Skip to main content

My hypocrisy and a little more

 


Some days have begun to look utterly washed out. When the current pandemic broke out, there was the hope that it would be brought under control soon. Our medical science is so advanced, isn’t it? When the first wave gave way to the second, I hoped it was sort of an anticlimax, one of those many cruel jokes that life loves to play and jokes don’t last long. But it hasn’t ended with the second wave either.

Life is slipping out like the effluence from a drab industry.

The weekend travels came to an end long ago. Too many books and too much TV have begun to taste sour. The online classes are threatening to get into a mundane rut. The mind refuses to think sometimes. Dreams died a pretty while ago without even leaving traces.

It’s then someone from the parish church called on Sunday, as part of a survey, to ask what my opinion was about rebuilding the chapel [kurisupalli] of the parish. I didn’t want to be asked such opinions since I hardly associate myself with religions. I told the caller that I had nothing to do with it and added that I didn’t know why the chapel required to be reconstructed now in the time of a pandemic and what purpose it really served even otherwise.

When the road was rebuilt recently the chapel got on the wrong side. Now its back faces the road. So the parish wants to reconstruct it facing the road.

Maggie was listening to the phone conversation and requested me to agree to make a contribution and leave the discussion. I thought that wise too and the conversation came to an abrupt end.

A lot of things come to such compromising ends in my life because I don’t want to look like a gargoyle on the edifices built by the people around me. It’s better to surrender certain of your convictions for the sake of peace of mind.

That may sound cowardly. It isn’t, however, if you think beyond the bravado of the street bully. As a friend counselled me many years ago, in a world which couldn’t be bettered by god’s incarnations those who think differently from the majority are absolutely helpless. As long as the affairs don’t touch your personal life, leave them alone. The chapel had nothing to do with my personal life. I choose to leave it alone.

These days the entire Catholic church in Kerala is grappling with a new controversy. Some of the bishops want the priests to face the faithful during the Mass in the churches and some don’t. The final decision was taken by a Synod of the bishops and the faction that didn’t like the decision protested by preventing the decision being read out in churches as well as attacking certain priests and/or burning the concerned document outside the churches.

I was reminded of an apocryphal anecdote about the Russian Orthodox Church. When the Revolution was raging in the country, the Bishops of the Church were engaged in a drawn-out debate on the colour of the vestments to be used for religious ceremonies. The Church was not touched by the disquiet among its people.

Now when a pandemic is raging in the state of Kerala, the church here is fighting on the direction that the priest should face while celebrating the Mass. And my parish is asking from people contributions for constructing a chapel which is facing the wrong direction.

I’ll make a contribution too. It’s utter hypocrisy, I know. But I prefer peace of mind to taking up issues with certain groups of people.

What really worries me is not my hypocrisy but the inability of my blood to cool in spite of the grey hairs on my head.  

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanSeptember 7, 2021 at 7:49 PM

    Hari OM
    The inanity of the arguments you describe, does indeed smack of 'ivory towers' and a total lack of awareness of the social situation currently playing out. Then there is your own natural antipathy to stir the pot. The world thrives on compromise and we must not be angry about that - or ourselves for having to make it. This is not hypocrisy, which would indicate falsehood on your part. That was not the case. You stated your view, but agreed to contribute without commitment to anything further. Done.

    ...If approached myself to give to a project I knew to be run by a group of which I disapproved, (and this has happened), I quite simply state that I am unable to support them. No engagement in why's or wherefores. Unless I actually think I will be listened to and a proper debate can take place. But mostly such callers have no intention (or indeed, ability) to enter discourse. So a simple "No and please do not call again" is what such as these get from me. Then again, I have no social standing to protect... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 8, 2021 at 7:40 AM

      You perceived it accurately. It's not hypocrisy. I know that too in the sense for me it's not hypocrisy. Others are likely to see it as such. That doesn't really matter. I can't make such people understand anything. That's the real problem. A desire to be understood better and the impossibility of fulfilling that desire.

      I can't make a blunt statement about certain things to certain people for various reasons. For one, I live in a village where everyone knows everyone else and compromises are inevitable for the social network to remain intact. Secondly, my wife is a devout Catholic for whom the church and its affairs matter much.

      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

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 4

The footpath between Park Avenue and Subhash Bose Park The Park Avenue in Ernakulam is flanked by gigantic rain trees with their branches arching over the road like a cathedral of green. They were not so domineering four decades ago when I used to walk beneath their growing canopies. The Park Avenue with its charming, enormous trees has a history too. King Rama Varma of Kochi ordered trees to be planted on either side of the road and make it look like a European avenue. He also developed a park beside it. The park was named after him, though today it is divided into two parts, with one part named after Subhash Chandra Bose and the other after Indira Gandhi. We can never say how long Indira Gandhi’s name will remain there. Even Sardar Patel, whom the right wing apparently admires, was ousted from the world’s biggest cricket stadium which was renamed Narendra Modi Stadium by Narendra Modi.   Renaming places and roads and institutions is one of the favourite pastimes of the pres...
12 comments
Read more

Good Life

I introduced A C Grayling’s book, The God Argument , in two earlier posts.   This post presents the professor’s views on good life.   Grayling posits seven characteristics of a good life.   The first characteristic is that a good life is a meaningful one.   Meaning is “a set of values and their associated goals that give a life its shape and direction.”   Having children to look after or achieving success in one’s profession or any other very ordinary goal can make life meaningful.   But Grayling says quoting Oscar Wilde that everyone’s map of the world should have a Utopia on it.   That is, everyone should dream of a better world and strive to materialise that dream, if life is to be truly meaningful.   Ability to form relationships with other people is the second characteristic.   Intimacy with at least one other person is an important feature of a meaningful life.   “Good relationships make better people,” says G...
21 comments
Read more

Georges Lemaitre: The Priest and the Scientist

Georges Lemaitre (1894-1966) The Big Bang theory that brought about a new revolution in science was proposed by a Catholic priest, Georges Lamaitre. When this priest-scientist suggested that the universe began from a “primeval atom,” Pope Pius XII was eager to link that primeval entity with God. But Rev Lemaitre told the Pope gently enough that science and religion are two different things and it’d be better to keep them separate.   Both science and religion are valid ways to truth, according to Lemaitre. Science uses the mind and religion uses the heart. Speaking more precisely, science investigates how the universe works, and religion explores why anything exists at all. Lemaitre was very uncomfortable when one tried to invade the other. God is not a filler of the gaps in science, Lemaitre asserted. We should not invoke God to explain what science cannot. Science has its limits precisely because it is absolutely rational. Although intuition and imagination may lead a scient...
5 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...
6 comments
Read more