Skip to main content

The Human Discontent

 


As soon as I was permitted to read after my cataract surgery, I resumed reading Benyamin’s Malayalam novel whose title translates as The 20 Communist Years of Manthalir. Since most readers of this blog do not read Malayalam, I shall not venture to provide a review of the book. But I loved the novel so much that I would like to look at one of its major themes: the ineluctable human discontent.

We keep searching for something in life. It may be happiness or meaning or a purpose for living. The achievement of our goal leaves us disillusioned and hence yearning for something else. All the prominent characters in this novel are seekers of something that would add more value to their lives. Some seek it in religion, some in Communism, and a few others in common worldly successes. Those who seek it in ordinary worldly things seem to be the luckier lot. It is quite easy to become a success in some profession, earn money and live a quotidian life. If you wish to go beyond the mediocrity of job-recreation-procreation, you are doomed to face discontentment in its various avatars.

Those who swear by religion in Benyamin’s novel end up wondering about the meaning of their piety and rituals. Most people’s religion is little more than a desire for a community, a sense of belonging to something that feels beyond the mundane, and/or the fulfilment of a need to follow a herd. The ideals preached by your religion crumble like wafers under a horse’s hooves in the face of real-life challenges. For example, fraternity crumbles when it comes to elevating a low caste person to priesthood. Gender equality crumbles when it comes to letting a woman lead the Sunday service in a church. We fight over a million things in the name of our gods and each time religion dies with something more than a moan.

Even a priest in Benyamin’s novel ends up as a disillusioned person. He became a priest in order to be of greater service to people. But his religious leaders like the bishop and the cardinal wanted him to become just another professional like a doctor or a lawyer. The only difference is that he is wearing the priest’s habit. This priest in the novel is not a fictitious exception.

On the other hand are some of the Communists in Manthalir who are compelled to face today’s reality in which Communism has no meaning whatever – neither as an ideology nor in practice. Nobody practises it anyway today. As an ideology it is highly questionable with its insistence on placing the party above the individual. Who is more important: the party or the individual? Who is more important: the majoritarian herd or the lost sheep?

Those who follow religion for finding solace in life are left as disillusioned as those who follow ideologies in Benyamin’s novel. The case is not different in life, of course. That is why the novel impressed me tremendously. The novelist presents the inevitable human dilemma of quest and discontent very convincingly.

In the end, each individual life becomes a kind of tale fabricated by the individual as well as others associated with him. A tale not very different from the one narrated by Shakespeare’s idiot: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing much.

Comments

  1. Hari Om
    So the novel - and yourself perhaps - allow not for those of us, however rare, who find the contentment sought - by whatever philosophy? (Although, of course, as an Advaitin, I agree totally with the final quote!) YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There are rare exceptions. I said that in answer to a young girl who raised this same question in slightly different words.

      Delete
  2. The reason perhaps very few die content.
    Your conclusion nails it!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In fact, the novel ends precisely with that conclusion.

      Delete
  3. Thanks for the review; will try to read this book. Your writing style is very good and will read other posts as well.

    ReplyDelete

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...

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...

The Parish Ghost

Illustration by Copilot Designer Fiction Father Joseph woke up hearing two sounds. One was his wall clock striking the midnight hour. The other was totally unfamiliar, esoteric. Like the faint sigh of someone too weary to knock at heaven’s door. Father Joseph thought it was the wind. Until the scent of jasmine, oddly out of season, began to haunt his bedroom in the presbytery which was just a few score metres from the parish cemetery. “Is someone there?” Father Joseph asked without getting up. He was more than a bit scared. He never liked this presbytery which was too close to the cemetery. But he had to endure it until his next transfer. “Yes, father,” an unearthly voice answered. From too close, not outside the room. “Pathrose.” “Pathrose who?” A family name was mentioned in answer. “But that family…” Father Joseph’s voice quivered, “no one of that family is alive as far as I know.” “You’re right,” Pathrose said. “We perished because we were too poor to survive what our...

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...