductive sirens on the other. What about Vis in Croatia?

Croatia is a relatively unpolluted place. Tourists haven’t done much damage to it. It has beaches and mountains and islands, things which I love. Even the towns there are very charming, I have been informed, because they are the least crowded in the whole region. The country has a unique history too with its Greek cemetery, Roman baths, and the English fortress. As a bonus comes Croatia’s wine whose greatness was chronicled by famous travellers as far back as 300 BCE.

Vis is a small island in Croatia. Some pictures of the island that I stumbled upon gave me this longing to visit the place which is a rare blend of the sea, mountain and human habitats. I’m not sure I’m particularly enamoured of human habitats. But I know that they are inevitable along the way. I’m sure of one thing anyway: I would love to climb that mountain while listening to the gentle sound of the lapping water in the background, or like Yeats, in my “deep heart’s core.”

Old Stone Houses in Vis [The Guardian]

PS. For Indispire Edition 339: Once the world wins against Covid-19, which place would you love to visit first? #BelovedPlace

Comments

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

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...

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...

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...

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai . ...

Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Search This Blog