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

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...

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

Two Women and Their Frustrations

Illustration by Gemini AI Nora and Millie are two unforgettable women in literature. Both are frustrated with their married life, though Nora’s frustration is a late experience. How they deal with their personal situations is worth a deep study. One redeems herself while the other destroys herself as well as her husband. Nora is the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House , and Millie is her counterpart in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version . [The links take you to the respective text.] Personal frustration leads one to growth into an enlightened selfhood while it embitters the other. Nora’s story is emancipatory and Millie’s is destructive. Nora questions patriarchal oppression and liberates herself from it with equanimity, while Millie is trapped in a meaningless relationship. Since I have summarised these plays in earlier posts, now I’m moving on to a discussion on the enlightening contrasts between these two characters. If you’re interested in the plot ...

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...

Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Search This Blog