Skip to main content

Simple goodness



I was 16 or 17 when I watched the movie Fiddler on the Roof first time. The character of the protagonist Tevye made a deep impression on me then. Later I watched that movie many times. I bought a CD when I was in charge of the Media Room of Sawan Public School in Delhi and showed the movie to my students. Even now I watch it occasionally. Tevye has been one of my most admired characters.

It is Tevye’s simple goodness that I find adorable. Right at the beginning of the movie, Tevye tells us that tradition is of vital importance to him and his people, the Jews living in a Ukrainian village in the early 1900s. The situation of the Jews is as precarious as that of a fiddler on the roof who will break his neck if he does not keep his balance adroitly. It is tradition that helps them to maintain that balance. They have tradition for everything: how to wear clothes, what and how to eat, how to pray, the duties of each person at home as well as in society, and so on. How did all these traditions start? “I’ll tell you,” Tevye says. After a moment’s pause, he says, “I don’t know…. But because of our traditions, everyone of us knows who he is and what God expects of him.”

Tevye is a devout Jew. He has deep faith in his God. He follows the instructions of the Rabbi. He is loyal to his community’s traditions. But each time he is confronted with a dilemma that pits him between love and tradition, he chooses love. Except when his third daughter chooses to marry a Christian. Compromises have their limits too.

There is no compromise when it comes to his God. He often wonders why God has made him thus and thus. Why am I poor? He asks God. What harm would have happened if he had a little wealth? He also tells God humorously that He (Yahweh) should choose some other race once in a while for His particular love. Nevertheless, Tevye shares a heart-touching rapport with his God. It is that rapport that makes him a simple, good human being.

Tevye reminds me of the human potential for simple goodness. He is all that I am not but I find immensely charming. He humanises religion and traditions as very few people can. If your religion and its traditions don’t make you a better human being, what use are they? 



Comments

  1. Hari OM
    You have named all the reasons I too have this musical and character as a personal favourite! YAM xx (who notes a return to the previous blog template - I prefer this one I think.)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Some works live on in our memory... Like this one.

      I keep tinkering with the templates when something or the other doesn't function smoothly. I too prefer this to the previous one.

      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

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...

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so...

Dine in Eden

If you want to have a typical nonvegetarian Malayali lunch or dinner in a serene village in Kerala, here is the Garden of Eden all set for you at Ramapuram [literally ‘Abode of Rama’] in central Kerala. The place has a temple each for Rama and his three brothers: Lakshmana, Bharata, and Shatrughna. It is believed that Rama meditated in this place during his exile and also that his brothers joined him for a while. Right in the heart of the small town is a Catholic church which is an imposing structure that makes an eloquent assertion of religious identity. Quite close to all these religious places is the Garden of Eden, Eden Thoppu in Malayalam, a toddy shop with a difference. Toddy is palm wine, a mild alcoholic drink collected from palm trees. In my childhood, toddy was really natural; i.e., collected from palm trees including coconut trees which are ubiquitous in Kerala. My next-door neighbours, two brothers who lived in the same house, were toddy-tappers. Toddy was a health...

Dark Fantasy

An old friend of mine was with me in my kitchen when Amazon’s delivery man rang to know the location of my residence. He was the same person who delivered all my cat food subscriptions regularly. “The location shown is confusing,” he explained. “I haven’t ordered anything,” I said having checked my profile on Amazon. He delivered the pack promptly enough and I was curious to see what it was. X, my friend, was in the kitchen cooking the prawns he had brought all the way from Kochi, his own city which reeks of seafoods naturally. “Dark Fantasy,” he mused when he saw the content of the package. Someone had sent me a box of Dark Fantasy cookies. I’m sure there isn’t any person on earth who keeps dark fantasies about me in their (her, as alleged by X) conscious/subconscious/unconscious mind. I wasn’t ever such a charming person at any time in my life. “Dark fantasy,” X said refusing to believe my deprecatory self-assessment though he knew it was quite true. “You never know where ...