Skip to main content

Prismatic Dispersions



Along with a few score of other bloggers, I’m accepting the A2Z Challenge of Blogchatter. This entails the writing of 26 blogposts in the month of April with each successive topic corresponding to a letter in the alphabet. This is the fourth time I’m accepting this challenge. I found it fun particularly in the last two years though quite exacting especially if you are hard up for time. But something productive emerges out of the exercise. What I wrote for this challenge in the last 2 years is available in book form in the public domain. Below are the links.

1. Great Books for Great Thoughts

2. Life: 24 Essays

This time my theme is Prismatic Dispersions.

A prism disperses light into its various components. We all learnt in junior school about the enchanting VIBGYOR. It was amazing to know as a little child that the ordinary white light that we took for granted consisted of so many sparkling colours. Later I thought of VIBGYOR as a metaphor for life itself. For life’s truths, more precisely.

Truth is never monochromatic. We are actually living now in what is called a post-truth world. Facts have ceased to matter anymore. Opinions matter. Perspectives matter. Whose opinion and whose perspective matters even more. Entire histories can be erased and whole new histories can be fabricated using the various state machineries and agencies. The media becomes the ruler’s lapdog. The judiciary becomes a mere scarecrow in the playfield of political hooligans who are ironically the legislators. Arthur Koestler’s Yogi and Commissar – opposite poles of the ascetic and the materialist – merge into a metamorphosed incarnation of Amrish Puri without facial expressions.

Prismatic Dispersions will present to you the multifarious colours of post-truth. No, it’s not going to be a political discourse. Not entirely, at least. It will be as apolitical as a metaphorical prism can be. It will start with A for Prayagraj and end with Zeitgeist. Prayagraj which killed one of the choicest celestial enemies of India’s history-lovers (or is it history-sheeters?) is our steppingstone to our ruling zeitgeist. In between there are even more interesting, possibly apolitical, things to look at like: Bhatti Mines as a symbol, Eclecticism, Loneliness can kill, Nationalism is a drug, Oceans are restless…


I assure the 500-odd readers who come to my blog every day that they will have much more in the month of April.

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanMarch 17, 2022 at 7:13 PM

    Hari OM
    ...and each post will, of course, be written from your own position within the prism. Knowing that, bring it on! YAM xx
    (I only yesterday rememebred about A-Z and am frantically preparing to see if I can joing once more...)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 17, 2022 at 7:38 PM

      Thanks for reminding me of the heavy personal hand I drop into my posts. Can't help it, I guess. What's writing if it's not personal, subjective... Post-truth?

      Delete
  2. Zens2centsMarch 17, 2022 at 9:41 PM

    Awesome. Looking forward 👍

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anagha YatinMarch 17, 2022 at 10:53 PM

    Hope this prismatic dispersion has some bright shades too.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Prasanna RaghavanMarch 18, 2022 at 12:24 AM

    So, it's going to be colorful, looking forward.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Pooja MahimkarMarch 18, 2022 at 12:21 PM

    That's amazing! Looking for more!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Pandian RamaiahMarch 19, 2022 at 8:34 PM

    All the best sir. looking forward.

    ReplyDelete
  7. SuchitaMarch 24, 2022 at 12:18 PM

    "Post-truth" and versions of truth - sounds like A2Z will be an educative experience. Looking forward to your posts and all the best!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Anupama JoshyMarch 30, 2022 at 1:16 PM

    Excited!

    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
47 comments
Read more

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...
19 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

Insecurity and Exclusivism

“ Hindu khatare mein hai.” This was one of the first slogans that accompanied the emergence of Narendra Modi on the national scene. It means Hindus are in Danger . It reveals a deep-rooted feeling of insecurity. Hindus constitute an overwhelming majority in India – 80%. All the high positions in governance, judiciary, academics, any significant place, are occupied by Hindus. Yet the slogan was born. Strange? It will be facile to argue that Modi used this slogan and its concomitant hatred of Muslims and Christians as a political weapon for winning votes. True, he was successful in that; he rose to the highest political post in the country using minority-bashing. But the hatred did not end with that achievement; rather it spread outward and became more exclusive. Muslim and European rulers of India were booted out from the country’s history books and wherever else possible like the names of roads and institutions. With vengeance. Now there is a concerted effort going on to place In...
10 comments
Read more

You Don’t Know the Sky

I asked the bird to lend me wings. I longed to fly like her. Gracefully. She tilted her head and said, “Wings won’t be of any use to you because you don’t know the sky.” And she flew away. Into the sky. For a moment, I was offended. What arrogance! Does she think she owns the sky? As I watched the bird soar effortlessly into the blue vastness, I began to see what she meant. I wanted wings, not the flight. Like wanting freedom without the responsibility that comes with it. The bird had earned her wings. Through storms, through hunger, through braving the odds. She manoeuvred her way among the missiles that flew between invisible borders erected by us humans. She witnessed the macabre dance of death that brought down cities, laid waste a whole country. Wings are about more than flights. How often have you perched on the stump of a massive tree brought down by a falling warhead and wept looking at the debris of civilisations? The language of the sky is different from tha...
13 comments
Read more