Skip to main content

The heartlessness of Idealism

 


John Oswald was sent by the British to reform India in 1780s. India reformed him instead. Under the influence of certain Hindu ascetics, Oswald became a vegetarian and also a committed champion of animal rights. This same man, however, had no qualms about killing fellow human beings. In the very same year in which his pamphlet decrying meat eaters for their “callous insensibility” was published, Oswald was devising, as a member of the Jacobin Club in France, effective methods for largescale massacres of human beings. Vegetarianism and sensibility towards animals on the one hand and heartless brutality to humanity on the other. This is what India taught Oswald.

Do you find something similar happening in India nowadays? One of our chief ministers appointed by none other than our Prime Minister himself is a Hindu ascetic by profession and is a pure vegetarian who loves cows more than certain human beings. Before becoming the high priest of his state, he had founded a local army of his own in order to commit such ‘religious’ deeds as rape and murder of people belonging to a particular religion. This yogi was arrested in 2007 for his murderous exhortations to an excited mob and his worldly possessions at that time included a revolver, a rifle and two luxury cars. As soon as this religious ascetic was made the CM of his state he went on a rampage against the Muslims in his state. “Human beings are important,” he declared, “but cows are also important.”

India now has a lot of people like him: with idealism in heart and murder in deeds.

Religious idealism has often been brutally murderous. Who can forget the crusades and jihads of the medieval history? The West seems to have realised the futility of crusades and religion in general. The east is still in the heat of religious idealism with all its murderousness. India seems to be on the way to becoming the leader of such countries in religious heat.

The roots of religion lie in a sort of insanity, according to philosopher William James. Saints are insane people by ordinary standards of human psychology. But most saints don’t harm others. They harm themselves in the names of their gods and religions. There are some, however, whose insanity makes them imagine themselves as the saviours of whole nations and hence they choose to inflict the nations with their insanities. India is in the hands of some such saviours.

The people of India can still choose a better life by deciding to be more practical than idealistic. Practical people have hearts, you know.

Comments

  1. Vinay NagarajuJanuary 20, 2021 at 1:23 PM

    I hear you Tomichan, it is such a painful scenario to see idealism take over humanity and the real essence. I see fragments of it everywhere - clinging on to ideas of the past, whether it is religion, superstition or even the history - they all have happened in the past. Instead of focusing on the learning elements from them and understanding that each person is an individual and have their own space and right to be the way they want is an extremely important fabric and it really hurts to see that it is one which is often violated :(

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 20, 2021 at 3:18 PM

      Learning from them - that's just what's required. But we repeat their errors instead. We are pathetically and pathologically incorrigible, I think.

      Delete
  2. Voice from the roof topJanuary 21, 2021 at 12:45 PM

    Love for animals is inversely proportional to love for human beings.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sonia DograJanuary 22, 2021 at 10:07 AM

    I had absolutely no idea of Yogi's background. This was an eye opener. Not that I've been a fan but still...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 22, 2021 at 10:31 AM

      Our idols are made entirely of clay. Not just the feet.

      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
47 comments
Read more

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...
19 comments
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...
14 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more