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. Yamini MacLeanFebruary 6, 2022 at 3:19 PM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 6, 2022 at 3:37 PM

      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
47 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more