Skip to main content

From Camus's Absurdity to Zorba's Santuri


 Life is a mystery to be experienced, not a puzzle to be solved. However, experiences can be terrible and terrifying more often than not. Life is not a fair game. It's a rugby of bullies. It turns a deadly battleground occasionally. Nevertheless, it has its music, its moments of awe, its sweet orgasms. 

I'm participating in this year's A2Z Challenge thrown by Blogchatter just for the fun of writing something non-political and possibly more exciting if not inspiring than politics. Life is the theme. But life is too vast a topic for a blogger to handle. Life is an infinite and eternal ocean with relentless waves and winds, as well as corals and pearls. A blogger can at best look at a tiny fraction of that infinity, that eternity. And I'm gonna do just that. 

The series is tentatively titled From Camus's Absurdity to Zorba's Santuri. It is going to take a deep look (as deep as a blogger can go, of course) into life's ocean starting with its absurdities. We'll move through such phenomena as the bandwagon effect, fictional finalism, Kafka's prison, serendipity, utopian chimeras, to the secret of Zorba's happiness. 

I said it was going to be "non-political". Well, can you really discuss life without touching upon politics? Isn't politics an integral part of the game called life? Isn't it politics that makes life the misery that it often is? Isn't our entire history from the most ancient civilisations onward about our kings and their henchmen? Do the workers who actually built the monuments and mausoleums find a mention anywhere in your history books? 

April won't be political anyway - not too obviously, at least. I shall try my best to keep politics away with a barge pole. I hope April will engage you meaningfully here in this space and thanks to Blogchatter team for their support. 

PS. I participated in this programme last year too and the result is still available as a free e-book titled Great Books for Great Thoughts. 


Comments

  1. Amit MisraMarch 17, 2021 at 12:36 PM

    In politics, I feel that 'the more things change, the more they remain the same'. It does not work on rules, ethics or anything deeper, I suppose. Personally, I could not learn anything worthwhile from political discussion, in spite of being a native of the state (U.P.) where politics and political discussion is the primary occupation of nearly everyone.

    Nevertheless, I read your each and every composition, whether political or non-political. All your commentaries carry a fresh and new perspective to the concept. And personally I am an admirer of your non-political compositions -- there is so much to learn and discover there. They are my all time favourites.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 17, 2021 at 8:45 PM

      I'm excited by this comment coming from an eminent scholar. Glad you expressed it so openly.

      I don't enjoy writing politics. I don't usually discuss it with people either. There's something detestable about it. Yet the way our country is turning citizens against one another, making one the enemy of one's neighbour in the name of religions and gods - this is extremely wicked in my opinion. Much worse than what the Congress or the British or the Mughals did.

      Delete
  2. SuchitaMarch 17, 2021 at 2:58 PM

    Loved your theme on life. And as I recently learnt in a session with a writer, even a fictional setting is politics since it comes with a set of rules and baggage. Looking forward to your posts. All the best!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 17, 2021 at 8:47 PM

      Thank you.

      Can a writer actually do away with politics? You're so right: even fictional settings are political one way or another. I have to set my story somewhere, some time, and that place as well as time has its politics. How can any writer worth his salt escape that politics?

      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
44 comments
Read more

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The
62 comments
Read more

Childhood

They say that childhood is the best phase of one’s life. I sigh. And then I laugh. I wish I could laugh raucously. But my voice was snuffed out long ago. By the conservatism of the family. By the ignorance of the religious people who controlled the family. By educators who were puppets of the system fabricated by religion mostly and ignorant but self-important politicians for the rest. I laugh even if you can’t hear the sound of my laughter. You can’t hear the raucousness of my laughter because I have been civilised by the same system that smothered my childhood with soft tales about heaven and hell, about gods and devils, about the non sequiturs of life which were projected as great. I lost my childhood in the 1960s. My childhood belonged to a period of profound social, cultural and political change. All over the world. But global changes took time to reach my village in Kerala, India. India was going through severe crises when I was struggling to grow up in a country where
14 comments
Read more

Diwali, Gifts, and Promises

Diwali gifts for me! This is the first time in my 52 years of existence that I received so many gifts in the name of Diwali.  In Kerala, where I was born and brought up, Diwali was not celebrated at all in those days, the days of my childhood.  Even now the festival is not celebrated in the villages of Kerala as I found out from my friends there.  It is celebrated in the cities (and some villages) where people from North Indian states live.  When I settled down in Delhi in 2001 Diwali was a shock to me.  I was sitting in the balcony of a relative of mine who resided in Sadiq Nagar.  I was amazed to see the fireworks that lit up the city sky and polluted the entire atmosphere in the city.  There was a medical store nearby from which I could buy Otrivin nasal drops to open up those little holes in my nose (which have been examined by many physicians and given up as, perhaps, a hopeless case) which were blocked because of the Diwali smoke.  The festivals of North India
50 comments
Read more

Country without a national language

India has no national language because the country has too many languages. Apart from the officially recognised 22 languages are the hundreds of regional languages and dialects. It would be preposterous to imagine one particular language as the national language in such a situation. That is why the visionary leaders of Independent India decided upon a three-language policy for most purposes: Hindi, English, and the local language. The other day two pranksters from the Hindi belt landed in Bengaluru airport wearing T-shirts declaring Hindi as the national language. They posted a picture on X and it evoked angry responses from a lot of Indians who don’t speak Hindi.  The worthiness of Hindi to be India’s national language was debated umpteen times and there is nothing new to add to all that verbiage. Yet it seems a reminder is in good place now for the likes of the above puerile young men. Language is a power-tool . One of the first things done by colonisers and conquerors is to
14 comments
Read more