Skip to main content

Pandora's Hope

 

Lawrence Alma-Tadema's water-colour of an ambivalent Pandora, 1881

Hope was the last item in a box of evils, in Greek mythology. When Prometheus stole fire from the gods for the sake of human beings, Zeus (king of the gods) took revenge by sending Pandora to the earth with a box that contained all the evils. The last item in the box was hope. Interestingly, hope does not escape from the box while all the (other) evils did because Pandora closed the lid on realising that she was condemned to bring evils to the human world.

The story has found numerous interpretations. Is hope yet another evil? The ultimate evil? Or is it retained in the box because human beings are condemned to live without its benefits? Did the gods want frustration to be the human lot? Why did they then put hope into the box in the first place?

Well, we can go on asking any number of questions when we are dealing with myths and scriptures. Let us be more realistic and look at our given situations.

“Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” as Alexander Pope sang. Life would have been quite unbearable without hope. We live (endure?) each day in the hope that tomorrow will be better. We wake up each morning these days hoping to hear better news about the pandemic. Hope – without it how much more wretched would our lives be?

Yet hope can be an evil, a terrible one at it too. Hope can render us lazy and inert. It can deceive us with the promise of the pie in the sky. Religions often do just that. Most religions teach us to endure the pains here on earth so that we will be rewarded for all that many times more in the next life. That sort of hope is an evil inasmuch as it supports the evils here implicitly. It is asking us to accept the evils without protest, without struggle, without efforts to mitigate them.

Our hopes should be pragmatic. Hope should lead us to positive action that can mitigate the evils we are confronted with. Hope should be a “confidence in a certain process of growth and development,” as philosopher Gabriel Marcel said. It is not enough to sit and hope that the pandemic will ebb and go away; we need to do our bit for that. Hope, in other words, is a sincere effort to mitigate the evils around us. Otherwise, it is a curse.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 375: "Hope was the last item in Pandora's box." What are the thoughts triggered in your mind by this statement? #Hope

Comments

  1. The world thrives on hope. We need hope in these times of Corona waves and lockdowns.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes, agree with your sentiments about hope. Without thoughtful action, hope is another four letter word like fate! And how many fatalists do we remeber today?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Perhaps Jacques the Fatalist is the only one to remain classical! 😊

      Delete
  3. Also, wanted to say that I like the brand new look of your blog:) All shades of Turquoise are my favourite.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Made it more mobile-friendly. In fact, Google suggested me to do that.

      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

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Book Review Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Author: Manu S Pillai Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2024 Pages: 564 (about half of which consists of Notes) There never was any monolithic religion called Hinduism. Different parts of India practised Hinduism in its own ways, with its own gods and rituals and festivals. Some of these were even mutually opposed. For example, Vamana who is a revered incarnation of Vishnu in North India becomes a villain in Kerala’s Onam legends. What has become of this protean religion of infinite variety and diversity today in the hands of its ‘missionary’ political leaders? Manu S Pillai’s book ends with V D Savarkar’s contributions to the religion with a subtle hint that it is his legacy that is driving the present version of the religion in the name of Hindutva. The last lines of the book, leaving aside the Epilogue titled ‘What is Hinduism?’, are telltale. “Life did not give Savarkar all he...