A Sunday Reverie

From the Facebook timeline of a friend

Sunday musings

The Congress is becoming like the BJP day by day. The lead headline of today’s Times of India reads: “Congress moots law to block women’s entry in Sabarimala”. “Females aged between 10 and 50 were traditionally not allowed to enter the shrine…” The report goes. The deity at Sabarimala was a celibate. His chastity will face potential threats if women in the menstruating age group appear before him! Since gods have always remained beyond my understanding, I shall not enter into the subtleties and logicalities of divine erections and predilections.

The Congress is determined to preserve tradition, if not the god’s chastity. The truth is that the party is trying to woo Hindu voters some of whom at least are enchanted by the intoxications of neo-nationalism. The Congress is playing the same religious card that the BJP plays rather shamelessly. Shameless because everybody – even the child on the sidelines – knows that all the brouhaha has nothing to do with religion and gods however much our politicians may pretend otherwise.

That shamelessness is not my concern, however. It would be very naïve to expect politics to have any sense of shame. What amuses me is the total lack of imagination among the Congress men. They should have invented something new, at least something different from what the enemy is doing. Isn’t there any new strategy left in the repertoire? Doesn’t the Congress have any leader who can take us forward instead of moving back to the prehistoric times of gods and their predilections?

The terrible irony of this newfound concern with divine chastity is the increasing use of drugs by the youth of Kerala. I know the future of the youngsters in the state is not a potential vote-catcher and hence politicians won’t be interested. I’m just pointing out the irony. I wish we had leaders who took interest in the live people near them instead of the dead gods on mountaintops.

Instead of giving us more gods and religions and traditions and so on, I wish our leaders gave us a new direction towards cooperation instead of rivalry, a paradigm shift from Me-and-my-gods to We-and-our-stars.

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...

Ram, Anandhi, and Co

Book Review Title: Ram C/o Anandhi Author: Akhil P Dharmajan Translator: Haritha C K Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2025 Pages: 303 T he author tells us in his prefatory note that “this (is) a cinematic novel.” Don’t read it as literary work but imagine it as a movie. That is exactly how this novel feels like: an action-packed thriller. The story revolves around Ram, a young man who lands in Chennai for joining a diploma course in film making, and Anandhi, receptionist of Ram’s college. Then there are their friends: Vetri and his half-sister Reshma, and Malli who is a transgender. An old woman, who is called Paatti (grandmother) by everyone and is the owner of the house where three of the characters live, has an enviably thrilling role in the plot. In one of the first chapters, Ram and Anandhi lock horns over a trifle. That leads to some farcical action which agitates Paatti’s bees which in turn fly around stinging everyone. Malli, the aruvani (transgender), s...

The Blind Lady’s Descendants

Book Review Title: The Blind Lady’s Descendants Author: Anees Salim Publisher: Penguin India 2015 Pages: 301 Price: Rs 399 A metaphorical blindness is part of most people’s lives. We fail to see many things and hence live partial lives. We make our lives as well as those of others miserable with our blindness. Anees Salim’s novel which won the Raymond & Crossword award for fiction in 2014 explores the role played by blindness in the lives of a few individuals most of whom belong to the family of Hamsa and Asma. The couple are not on talking terms for “eighteen years,” according to the mother. When Amar, the youngest son and narrator of the novel, points out that he is only sixteen, Asma reduces it to fifteen and then to ten years when Amar refers to the child that was born a few years after him though it did not survive. Dark humour spills out of every page of the book. For example: How reckless Akmal was! ...

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...

Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Search This Blog