Skip to main content

Short lives and long leaps

 

Antony always ready for new leaps

My cat, Antony, fell on my TV while trying to catch a lizard from the wall. The TV which couldn’t hold Antony’s weight fell with an explosive sound to the floor before Maggie or I could save it. Antony was stunned by the sound. He realised he had done something rather terrible and so he lay down with his forelimbs stretched ahead as if seeking pardon. His gesture extracted a smile from me. “You’re smiling?” Maggie was scandalised. “Give him a slap,” she said. “Will he understand?” I asked. “Moreover, our TV is nearly 15 years old. Maybe, it’s time to replace it.”

I picked up the TV from the floor. Its stand was irreparably broken. But the set could stand by itself. I replaced the detached cables in their appropriate places and switched the set on. It worked as if nothing had happened. “This is old technology,” I said. “A traitor to the TV industry,” I almost added sotto voce.

That traitor concept came from an American contractor of last century. “The man who builds a skyscraper to last for more than 40 years is a traitor to the building trade,” the contractor had said. Aldous Huxley quoted that contractor in his essay ‘Selected snobberies’ written a century ago.

My childhood which goes back by half a century witnessed things enduring for ever. Our furniture at home was made of teak or other durable wood and some of them can still be found in the ancestral house. Things were made to last in those days. A carpenter would take weeks if not months to complete a piece of furniture and would be proud of his creation in the end. Such carpenters would be deemed traitors today, I’m sure.

I constructed a house in my village in Kerala five years ago and some of its doors and windows need a few redemptive touches from a carpenter now. The carpenter who worked on my house belonged to the new gen and he certainly didn’t betray his industry.

A laptop that I was using in Delhi travelled with me to Kerala and it served me full seven years. When I had to replace it with a new one, the dealer told me, “Today’s laptops won’t last 7 years. They are created to go wrong after a couple of years.” The whole world has now learnt the lesson of loyalty to one’s trade that America taught its industrialists a century ago. We have all learnt to create cheap things that can be used and thrown without guilt.

My ‘new’ laptop lasted three years. In those three years, I had to replace its keyboard twice and finally I discarded the entire thing. My present laptop is just over a year old. But most of my electronic equipment brought from Delhi are over a decade old and still running though with occasional grunts and huffs. A scary awareness descends slowly into my consciousness: all these things will sooner or later be replaced by their new gen successors which won’t even give me time to establish a relationship with them, a relationship that will accept their eventual grunts and huffs without complaints.

Grunts and huffs have no place in use-and-throw civilisation. Maybe, Antony can leap more boldly over them.

Comments

  1. A part of new gen treats people the same way, they throw people away once they find that they are no more good to them.

    ReplyDelete
  2. प्रभावी !!!शुभकामना

    ReplyDelete

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

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...

Are You Sane?

Illustration by Gemini AI A few months back, a clinical psychiatrist asked me whether anyone in my family ever suffered from insanity. “All of us are insane to some degree,” I wanted to tell her. But I didn’t because there was another family member with me. We had taken a youngster of the family for counselling. I had forgotten the above episode until something happened the other day which led me to write last post . The incident that prompted me to write that post brought down an elder of my family from the pedestal on which I had placed him simply because he is a very devout religious person who prays a lot and moves about in the society like the gentlest soul that ever lived in these not-so-gentle terrains. I also think that the severe flu which descended on me that night was partly a product of my disillusionment. The realisation that one’s religion and devotion that guided one for seven decades hadn’t touched one’s heart even a little bit was a rude shock to me. What does re...

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...

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 ...