Expression and Elegance

Salman Rushdie’s latest short story, The Old Man in the Piazza, is a moving plea for bringing elegance back to our public discourses. And truth too.

It is not the elegance of total assent that is desired. Everyone saying “Yes” to everything all the time is not a utopia. Language sits sulking in a corner of that utopia in Rushdie’s story. She endures the obsequiousness of all the yes-people for five long years and then, unable to bear the vulgarity of such invertebrate bhakti, stands up and lets out “a long, piercing shriek”. Language rebels against the total assent.

Assent is not a virtue, except in religion maybe. When the leader says that the moon is made of ancient Hindustani paneer, all the bhakts asserting their assent in unison is not the beauty of human life. Diverse are the beauties of language. Shakespeare and Kalidasa have their own places in her kingdom. [Language is presented as a woman in Rushdie’s story.] Vikram Seth’s inter-religious lovers can have their kiss in the temple of language without being shrieked out by the toxin of bigotry.

Dalliance is not what the lady language longs for either. Rushdie’s story shows young and handsome “Byronic creatures” paying shallow homage to language reminding us of the “bestselling” writers of our times. Language allows them “to ravish her in private”. Language has her own promiscuity. Her morals are loose.

Rushdie’s old man is watching all these. He is judging too. The eerie shriek of language works some miracle. The people open up debates. There is dissent now. Freedom of expression is rediscovered. The old man in the piazza becomes an official judge between arguing people. He decides that the earth is not flat and that there is God, and Heaven and Hell, and so on.

Slowly the old man’s judgments move from rightness to rectitude. “No longer willing simply to answer yes-or-no questions, he seeks to establish which of the disputing parties is the more virtuous.” He sometimes passes the verdict in favour of a plaintiff who is undeniably in the wrong but is a lesser evil than the rival.

Language sits brooding. This is not what she had expected from freedom of expression. Expression can have beauty in spite of infinite dissent. It should have. Language longs to be liberated, to unfold her endless beauty, to dance like a peacock…

Beauty is not loud. Not moral. Not religious. Beauty is subtle, gentle, mellow. Why has our language lost all that?

PS. Thanks to Manu S for drawing my attention to Rushdie’s story.

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

Joys of Onam and a reflection

Suppose that the whole universe were to be saved and made perfect and happy forever on just one condition: one single soul must suffer, alone, eternally. Would this be acceptable? Philosopher William James asked that in his 1891 book, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life . Please think about it once again and answer the question for yourself. You, as well as others, are going to live a life without a tinge of sorrow. Joyful existence. Life in Paradise. The only condition is that one person will take up all the sorrows of the universe on him-/herself and suffer – alone, eternally. What do you say? James’s answer is a firm no . “Not even a god would be justified in setting up such a scheme,” James asserted, knowing too well how the Bible justified a positive answer to his question. “It is expedient that one man should die for the people, so that the nation can be saved” [John 11:50]. Jesus was that one man in the Biblical vision of redemption. I was reading a Malayalam period...

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...

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...

Loving God and Hating People

Illustration by Gemini AI There are too many people, including in my extended family. who love God so much that other people have no place in their hearts. God fills their hearts. They go to church or other similar places every day and meet their God. I guess they do. But they return home from the place of worship only to pour out the venom in their hearts on those around them. When I’m vexed by such ‘religious’ people I consult Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov in which there are some characters who are acutely vexed by spiritual questions. Let me leave Ivan Karamazov to himself, as he has been discussed too much already. In Book II, Chapter 4 [ A lady of Little Faith ], a troubled woman comes to Father Zosima, the wise monk, and confesses her spiritual struggle. “I long to love God,” she says. She knows that she cannot love God without loving her fellow human beings, or at least doing some service to them. The truth is, she says, “I cannot bear people. The closer they ...

Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Search This Blog