Skip to main content

Look on my works and despair

Image from literaturemini


‘Ozymandias’ is one of Shelley’s popular poems though it is not a typical poem of his. It presents a mighty ruler of some “antique land.” Ozymandias is his name and his statue, which is now in ruins, can still be seen in the desert sands. “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone” stand erect on a pedestal while the head lies in the sand wearing a sneering frown on the wrinkled lips. On the pedestal is the inscription: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my works… and despair.” But all his might now lies in utter decay. He is nothing but a “colossal wreck.”

All conquerors, however mighty and contemptuous of others, will fall to dust one day. Even their conquests won’t be remembered. What the world wants are not conquerors but redeemers. That is why Ozymandias and his type are destined to lie broken in some distant sands of forsaken history.

What Russia is doing to Ukraine is yet another inhuman deed through which Putin seems to cock a snook at the world with the same attitude of Ozymandias, “Look on my works and despair.” Every war is a subhuman assault on human civilisation. Every war takes humankind back to the ages of savagery. If we can’t find peaceful solutions to problems, if we can’t find solutions without killing innocent people and destroying their houses and other buildings, we need to “despair” indeed – but not by looking on the might of the warmongers. We despair about our own savagery.

I’m not forgetting history, however. Today the US of America is pretending to be a great moralist admonishing Russia for its savagery. Let us not forget what America did in that region earlier. In 2004, American Intelligence toppled the Ukrainian government just because it was pro-Russia and set up a pro-US regime. Russia was powerless against the might of the US in those days. USA had played many political games in that region earlier too. There are many Russians living in Ukraine. Ukraine has an umbilical cord connection with Russia. America was using Ukrainian president Zelensky to cut that cord for its own selfish purposes. What America did in Ukraine is similar to what China is doing and planning to do in Nepal against Indian interests.

Politics is irredeemable, I understand. Wars are integral parts of that lack of redeemability. And so we the ordinary mortals who dream of a better world are condemned to get more and more Ozymandiases.

 

Comments

  1. Pandian RamaiahFebruary 27, 2022 at 5:39 AM

    'Democracies' are the keyholes of the west, that gives them control over a democratic governments to align with their interests. I seriously worry about the little nation of Taiwan now, after the catastrophic failure of the US in Iraq, Afghan and Ukraine.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 27, 2022 at 9:40 AM

      Your concern is valid and China might follow Russia. With all its drawback, democracy is the best form of government. India is also fast losing that democracy.

      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 – 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

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...
14 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 2

Fort Kochi’s water metro service welcomes you in many languages. Surprisingly, Sanskrit is one of the first. The above photo I took shows only just a few of the many languages which are there on a series of boards. Kochi welcomes everyone. It welcomed the Arabs long before Prophet Muhammad received his divine inspiration and gave the people a single God in the place of the many they worshipped. Those Arabs made their journey to Kerala for trade. There are plenty of Muslims now in Fort Kochi. Trade brought the Chinese too later in the 14 th -15 th centuries. The Chinese fishing nets that welcome you gloriously to Fort Kochi are the lingering signs of the island’s Chinese links. The reason that brought the Portuguese another century later was no different. Then came the Dutch followed by the British. All for trade. It is interesting that when the northern parts of India were overrun by marauders, Kerala was embracing ‘globalisation’ through trades with many countries. Babu...
10 comments
Read more

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...
11 comments
Read more